Ensure that the equipment is working and up to date. Frustrations with slow Internet connections and unreliable equipment are major deterrents to effective use of technology.
Make sure you have technical support. This may be an IT person on staff to help you set up computer and internet accounts and assist you and your students in projects, or simply someone to help out if you have any problems or special needs.
Find out what your students already know about the technology and what kinds of fears and concerns they may have about technology. To do this, create a survey full of questions that will help you determine the existing skills and needs of your students.
Familiarize your students with the technology before you actually have them work with it. First let them know what the technology can do. Then assure them that they can interact with the technology by mastering just a few basic skills. To teach the required skills, a tutorial is often the best tool. If you do not have access to a tutorial however, you can create a lesson that engages the students with the basic components of the program.
Hold the first few class sessions in a computer lab. Set the students up with their own email accounts and demonstrate the basic steps of how to access the inbox, open and read new mail and attachments, and reply to a message. Then teach students to compose a new message and send it to you. You can then use email to deliver worksheets and other handouts and to make class announcements.
Begin doing research on the Internet with a very structured assignment with limited searching requirements. For example, introduce the students to a few major search tools such as Google, Yahoo, and one or two article databases. Then give students a topic and a worksheet that guides them in finding information from each search tool.
Have the students participate in chat sessions for group projects and do research projects with websites and email. With just email and basic Internet search skills, you can incorporate technology into every aspect of your class. As you teach the primary content of the basic adult education class, you can engage the students with technology as one or more components to every assignment. There are many programs you can work with depending on how quickly the students pick up the skills needed to do these basic tasks.