Sunday, June 24, 2007

Brain on Over Load and Over Drive


Spent aay to much time hunched over one computer or another this past week. Among my summer plans was to down load and start using Art of Books. Thanks my scanner and some good garage sales and thrift store runs book inventory is up by 1/3 and my sales are too. That’s a very good thing, but getting the books packed up and shipped out is taking more and more time. Enter Art of Books, a combined listing, packing and when paired with Endicia shipping program. Excellent solfware but a killer learning curve. The Endicia / AOB shipping pairing spits out professional looking labels in the blink of an eye but somehow I can’t seem to get all the steps down in the correct order. This morning’s snafu resulted in triple printed labels. Good thing Endicia gives postage refunds!

Education, in an attempt to capture the attention of the video game generation is becoming more interactive. A chalk board and an over head projector just don’t cut it any more. Enter
Promethean , the educational version of a the Smartboard. Very interesting – a Promethean board is akin to an interactive PowerPoint presentation on Speed but overwhelming to say the least.

After 15+ years of new technology becoming old technology and being replaced my newer technology (even though the original new technology has never been taken out of the box.) the district has finally realized that folks need to be held accountable. The district is investing some very serious dollars in the technology and if you want to play, you have to go to training.
So, this time nobody gets the laptop necessary to run their gizmo till they attend training and nobody gets credit (necessary for continuing education) till they complete a “homework” project and bring it the advanced training.

Never being one to turn my nose up at a new piece of technology I dutifully took myself off to an all day training session. Great fun, but so much to comprehend in such a short time. I lucked into a small class – only 3 of us, and a class where all of us were already computer literate and it was still to much to absorb. New terms, new techniques and new methods all coming at me at warp speed.

Note to Self: Don’t ever try to master 3 new software programs in the course of one week. Especially after the age of 50. There just aren’t enough brain cells left to cope.

3 comments:

VWB said...

but if anyone can do it, you are the one! hope you enjoy the new "toy"!

Anonymous said...

Hey, I think you have more brain cells than me -- and I'm not quite 50 yet!!! Does this mean after 50 they will disappear even MORE quickly????

kma said...

Even Bill Gates can't do his programs by himself. He has someone else do his WindowsXP and Vista. Does age always matter?