• Jubilee Jobs Orientation will be on May 7th and May 21th. Jubilee Jobs helps provide students with employment to entry level jobs throughout DC. Students should mention they were referred by Byte Back if they are asked how they heard about the program. Orientation begins promptly at 9:00am and ends at 10:30am. It is held at The Festival Center, 1640 Columbia Road, NW, Washington, DC.

For those who have a Monday 9am or 10am class, students are permitted to arrive late on that day only if they are attending the orientation. Please get a referral form from your teacher and have it signed before you leave the orientation as that will be proof of your excused absence. For more information contact Robert Waisburd at rwaisburd@byteback.org or (202)525-3157.

• Job Club will be held the 2nd Thursday of this month (May 10th) from 5:15pm-6:30pm and Tutoring will be held the 4th Thursday (May 24th) from 6:00pm-7:30pm. Both events will take place at Byte Back. This month’s job club will focus on developing an Individual Employment Plan (IEP). An IEP will help you assess your personal goals and get you on the right track to obtaining employment. Separately, students will receive tutoring where they can get one-on-one assistance with their resume, interview practice, material covered in class or anything else they need assistance with. For more information and to RSVP contact Robert Waisburd at rwaisburd@byteback.org or (202)525-3157.

• American Sign Language (ASL) Job Club will be held the 3rd Thursday of this month (May 17th) from 6-8pm. The workshop will cover job search strategies. For more information and to RSVP contact Joseph Lewis at jlewis@byteback.org or 202-529-3395.

• Tutoring for Spanish PCB and OT classes will be held Saturdays from 10am-12pm at 3420 9th Street NE (a few doors down from Byte Back). Ask your teachers about upcoming dates. For more information and to RSVP contact Eleanor Grewal at egrewal@byteback.org or 202-529-3395.

Click here to download the PDF flier

(Student name changed to protect privacy)

The cost of this class is $2599, however, those who are Low Income and/or unemployed may qualify for a full Byte Back Scholarship.

The class meets Monday and Wednesday evenings from 6:30pm-8:30pm at Byte Back headquarters located across the street from the Brookland Metro at 815 Monroe St. NE, Washington DC. Class begins April, 23 and ends July 18.
For more information, call Byte Backand ask for Carine. The number is at 202-529-3395. Again that’s 202.529.3395. You can also email at info@byteback.org

Click here

Byte Back volunteers are the very backbone of our operation, and our ability to deliver meaningful training to those most in need. We seek volunteers to teach computer courses, mentor our students, design course curricula and fundraise. We also look for professionals to assist our Board of Directors in a variety of areas. Our volunteers are diverse in terms of age, race and profession. They aren’t all computer scientists, but they all work hard to see their students succeed. In Fiscal Year 2011, about one of every five of our long-term volunteers was a Byte Back student or alum.

If you are interested in becoming a Byte Back volunteer, please email Eleanor Grewal, Volunteer Coordinator, at egrewal@byteback.org or call 202-529-3395.

For Photos, click here

After days of lessons, exercises, and review sessions, two students had a rough day. That rough day happened to be the day of the Excel test, and their scores reflected it. This happens: what’s going on in Byte Back students’ lives, whether great things or challenging things, can make it tough to focus, to remember those skills that seemed to come with greater ease after days of hard work. So when these two students went to show what they know in Excel, both of them scored just a few points above passing.

Neither was satisfied and they both wanted to retake the test. This is the sort of dedication that Byte Back students bring to classrooms across the city. They want to be so familiar with this material that they can show off their learning even on bad days and continue improving their skills after the course is over.

Another student realized after showing what she knew in Word and Excel that she wants to take the course again. Sometimes a Byte Back student thinks she or he won’t be able to pass a course, so she or he registers to take the course again. They may stop coming to class and commit to giving more effort and time for practice when they return. Not this student. She signed up for a new class and she continues to come to class each day, giving her best to all exercises, projects and tests. Because of her test scores, she won’t receive a certificate at the end of the course, but she knows she’ll be back for more.

What amazes me about Byte Back students is that when given the chance to learn what they can and to show what they know, they know so much more than what instructor can show them in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Outlook. Byte Back students know how to make their learning their own experience. They know how to focus even when it’s tough, making the most of the opportunity to prepare themselves for personal and professional opportunities to come.

-Griffin

Click here to view a PDF of  upcoming events in April.

View opportunities for job fairs and tutoring.

Thanks!

I was late to class
Ran up the steps
A panic in my eyes
Missing the bus
Is definitely not the best of alibis.

Have they all gone?
I fear the worst
Feelings of dread sink in
I burst through doors
And sigh relief: all my students wear smug grins.

“Were you lost?” They joke
“Get enough sleep?” Some quip
But among them all, no griping.
Even though their teacher was late,
They all stayed to practice their typing.

“We’re glad you’re back”
“You see, we’ve started!”
They remembered my little typing creed;
For in my absence, they echo my words:
“Focus on accuracy, then work on speed!”

I thought all was lost
But the day was saved
Despite my tardy state
To my dear students who stuck through the end:
Never again will I be so late!

By the end of each Personal Computing for Beginners (PCB) class, students have gone from zero to sixty: after twelve two hour sessions, they can select text in order to copy and paste it, change its format, or erase it all together. They can open up an Internet browser and use the address bar to pull up a specific website and use a search engine to find information that they need, or send and receive messages online. Classes are challenging, frustrating, and exhilarating, sometimes simultaneously, and always hard work. If we get through all of the required material before the last day, I try to give everyone a break while maintaining momentum by “student-sourcing” the content of the final lesson – that is, I ask students what they want to learn, and then do my best to teach it.

Requests for material to be taught on this last day of class are always exciting to me, because they reflect the personal, unique reasons why students are interested in technology. There are a wide range of topics: one student hopes to listen to and download music online, others want to start learning to make their own websites or create accounts on Facebook. One of the most common, and most enjoyable, requests that I receive is that we go over how to share photos with friends and family. I love teaching this subject because it lets students use the Internet for something that’s meaningful to them, and it illustrates how they can use what we’ve already covered in class about saving files and attaching them to emails in their personal lives.

In my most recent PCB class in Spanish, I took this lesson a step further and explained how memory cards relate to the process of sharing photos online. Demonstrating with my own digital camera, I took pictures of the class and then uploaded them to the computer, finally attaching the images to an email that I sent to each student. Then we looked at the memory cards in our cell phones – students’ faces lit up as they grasped the accessibility of this concept and envisioned how they would replicate the process of sharing photos independently. In just an hour, we tapped into recently learned skills, explored how what we had studied about computers translated to other types of technology, and put knowledge into practice by creating our own memories through photos that we could share.

Photo captions: 1) Class group photo; 2) Byte Back Spanish language students examine memory cards in their phones

- Carolyn Kraemer, Volunteer Instructor