Every year, we have a Valentine-related workshop. At this one, we will use online photo-editing website Picnik to transform photos into Valentine ‘cards’. You will have your own copies, and we will make an online slideshow of the best results. It is essential to have an email address that you know how to use – but you don’t need much more experience than that.
In a nutshell.
Choose photos from our Valentine collection, upload them to the Picnik website, turn them into Valentine cards which you can save.
Please reserve your workshop place.
Reserve your place by sending an email to acc@lawns.org.uk – and please read your email again soon after for our reply, as our workshops get over-subscribed very quickly. People who have reserved get priority, but must be there when the workshop begins at 3:30 pm.
Agewell in Hackney eligibility.
Our funders expect that everyone attending the workshops they pay for should be eligible for other Agewell in Hackney services – that they should be Hackney residents aged 50 to 65. However, sometimes we invite other people to join us.
This impromptu workshop is mainly for people who came to our last Posterous workshop, and would now like some help on what to do next. Of course, everyone else is welcome too. It is essential to have an email address that you know how to use – but you don’t need much more experience than that.
In a nutshell.
How to make your own website with photos and anything else you want to put there – and do it all just by sending emails.
This five-week course has been cancelled because too few people signed up to justify it. We will replace it with a series of five workshops on themes requested by our service users. The workshops will all take place on Monday afternoon from 3:30 to 5 pm, as follows …
6 February – More Posterous.
This workshop is mainly for people who already have Posterous accounts, and need help understanding what they can do next.
13 February – Make your own online Valentine card with Picnik.
An update of our successful Valentine workshop last year.
(Read more about the Valentine workshop).
20 February – Not decided yet, but we will know soon.
We would like to tie this workshop to the Hackney Life project – so it will be about either
Making very simple videos with a mobile phone, stills camera.
Or uploading video to YouTube.
Or both.
27 February – How to put your own photographs, links, comments and questions on our Agewell Social Network website.
This workshop could be sub-titled ‘Elementary Blogging for Beginners’.
5 March – Radio Agewell.
We will stream this workshop straight out to the Internet on Radio Agewell, so that anyone at home with a computer can listen in. Come and find out how easy it is to do.
As usual, please reserve your place on these workshops by sending an email to acc@lawns.org.uk .
Help and support for beginners. No need to reserve a place – just come.
Workshop: Grooveshark for beginners (3.30 to 5 pm).
Grooveshark is an international online music search engine and music streaming service, allowing users to search for, and stream, music that can be played immediately or added to a playlist. Unlike other music streaming services (for example – Spotify, We7, Deezer) Grooveshark does not require you to login through a Facebook account.
At the workshop, we will …
Show you how to get started with Grooveshark.
Search for and play music you like.
Create a Grooveshark account so you can make your own playlists.
Agewell Community Computing: Tuesday 24 January 2012 (2.30 to 5 pm).
About Soundcloud.
Soundcloud is a way of recording sound directly from your computer to the Internet, and then sharing the audio file with your friends, family, or (if you want to) everybody. It’s free, very easy to use, and perfect for sending spoken messages across the Internet.
At the workshop, you will learn how to …
Create your own Soundcloud account.
How to record your voice on the Soundcloud site, for example – a message to your family (a lot easier for some people than having to type it). You can add a photo too, if you want to.
Save your audio recording (as private or public) with its own web link.
Share your audio recording in an email, so that the person you are emailing to can listen to you, instead of reading you.
Share your audio recording in a personal blog, or on Facebook.
Here’s an example Soundcloud audio.
Click on the triangular ‘play’ button to play the audio track.
This YouTube video explains a bit more.
Click on the triangular ‘play’ button to start the video.
Help and support for beginners. No need to reserve a place – just come.
Workshop: YouTube Disco for beginners (3.30 to 5 pm).
YouTube Disco is a simple way to find music on YouTube. We will show you how to use it at the workshop. If you can’t wait, watch the YouTube video below.
Click on the triangular ‘play’ button to start the video.
Agewell members can reserve a place at the YouTube Disco workshop by sending an email to acc@lawns.org.uk .
Agewell Community Computing: Tuesday 17 January 2012 (2.30 to 5 pm).
About PDF.
PDF means Portable Document Format. PDF documents have been part of Internet everyday life since 1993. They are all over the World Wide Web, and frequently appear in the email inbox – but few of our members know what they are, what to do with them, or how to make them.
Here is an example of a PDF document. Click on this link » Agewell Computer Club January 2012 «. Most links open a web page, but that link opens a document. Unlike a web page, a PDF document should always look exactly the same – whatever kind of computer you are using.
Most people read PDF documents with free software from Adobe. It is often already installed on new computers.
At the workshop, you will learn …
Different ways to read a PDF document.
How to save a PDF document attached to your email.
How to send a PDF document as an email attachment.
At least one way to make a PDF document yourself.
How to download PDF e-books from Bookboon – including their free textbooks on how to use MS Word, MS Excel and MS Powerpoint.
We are going to start these Monday sessions with topics requested by our members. Usually, we we will have 90 minutes for beginners, followed by a workshop at which Agewell members can reserve places.
Agewell Social Network: Monday 16 January 2012.
Internet for beginners (2 to 3.30 pm).
Help and support for beginners. No need to reserve a place – just come.
Workshop: Skype for beginners (3.30 to 5 pm).
This is for beginners who have an email address, and are reasonably confident using it. At the workshop, we will …
Try to answer all your Skype questions.
Show you how to join Skype, and get a Skype name.
Demonstrate Skype in action at The Lawns.
Set up a Skype Premium account so we can do group video calls at The Lawns.
Show you how to run Skype on a flash drive (memory stick), which is possibly the easiest way to do it.
Discuss how we might set up an Agewell Skype network to help people who are stuck at home.
Facebook is a menace to new learners – and not entirely safe for other people who have not investigated and understood what Facebook might do with your private data. The purpose of this workshop is to help you understand how Facebook works, and what you can do to protect yourself. The workshop will have two distinct sessions …
2.30 to 3.15 pm – the Facebook deletion party.
Join us for this if you have a Facebook account that you are not using. Don’t just abandon your Facebook account – delete it permanently! It’s the only sane and sensible thing to do. Once it has gone, you can stop worrying.
3.30 to 5 pm – understanding Facebook privacy.
Join us for this if you have a Facebook account that you have a reason to keep. We will show you how to make it safer.
At the recent workshop about refurbished computers, we were asked the meaning of the phrase ‘assistive technology’. It’s shorthand for a range of gadgets and software that make life easier for people who have various disabilities. For example, in our group there are many people who have difficulties with their eyesight or their fingers.
But the real problem is not disability – it’s bad design – of keyboards, pointing devices like the mouse, and software screen interfaces. We have a cupboard full of gadgets which help to overcome some aspects of bad design. They should be used more often.
Examples include …
Alternative keyboards which have characters you can actually see.
Sophisticated mice and trackballs that do not require you to contort your hands into impossible shapes.
Software to help dyslexic people.
At the workshop we will have some of our gadgets on display and in use. You will be able to play around with them, and decide if any of them might be useful for you, or for your older friends and relatives.
It’s very different from traditional terrestrial broadcasting. When you listen to Internet radio, you are listening to sound streaming from the Internet. There are no transmitters, no licences and no need for a studio full of expensive equipment. Music performance rights must be respected (they are not cheap) – but talk is free. Anyone with a little technical knowledge can make their own Internet radio station for a very small cost. There are now tens of thousands of small, independent radio stations all over the world. They are not competing with the big operators, just doing their own thing.
At the workshop.
We will show you how to find and listen to some of the small stations, and some of the big ones too.
We will demonstrate our own low-cost, but fully-functional Internet radio station (Radio Freedom Pass), streaming directly from The Lawns.
The workshop will double up as our end-of-year Agewell Computer Club party – with music from a small, established Internet radio station.
Workshop: Tuesday 13 December 2011 (3.30 to 5 pm).
Cancelled.
We have just discovered that the conditions for joining Spotify have recently changed.
Now the only way to join Spotify is through a Facebook account. If you don’t have a Facebook account, you can’t use Spotify. Existing Spotify account holders are not affected – nothing has changed for them – but we were expecting to help new learners join Spotify.
Facebook is unsuitable and unsafe for Internet beginners, so the workshop we had planned cannot go ahead. We will do something else instead.
Sub-workshop: Tuesday 13 December 2011 (2 to 5 pm).
We are going to set up the USB turntable so that Agewell Computer Club members can digitise their old vinyl disks. It will be attached to the computer which we call the ‘Agewell Media Machine’ (in the corner of the drop-in area). The USB turntable creates MP3 audio files from the tracks on the vinyl. The MP3 files can then be copied to a flash drive and taken away.
We are hoping to get this started as a demonstration next Tuesday 13 December, and then do more the following week – and more frequently in 2012. It will happen in the drop-in area, so you can’t reserve a place. If you are interested – just be there. You probably would be anyway.
We have acceded to requests for another Picnik workshop. Picnik is one of the most popular web sites at Agewell Computer Club – a free web site where you can …
Upload photographs and other digital pictures.
Do interesting things with them, for example – special effects, colour filters, add text, resize, crop, rotate.
Download the resulting images back to your own computer – or email them to yourself, or to somebody else.
At the workshop, we will …
Show you how to upload photographs (from our collection, or perhaps one of yours) to Picnik.
Suggest special effects and text options to help you convert your photos into something that has a passing resemblance to a greetings card (Christmas, New Year, birthday, whatever).
Show you how to save your greetings cards back to your computer.
Show you how to email your greetings cards to a friend (or to yourself).
If you have a Posterous blog account, show you how to send your cards to your blog website.
Make an online slide show of the best cards you make.
Workshop: Tuesday 29 November 2011 (3.30 to 5 pm).
In a nutshell.
Answers to questions such as …
Should I buy a new or furbished computer? Laptop or desktop? How much should I spend? Where should I get it from? What jargon do I need to understand? Do I really need a computer at all?
Workshop: Tuesday 22 November 2011 (3.30 to 5 pm).
In a nutshell.
This is for everyone who has an email address at seniors.org.uk, bold.org.uk, gmail.com, googlemail.com. Your webmail system is going to get a visual makeover from Google. It might please you or confuse you. Come and find out.
What it’s about.
Users of Gmail/Googlemail and Google Apps email (eg: seniors.org.uk and bold.org.uk) have probably noticed suggestions that they ‘switch to the new look’. We suggest that before you switch, you come to this workshop.
The gmail ‘new look’ is very sophisticated, and no doubt a big step in the right direction for experienced email users. For new learners and beginners, it is likely to be massively confusing. We have examined the ‘new look’ and concluded that many of our members would be better off moving in the opposite direction, back to what Google calls ‘Basic HTML’.
At the workshop.
We will explain what is happening with your email system, demonstrate your options, and help you make a sensible decision.
Who should come?
Anyone with an email address @ seniors.org.uk, or bold.org.uk, or gmail.com.
Workshop: 
This five-week course has been cancelled because too few people signed up to justify it. We will replace it with a series of five workshops on themes requested by our service users. The workshops will all take place on Monday afternoon from 3:30 to 5 pm, as follows …
Agewell Social Network:
At the workshop, we will …
Agewell Community Computing:
Agewell Community Computing:
Workshop: 
Workshop: 
Examples include …
Workshop: 
We will show you how to find and listen to some of the small stations, and some of the big ones too.
Workshop: 
Sub-workshop: 
Workshop: 
Workshop: 
Workshop: 
