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Arm yourself with a small set of computer skills and technology challenges won't frustrate you as you return to the wonderful world of higher education! You'll enjoy learning, improve your chances for success, and impress your younger classmates if you know how to: use web browsers, manage email, send or receive files through the internet, and install programs called readers or players that allow you to view a variety of files. These skills can be learned through continuing education classes, community or non-credit classes, books, by using Internet resources which will be mentioned in this article, and by asking your teachers and classmates for help.

The key to school is information. Vast amounts of it are available online, through the World Wide Web. In order to effectively navigate and travel on the information superhighway (the World Wide Web), you must learn yo use web browsers and search tools. Much of the information on the World Wide Web exists in web pages which can be viewed through web browsers. Some of the most popular browsers are Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, and Flock. If your computer is the vehicle, the web browser is the road.

How do you know where to go once you are on that road? Search tools provided by http://www.yahoo.com, http://www.google.com, http://www.altavista.com, and others point the way to locations on the World Wide Web. They find web pages based on words or terms that you enter and then give you a list of road signs' or links that when clicked, take you to the desired page. If you want to find web pages about haiku poems, when on the main page of a search engine like Yahoo!, enter the words haiku poems' or haiku' and the results will appear, with links to pages with your keywords on them. Google provides great information on how to perform a search at: http://www.google.com/support/ bin/static.py?page=searchguide s.html&ctx=basics&hl=en

Web browsers enable you to read web pages but course material is often in other forms formats that require special software so that you can read the material. Examples are videos, audio files, slide shows, word processed documents, spreadsheets, or documents in Portable Document Format (pdf). See http://www.sharpened.net/gloss ary/definition.php?pdf for a good definition of pdf.

Playing video and audio files require that you install the appropriate media players on your computer; the most common include RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, QuickTime, and iTunes. Your course instructor

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