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So don't teach them Windows and Office. Teach them software and computing concepts.

Stuff like, "most software has a menu bar, you can expect to find File, Edit, Window, and Help menus, here's what they usually mean," and so on.



Pretty much this, teaching people "Office" or "Windows" is the wrong thing to do, the goal is to give someone tools to interact with a word processor, whether that be LibreOffice, MS Word, Etherpad Lite, or another word processor.

If you teach a narrow set of skills and don't train for flexibility, your robbing the students by pigeonholing their skills into only being applicable to a segment of the market.


I agree. Skills should be transferrable.

I've seen friends who can do mail-merge in Word but cannot navigate the internet on a desktop with the ease and speed I can because they learned mail-merge in school but never bothered to browse internet on a laptop/desktop (instead they use phones all the time).




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