As teachers we need to solicit the help of our students to become champions of the technology.  What I have done along with many other PBL teachers is have the students from the previous years come back to teach our current students.  Kinda like paying it “backwards.”

BUT in the very beginning the first group of students needed to be taught.  So what are some things you could do that first time around:
- Ask a colleague in the school or outside of the school (a pro) who is familiar with the software to teach the students the basics
- Ask that “techie” student in your class if they wouldn’t mind learning some new software and teaching the class.
- Learn the very basics yourself and usually a handful of student take it and run with it to become the “goto” people

The bigger issue is how to conduct the technical training/lectures.  The students have to be actually using the software during the training.  It needs to be hands-on.  Step by step handouts could only go so far, especially since the software is always changing.  Sometimes when I have a choice of software packages, I do look at how much online support materials are available.  But in the end, they need to just go in and play around with it.

Software.education has been thought of in terms of a school model. The teacher teaches and the students are expected to learn. Students are graded on a normal curve with some achieving high grades and others failing. The assumption is that the teaching is perfect and the only variable is the student’s ability to learn. This model is known as Normative Referenced Instruction. The burden for learning is on the student rather than the instruction.Industry requires that everyone achieve the level of success needed to perform the job. It is not economically feasible or legally advisable to fire every person who does not score well on a norm-referenced test. Rather, the objective is to provide instruction such that everyone can master the subject and the only variable is how long it takes each person to reach mastery. The assumption is that everyone can learn the subject and the burden in on the instructional materials rather than the students. This model of instruction is known as Criterion Referenced Instruction.Today, industry and the military have adopted the Criterion Referenced Model where each person must reach a criterion of mastery but everyone does learn the material. Great emphasis is placed on the instructional material to achieve this result. Poor performance means that the instruction is not adequate. Because it is recognized that each person will take a different amount of time to reach criterion, industry has often adopted various forms of self-paced instruction. The idea is that people will not be constrained by the timing of a classroom or the pace of the slowest person in a group. This is also the reason why Instructional Design methodology is often focused on Criterion Referenced Instruction and self-paced materials.Note that the typical online training is both Criterion Referenced and Self-Paced Instruction. Individual users works at their own pace until they do master the topic. This is considered one of the advantages of online training.In many cases, instruction can make the difference in profitability or it can be a life or death matter as with aircraft training. In the high tech industry, it can mean faster time to learn a new technology, fewer errors when designing or manufacturing, and greater customer satisfaction when applied to service departments.For more details visit our web site soutien scolaire 

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