My First Night as a Techno Scholars Mentor: 4 August 2008

My First Evening as A Techno Scholars Mentor was an awesome experience. I spent the first part of the evening observing the mentees in their Martial Arts Class. The Mentees were taught various defensive techniques used in martial arts that would generally be used in both competition and in the event they found themselves defending their lives.



The instructor was very informative, and very energetic and reiterated to the mentees that what they learn in the class is not to be used on anyone or to be practiced without proper supervision, as well that they could not only hurt themselves, but can hurt others.



The second half of the evening, was spent working on their music projects (Fruity Loops), and their adobe photoshop projects. I was just totally intrigued and in awe all of the technology that these mentees know. I've just learned how to really manage my email folders and recently learned how to do powerpoint well enough for class presentations, as well as use a digital camera and post pictures on the website.



When I was the mentees's ages, we didn't have computer use or the use of technology as it is now. Hard Drives were very small, and floppy disks which have been replaced with jump drives. Floppy Disks were as large as a pizza box and then later reduced to the size of a notebook, and then were again reduced to the size of a wallet or a small billfold. Then CD's came out and CD's were used to save material, and now we have the jump drives.



I remember that the only form of communication was just the telephone and the television before the cable days. When cable came out, there were very few networks, Lifetime, ESPN, MTV, as well as WGN which is actually a TV Station in Chicago, are some of the old and faithful.



Now virtually everything is depended on technology and the internet. I remember all that I had to learn in my job as an IT Support/Customer and Data Support Specialist about technology in order to resolve customers issues on a daily basis and remembered growing up and being the ages of some of the mentees, how issues with the phone system, car repairs, and/or issues with appliances took days and even weeks to repair. Now with the Technology age that we live in, technical repairs can be fixed in the matter of minutes, never and rarely exceeding a few hours.



Yes this new mentor throroughly enjoyed her first evening with the Techno Scholars and look forward to many, many more, and looks forward to helping the mentees with their various projects.