Holy Cow! Our local newspaper calls teabaggers "terrorists"

[tblue37]

21. AHHHH--a neo-Luddite (like me!)

If you are anything like I am about technology (and especially computers!), that bit of instruction might not suffice!

Here are the actual steps to follow:

~Click the browser bar on the page you want to link, and the URL will turn blue.
~Then right click your mouse and click "copy."
~Then point your mouse to the place in your post where you want to put the link, and then right click the mouse and choose "paste." The stuff you have just "copied" with your mouse will then paste right where you have indicated.

Once we learn to do something with our computers, we forget that not everyone already knows how--even basic stuff.

I remember when I had no idea how to create an email account and sign in to it! In August of 2000, when I came back to campus for fall term I found a computer on my desk, provided by the university. I had never used a PC before, so I had no idea how to do even the most basic things. My daughter had to come home one weekend from her first term at college to show me how to use the darned thing!

When she signed me up for a Hotmail account and also showed me how to sign in and then send emails or read and reply to those sent to me, I sat there with a little notebook, writing down every single step:

~Go to "hotmail.com" and click "sign in."
~Then type in xxxxx for my user name and xxxxx for my password.
~Then click "compose" to write a new email.
~Type in the other person's email address in this box, but type the message subject into that box. Then click "Send."
~To reply to an email, click "Reply."
~And so on!

And the first several times I used email, I actually had to use that list of steps in order to manage at all. (I really am a technophobe.)

I still can't do some of the most basic things on the computer, even though I am a prolific internet writer and use the machine constantly.

For example, I cannot find any file in my Word program if I have to know its drive path (I think that's the right name for that list of information--but of course I am not sure about that either). I can only find a file if I already know what folder it is in and can go to the list of documents and find its actual name. I have lost a lot of files that way--and I have never been able to use the "search" function to locate a file, since there always comes a point where the search box will ask for some bit of information that I have no clue about.

I lost touch with one of my sisters for 8 years because we were both too deaf to chat on the phone, and we were too ADD to successfully carry on a snail-mail correspondence. Then my sister finally got online, and when I heard that she had, I immediately sent her a long "reconnecting" email. But she didn't reply. I kept sending "Why aren't you replying" emails, until several days later, when I got an 8-page snail-mail letter from her telling me that she knew how to read my emails, but had not yet figured out how to reply to one!

In this article from my deaf website (I'm Listening as Hard as I Can!) I tell that story about my sister's initial inability to reply to my emails:

"Deaf Sisters Reunite":
http://deafnotdumb.homestead.com/reunite.html

And in this article from my Teacher, Teacher website, I relate my early inability to do even the most basic things with a computer to my responsibility as a teacher to recognize what my students don't already know and to not blame them for not already knowing what it is that I am supposed to be teaching them:

"Beginner Mind"
http://teacherblue.homestead.com/beginnermind.html