Week 11

This week I want to address one of the biggest problems facing IT departments across the country if not the world...the users. Maybe this is coming out of my own experience, but probably eighty to ninety percent of the issues I deal with every day are not problems with the computers or other devices it's the people using them. This isn't to say they are doing anything on purpose to mess with the computer. The majority of issues are because they don't know what they are doing. This is especially the case amongst older tech users. They didn't grow up with computers and depending on their career may never have had to use one. Suddenly they are faced with a plethora of devices that confuse and sometimes frighten them (not in the horror sense but more the "Oh my god, I don't know what to do with this!" sense). Luckily ignorance is something that we as IT personnel can fix. A large part of my job is sitting down with people and showing them how to use their new laptop, Ipad, Kindle or other device. I also spend a significant amount of time teaching grandparents how to go online and email their families or fill out applications.
This is to say that even though we complain about the insane things we see the people around us do to their computers, one of our most important jobs is to educate and train the people we support so that they don't keep opening up strange emails and downloading viruses. To that end I would like to share a couple of links to sites that I use on a fairly regular basis when working with the public. Both are free and contain both videos and activities to help with training.

 
www.gcflearnfree.org
This link is to the Goodwill Community Foundation Learn Free website. They have an amazing selection of videos and tutorials on topics from internet or computer basics to how to use Facebook.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/training/
Microsoft's very own site for training for Office products. This includes previous versions of office like 2007 and 2010 as well as Office for Apple devices.