Internet for Seniors

Now I'll admit that our Renaissance Society is not your usual average bunch of retired people. We wouldn't be taking the time and effort to attend classes at Sac State if we didn't have a little more interest than the average senior citizen in continuing education. But it was still fun to see the responses of the class today which was titled "The Internet - the Good, the Bad, the Ugly". The first question the instructor asked was, "How many of you have access to the Internet in your home?" I didn't see a single person without a hand up.

The first topic we covered was "The Good" which our instructor interpreted as Useful and Interesting. He distributed a handout with the following websites listed and then proceeded to access and show off each of the sites.

INTERNET WEB SITES

WWW. Google.com - Search Site
http://books.google.com Research site with access to thousands of books, both copyrighted and public domain titles.
WWW.Amazon.com - Generally a book buying site, but also sells many other items.
http://www.ebay.com/ - Online auction site that sells just about anything you could imagine.
http://sacramento.craigslist.org Local site to buy or sell most anything.
WWW.Mapquest.com - Mapping site to get excellent directions to anywhere
WWW.intellicast.com - The best weather site around. To get our radar,

1. Type in www.intellicast.com
2. Click on the RADAR link on the upper middle area of thescreen. When you click on it, a menu will drop down. Click on CURRENT.
3. Scroll down, and you will see a radar map of the United States.
4. Mouse the pointer over to the Sacramento area.
5. Reno NV will pop up. Click on that.
6. Scroll down an you will see the radar screen for Northern California and Nevada.

http://www.saclibrary.org/- Sacramento's public library site where you can check out or renew books, find out hours branches are open, check book availability, request books, and get audio books.
www.hulu.com - A free movie site that allows you to stream old movies or television shows on a high speed link.
http://directorv.etalkinghead.corn/ - An index of "blogs" -Web Logs both conservative and liberal.
www.snopes.com - A site where uses can check out rumors and find the real story.

With what little time we had left, the instructor talked about scams and phishing on the net which was his definition of the Bad. Then we briefly talked about how easy it is to find porn which represented the Ugly.

All in all a good seminar. I consider myself a capable user but I still found a few new places to bookmark.