September's Fury

September has leapt upon me fast and furious. I am involved in three computer classes for the public this month, two of which are brand new.

This time around, we are going to build on our 'Learn How to Blog' class, and do a class called 'Finding News with Aggregators and News Alerts'. We are simply going to talk about alternative news sources, show them how news alerts through e-mail work, and show them how to use Bloglines.

There are so many news aggregators out there that I feel like I can't possibly know what I'm talking about, having only tried a few of them. It's the blind leading the blind, but hey, at least they'll come away with an awareness that aggregators exist. And getting news on a topic from many different viewpoints is what libraries are all about.

The other new class is 'Keyboarding Practice'. When we look at our demographics of who takes computer classes at the Library, they are primarily seniors. Many of them didn't need to use typewriters in their work days, and suddenly keyboarding is just one more barrier to information literacy. We are going to talk about all the resources that the Library has for learning keyboarding, and let them practice using free keyboarding practice sites on the Internet. Such as Typer Shark (click on Typer Shark down at the bottom of the page), which my dear schwester directed me to many moons ago.

If you want to waste a lot of time having fun, Typer Shark is for you, boy, howdy, take it from this squirrel.