Last Friday I headed back to my alma mater (FFHS) to serve as the guest lecturer to three classes taught by the Business teacher. She was actually not there that day, so I was working with a substitute who happened to be the father of one of my classmates, Erin Mason. My goal was to educate the kiddies about Microsoft and some of the possibilities with our applications.
The first class was Accounting, and there were about 12 kids in class. I had prepared a slide deck about Microsoft, our products, the Fargo campus, and then some more detail about Dynamics and Office in particular. As I was talking through the products, I mentioned and showed off the Zune – and I was surprised to find that they had pretty much all heard of it. Of course, they asked about the Xbox too, and were pretty disappointed to find out I didn’t have one. After the deck, I demoed Dynamics GP for about 20 minutes to try to show them what’s possible. I asked them if they knew what a quote, order and invoice were because I wanted to show off Sales Transaction Entry, but unfortunately they hadn’t gotten that far yet. So I mostly highlighted the General Journal Entry and how GP fills in the accounts on basic Receivables transactions. I thought that went pretty well as I had a few people paying attention and only 1 sleeper in that class.
The second class was the 6th hour class for Computer Applications 2. I went through my slide deck, and then I got to a point where I wasn’t really prepared for – I hadn’t thought through how I was going to demo Office applications for the middle 25 minutes of the 50 minute class. I showed them how to do Reviewing in Word, some basic formulas in Excel, how to do animation in PowerPoint and just how to use OneNote. With all my demoing I ended up a few minutes short of the hour, so had to sit in silence for the last 2 minutes as they had no questions.
For the last hour, I had primarily 9th graders for Computer Applications 1. I did my slide deck then had a better plan for my demos and was able to extend it long enough to make it through. Since it was the last hour of the day on Friday, I had a few more sleepers in this class, but it was a larger class where most paid attention.
I had a couple kids come talk to me at the end of the session, so that was positive to see people energetic about Microsoft and technology. Overall it was a good experience and hopefully showed them a Fergus Falls grad can go on to work in a cool field.
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