The Joy of Learning to Virtually Chat

One of my high school students has been learning technology for awhile, but because she did not start it until high school, she had no paradigm for how technology worked, so struggled with using it. This year, it has started to click in and she is really getting it. When she is learning a new skill on the computer, she can start to figure out where I am going to take her and what we are going to do.

I have been telling her about Google chat for awhile, but she had so many other areas that needed addressing that we were not able to start it until today. With JAWS tandem I can connect and disconnect with just a keystroke, so once I got her all set up, I told her we would just communicate through chat and I was going to disconnect for a bit. We text each other back and forth and as she was inputting her 5th response I quickly brought her computer and her up again. The smile on that child's face lit up the room.

I told her that once she gets really good at it, that she can leave her Gmail and chat box open all day. Whenever she does not know how to do something, she can just text me and get an answer within seconds. I asked her if she understood the power of this tool. "YEAH!!" was the quick response. That incredible happy smile of JOY beaming throughout her will warm me for quite some time.