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INTERNET TUTORIAL FOR BEGINNERS

Find your own personal reason to be on the net.
What turns you on? What is personal to you? What do you really want to know about?
You have to understand what it means to you then you'll help other's find what is valuable to them. That is what this is about, using a computer or a pencil and paper, what does it help you do personally? This whole internet thing is just like having the biggest library on earth.

How to NAVIGATE AROUND a Web Site Top
To get around just point your mouse arrow and click on it.  You should go there. If this doesn't work then don't worry, it's not your fault. This Hot Link is probably screwed up for some reason.
First notice the menu above, it is there for you to get back and forth from where you were to where you are now.
If you get lost in a site cause you forgot how you got there. This happens all the time at first. When you want to go back to where you were in the beginning, just click the BACK button on your menu that should take you to the page right before the one you're on now, and so on, until you get back to First page which is at the beginning.
To go to the beginning immediately, click on the button on the left side of the window that says Home page. This is pretty much how all the web sites work. Some have a menu at the top, some at the bottom, or side of the page. If you are reading something very long just scroll up or down to find your way to a menu.
Scrolling happens when you use your mouse to place the cursor on the button on the left side of this screen. See it? Practice getting your mouse over it then CLICK AND HOLD DOWN THE MOUSE AT THE SAME TIME now push the mouse along the mouse pad going forward (NORTH ) and then if you want to scroll down pull the mouse towards yourself (SOUTH).

Very big clue! Reasons To Play Here and you will go somewhere right on this site. In other words, you stay here on The CyberPlayGround. I've tried to have a lot of info located right here to save you time. BUT, you will definitely click on a word and find that this link will take you away from this site, you will leave here and this means you'll have traveled out through cyberspace to another completely new web site.
Now what do you do? You'll have to learn to click some other buttons to get back to this web site again. This is really no big deal once you get used to doing it. Anyway the upside is that this is just the beginning of acquiring life long learning skills which is the best reason to learn to use a computer. Surfing around is part of the fun. You never know what might interest you and where you'll end up or what you can find out about.

BTW: (By The Way) : - ) These are call smiley's, click if you want to see more stuff about ART

BOOKMARK The Educational CyberPlayGround using the Menu in your Browser (Netscape? AOL? Explorer? ) and start a file of web site places you want to go back to.

Did you know that you can change your settings?
Under Preferences, set your Web Graphics to use Uncompressed graphics. Then clear your cache and reload the page...your "fragmentary" graphics should no longer be a problem. Unfortunately, AOL ships their software with the "Use Compressed Graphics" as the default setting.


THE INTERNET - How to Get To Other Sites On Purpose. Top
The Internet connects all the computers to each other. It's like getting into your car - going up the ramp onto the expressway to get to the web of interconnected highways that will take you to your destination. Every destination is located in what people call "cyberspace".
Cyberspace is really great because it's like the wild west. A frontier - boundaryless! You can find out anything you want to. You will learn to use search engines, be able to locate high profile people. Email people who you otherwise wouldn't ever get to talk to in a million years, and all because you can get past their secretary! Forget the old days -- this is the future -- boundaries are disappearing. I think the only reason to turn on and use a computer is to be able to cyberspace, where all the fun is. So, go read up on internet terms. And don't worry be happy, nobody is "fluent" in this language. Things change to fast to keep up with all of it. Remember, if you can throw some of these words around you can fool people into thinking you are a netizen (citizen of the internet).

 FREE TUTORIALS Top

Internet for Beginners - Starter Sites

HOW DOES THE INTERNET WORK?
For more information about the internet in general, see the big picture.


THE COMPUTER Top

Did you turn the computer on? Turn it on, and then GET SOMEONE TO HELP YOU install programs. You can choose a friend, a high school kid, a fellow educator anyone who knows more than you do, ask the Media Specialist or Tech Head in your neighborhood school, someone who understands this stuff. DON'T BE SHY about it, believe me THIS IS HARD FOR EVERYONE! Even the computer heads I know, have to sit there and monkey around with this for hours. It isn't easy. That's because all this stuff is really just at the beginning stages. In 50 years it'll be like The Jetsons cartoon, but right now it's still a really primitive technology. Believe me, I just want to turn this stupid computer on and go to work. It's just like driving a car, all I want to do is put the key in the ignition and go, I don't want to know what's under the hood. And until a computer gets this easy to use, we are all struggling.

IDEA - ASK YOUR FRIENDLY COMMUNITY LIBRARIAN Technology

USING TECHNOLOGY IN GENERAL Top

HOW TO INTEGRATE TECHNOLOGY INTO YOUR CLASSROOM.

Try out some of the online curricula in the Cul De Sac area

It's about hardware (the stuff you can put your hands on physically) and software - which are the programs, the discs you will put inside the computer that will tell your computer what to do. Software can also be downloaded from the internet right into your machine. Did you know your school has to connect to the internet, and all educators have to learn how to use it. It's the Law.

I hope you will enjoy the Educational CyberPlayGround. I made this site to help the Newbie (a beginner) learn to take their first baby steps - no pressure! or depending on your attitude leap right out there screaming' with your hair on fire. This is the place on the CyberPlayGround for Technology information.

DON'T SIT UP STRAIGHT
DO NOT do as your mom told you - do not sit up straight.
Avoid problems when sitting in front of a computer. "The longstanding advice to "sit up straight" has been turned on its head by a new study that suggests leaning back is a much better posture. Researchers analyzed different postures and concluded that the strain of sitting upright for long hours is a perpetrator of chronic back problems. Using a new form of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), researchers studied 22 volunteers with no back pain history. The subjects assumed three different positions: slouching; sitting up straight at 90 degrees; and sitting back with a 135-degree posture—all while their spines were scanned. "A 135-degree body-thigh sitting posture was demonstrated to be the best biomechanical sitting position, as opposed to a 90-degree posture, which most people consider normal," said study author, Waseem Amir Bashir, a researcher at the University of Alberta Hospital in Canada. "Sitting in a sound anatomic position is essential, since the strain put on the spine and its associated ligaments over time can lead to pain, deformity and chronic illness." When your nose hits the monitor, you've been sitting there too long get up and take a break!

TIPS FOR THE VERY VERY NEW COMPUTER USER

Computer Hacking Results In Armed Police Raid
You have to make sure your computer is protected from bad things getting into it. Security Bad things get inside of your computer and spy on you. Bad things will take over your computer and tell it to do stuff and you don't know it's happenings. You need to potect your computer from bad things with a fire wall. If your computer is working very very very very slowly - you might already have bad things on it and need it cleaned out. Don't run a computer without a firewall or the police may show up at your door one day - no kidding.

THESE ARE THE TROUBLE AREAS FOR KIDS & PARENTS

PARENTS -- These things need to be supervised. You won't be able to and can't, keep up with what is going on in the following area on the internet:

Espionage/Counterespionage at home *in context*
Countersurveillance being done by kids like changing the text and background on a monitor to blue and black "making it harder to read the screen from across the room"; setting IM preferences to "invisible" so parents can't tell they're online; turning GPS-enabled phones off; making MySpace profiles (and searchable personal info) partially fictitious [1]; learning to check blogs and to IM them to come down to dinner. One mother thinks "communicating over a screen has helped her and her son step out of their customary roles" and see each other as people.

EthicalHacker.com http://www.ethicalhacker.net/content/view/182/1/ explains that there is free downloadable software on the Net that allows malicious hackers to steal users' passwords. Cain & Abel is "a password recovery tool for Microsoft Operating Systems. It allows easy recovery of various kind of passwords by sniffing the network, cracking encrypted passwords using Dictionary, Brute-Force and Cryptanalysis attacks, recording VoIP conversations, decoding scrambled passwords, recovering wireless network keys, revealing password boxes, uncovering cached passwords and analyzing routing
protocols." In Slashdot, which Daniel linked me to, a young security expert posted: "If I were to run this attack on the computers at my high school, I could cripple a lot of kids' social lives (and get expelled when the admins see :) I see SO many of my classmates using proxies to get on MySpace at school (even though it's against school rules, which I don't blame after seeing some of my classmates' MySpace pages). They just don't understand how easily I could get their password (or whoever's, running the proxy, or even the admins). And it's worse when you wonder how many kids use the same user name and password for everything. Kids these days [note that he's talking about his peers] are just not educated enough on good security practices, or show a lack of common sense with this stuff." Parents, make sure your kids practice good computer security - choose hard-to-guess passwords, don't share them with friends, change them fairly often, and choose different ones for
different sites and services.

LEARN THE INTERNET RULES

10 Tips for Safe Surfing

What Real People & Real Computers really act like vs. what you see in the Movies

Fear on the Phone: When Children Get Threatening Texts: within the next year or two nearly all mobile phones will have internet access. Parents should be aware of this and no longer assume that internet safety applies only to the home computer.

social network networking diary online private journal online photo albums myspace facebook flicker social networking Tools web 2.0

 

Learn about  SOCIAL NETWORKING

Recommended kid communities

Izzy Neis has done parents a real service in publishing her list of about two dozen "Worthy Kid/Tween Communities" (emphasis on "community," ConnectSafely.org). "Community" is important because tweens and lots of kids like socializing online as much as teens do, but they're too young for places like Facebook, Bebo, and MySpace. So it's good to know what the age-appropriate spots are. She also provides another list of sites that are *not* for people under 14. The Associated Press recently look at the pre-tween end of the social Web in general .

Talk with your kids about what is happening. MySpace's Tips for Parents page
The technology isn't the problem it's the way people use it. The reasons kids are there are very very attractive. The kids are tired of being marketed.There will come a day when you can't market anything.  When everybody alive has been street-teamed and product-placemented to death.  When everybody TiVos past the commercials.  When the only people listened to will be those without a financial stake.
Used to be you couldn't ignore the efforts of the major media companies.  There were only a few TV networks.  Movies had to be attended to be able to participate in discussions at parties.  But that was before people finally got choice, and abandoned the mainstream in droves.  The media companies believe they've got a God-given right to their dominance over the populace, that they own the eyeballs.  But those days are done. These kids make their own content and put it online for all to see and that's why there's a vitality to MySpace.  To YouTube.  That makes you WANT to pay attention.  Because those posting there are beholden to no one other than themselves.  They're naked.  And their humanity is VERY appealing.

ALERT see real world Blog Discussion that took place on a social networking site below.

 

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