What do you wish teachers knew?

[KTJ]

I have found this area invaluable since I recently came across it. There is
a wealth of information in this community. I teach K-12 teachers how to
apply some of the lesser known features to help them teach their students and
to help their students demonstrate what they know.
Knowing what you know now, what do you wish teachers had shown you when you
were in school? What do you wish you could have done then that would have
helped you in school?
Thanks for any suggestions that you have. This is all about educating the
educators and you'd be amazed by what they don't know how to do in Word!

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

When I was in school, a typewriter was high-tech, so I can't say what
teachers could or should have taught me about Word, but it amazes me to see
questions here in which users are looking for what they imagine will be very
difficult and convoluted solutions to problems such as inserting footnotes
or page numbers. I can't tell you how many documents I've received where
users have typed page numbers or even entire headers/footers manually onto
each page (and of course if the document is repaginated even slightly, these
end up on the middle of a page).

One reason users don't find these simple features is a lack of sufficient
curiosity, but also time pressure. You do have to have a little free time to
explore Word's toolbars and dialogs just to see what's available, even if
you have no current or projected need for it. But it is also certainly true
that, as Word's complexity has increased, many features have become less
discoverable. That is the issue that the Word 12 UI hopes to address, making
it much easier for users to accomplish common tasks because some of these
useful features will be much more obvious. (Unfortunately, it may make it a
lot more difficult for experienced users to do things the way they're used
to doing them.)

 

[JoAnn Paules [MVP]]

My wish would be that teachers would teach their students how to ask a
computer-related question. If I read one more post like "Word doesn't work.
Why not??" I'll scream.