THINK YOU’RE GOOD? PROVE IT!

You may think that you’re pretty good with a computer. You may be great in gaming, in downloading tunes, or IMing your friends. All of that might be fun – a lot of fun – but your future employer will probably not care about any of those things. Neither will your college professor. Employers and professors will expect you to be ready for work – ready for college – with an appropriate level of computer proficiency.

Your future employer will expect you to use word processing, spreadsheets, presentation and database software so that you are as efficient as possible in your job. She will expect you to use features of those applications in the correct way so that anyone who needs to change or add to your document can also do so in an efficient way.

She will expect you to be able to produce letters and other documents, develop budgets in spreadsheet documents, build and use database programs, and construct presentations to your co-workers or customers.

The Technology Challenge will help make sure that you know how to use a computer the way you will need to use it when you get to the world of work.

If you go to college, you will have to research material on the Internet and in database files, track science experiments in spreadsheet software, construct databases of sociological information, and submit well-constructed documents using word processing software.

The Technology Challenge will help make sure that you know how to use a computer the way you will need to use it when you get to college.

The Technology Challenge is not like any test you’ve taken before. The Challenge doesn’t ask you what you know – it asks you to demonstrate what you know how to do. And if you don’t do well on one Challenge, you can take it over, and over, and over, until you learn the skills you will need to succeed in college or in work.

There are many levels of Challenges. Each Challenge has a total of 10-20 questions and there are also three sample/tutorial Challenges as well as one 27-question designed to meet federal guidelines for technology literacy. Beginning Challenges include some practice questions meant to help you learn how to use the Challenge. Challenges get successively more challenging, too! There are easy Challenges for beginners, and the skills get more demanding as you progress through the various Challenges. Your teacher will be the one to determine which Challenges you will take and when. Because they are Internet-based, Challenges may be accessed from any computer with an Internet connection. In some cases, however, your teacher may include a secondary password on your Challenges which will prevent you from accessing the Technology Challenge outside the classroom. This is done to assure that you are the person answering the questions.

You should progress in sequence from the easy beginner Challenges, to the more demanding intermediate Challenges, and finally, to the most difficult Challenges. Sometimes, a single Challenge exercise will ask you a series of questions that cover a lot of different skills; sometimes a single Challenge will focus on a limited number of skills.

Some Challenges ask you to ‘go broad,’ presenting you with 10-20 questions on 10-20 different skills. Other Challenges expect you to ‘go deep,’ and present you with 10-20 questions on only two or three different skills.

At the end of each exercise, the Challenge presents you with a credential that you can print out. Take this credential to an employer so she will know that you have the skills you need or use it to document your proficiency in school.

It’s a technical world, and you will need computer proficiency to succeed in college, in work, and in life. So take the Challenge – The Technology Challenge.