MY BUSY WEEK AT COMPUTERPALS - August 2013

Wow, this has been a busy week for me.........the weekend and Monday was taken up with reconciling the bank balance against the computer provided Register balance, and then printing out and emailing pdf files of five reports to each Committee member.

 That task completed, I attended the local bank following earlier rollover of the Clubs Interest Bearing Deposit of $15,000 to successfully sort out and increase payment of interest as at the maturing date, when it was 3.55%.

Followed on Tuesday by attending the monthly Management Committee meeting and presenting the Financial Report, and fielding questions. 

I reported to Committee that our Honorary Auditor Kerri was retiring as Auditor at the AGM.

 Keri has been our Auditor since 2008 and has given freely of her time and experience and help to the previous Treasurer Hazel and myself - thanks Keri, you will be missed!

Wednesday I was back to assist Trainer Jon at our week three of the Managing Your Digital Photographs five week course.

 After the course finished Jon and I opened Skype and contacted this months members meeting guest speaker, Marti of Photobooksrus, to carry out a visual and sound test. Photobooksrus is located in Melbourne and Marti works from home on the Queenslands Gold Coast, so I decided to try and make technology work for us.

All went ok, so hopefully our live broadcast of Marti's presentation on how to make a photobook will be successful next week.

 This is a first for our Club, a guest speaker who is not at the meeting. Will the technology work...Jon and I hope so!

 Today, Thursday....back to the office to collect monies and deposit at the bank.
 Then into the Training Room for our regular Film Making Special Interest Group meeting, conducted by John, with members Judy, Yvette, Michael and 2 Johns attending.
 We discussed the club's use of recently purchased Adobe Premier Elements 11, a powerful and easy to use movie editing software that will let our members organise, enhance and edit videos.

Trainer John looks at some benefits of using Elements 11........







.........and Michael, Judy, Yvette and Tom relax during the presentation

 

Breaking news......our 8 new computer monitors with big 21.5 and 23 inch screens arrived today and will soon be installed to our training room computers!

While we were in the Training Room, our Secretary Margaret was out alone in the office entering new members into the member register...she is hard-working and a real treasure!

I'm glad this week is over!

John L

ANDROID SMART PHONES/TABLETS Special Interest Group

It's certainly true that Android smart phones and tablets are taking over - our ipad/iphone SIGroup this morning attracted 10 members, but the afternoon session on Androids saw a record 20+ try to crowd into our Training Room.

We then split up into two groups, Deborah staying in the Training Room with experienced users and Jon and me using another room with inexperienced users.

                                   


 Deborah with her group  of tablet users
                                      ...and one smart phone

Meanwhile, Jon and me were battling in the other room, setting up Android tablets, big and small, and with every one a different make and different setups, etc...

Both groups were keen to learn, and Jon and I  worked our way through the various tablets and smart phones setups and queries. Afternoon tea was a welcome break for us two!

It certainly looks like we need to provide more formal training for tablets, possibly in smaller groups as Androids are made by different manufacturers and, as Jon and I found out today, each are different to operate.

A FACEBOOK TRAINING COURSE - July 2013

I had to go to the Office today to collect membership and course monies, there were so many receipts issued over the past week I needed help.....and it was forthcoming from our regular Wednesday office volunteer Aileen!

"I'll help you John", said Aileen. So she did...here is Aileen transcribing heaps of receipts onto a recording form (designed for me by another volunteer, Dawne!)....then Aileen donned her warm clothes and walked down Church Street to the Bank for me. Saved me lots of time...thanks again Aileen.

And...seeing now that I now had more time, I looked into our Training Room and found it was full of six students and trainers Deborah and Margaret..their first day of a two day course on Facebook.

 There were "old hands" Noelene, Anne and Laura, as well as new members Connie, Maureen, James and Kathryn doing their first course at our Club......they have a couple of beaut trainers, so they will soon be regular Facebookers!

MEMBERS' MONTHLY MEETING - July 2013

President Deborah was pleased to welcome to the meeting  new members who had joined at the recent Open Day, and to also present Trainer and IT helper Bing with the Mug of the Month.

Deborah reported she had purchased the iPad4, Samsung Galaxy2 Android and Microsoft Surface RT Windows 8  tablets that were part of the recent Parramatta City Council's Community Grant to our Club.
Deborah also spoke about an Excursion on Friday 30 August to the Museum of Sydney and the Custom House. Members going on the excursion should tell Deborah asap, so she can book the numbers.

           During morning tea, many members joined Deborah to inspect the tablets.


Jon Bayley took members online to view Telstra Tech Savvy Seniors training videos on using tablets, social networking and security, and also played a sample of short talks by the Gadget Guy Peter Blasina.

 You can see all the videos online at http://www.telstra.com.au/telstra-seniors/

 The bountiful home-baked cakes were very popular at morning tea, our Club has a great mob of volunteers that cater for our activities and appetites.

The usual Q and A session was replaced with an open forum to help the Committee plan future training courses, and the participation by members was outstanding.

JON BAYLEY'S Course - Managing Your Digital Photos - July 2013

It's the first day for these students doing Jon's popular course on managing digital photos and they are learning the finer points of their digital cameras...like setting the correct time and date, how to set up the various types of flash - auto, always on, always off, etc and how to set the number of pixels, picture quality and aspect.

Jon and me, his Assistant Trainer, have been conducting this popular course for nearly six years and, with up to 6 students each time,  a lot of students have passed through the course.

This is just the first day, and it is obvious from the above photo that the students are keen, and are involved in setting their digital cameras correctly.

The students were then given an introduction to Picasa3, a  photo management application from Google.com thats free to download and use.

Next week they will be shown how to download their photos from their camera to a computer-after that they will try out Picasa3 and its photo editing processes. This is when the course gets really interesting!

WORKING BEES AT OUR COMPUTERPALS

Our training courses are not conducted during school holidays. But this does not mean that nothing happens in our club....its the time when our volunteers have working bees to carry out various housekeeping activities.
Here is Dawne, organising our
course notes and folders
in our Training Room

And our President Deborah printing brochures..............................

                      ......and our Secretary Margaret 
                    preparing Welcoming Letters to new members, and entering them onto our data base
                              ...and filing her recent Advertiser article

     ......and Ron is compiling brochures with Anne, pictured below

.....and

me balancing the cash receipt book.

And also, there are our IT experts, Deborah, John and Bing who spent hours updating and also configuring the Win 7 platform to the HP printer. Vista was removed from our old computers and now they still work in both XP and Windows 7. Robert Delvecchio also attended to look at card reader and USB problems.

So, even though there are no students in our club rooms, there are lots of busy bees at the Working Bees

OPEN DAY - Tuesday 2 July 2013

Our Open Day was highly succesful with attendance of around 30 throughout the day.





Secretary Margart was kept busy handling new members,
annual subscription renewals and Term 3 course bookings

Ten new members joined our Club, many of them had the article that recently appeared in the Advertiser.

 
Card and photobook displays
 were popular








A number of 20 minute talks were conducted by Trainers Jon, John and Judy and Lilly., followed by an interesting presentation of a wonderfully, easy way for Seniors to use Tablets for a simple way to connect online with family while ensuring privacy, and also to search the Web was made by Phil Willis from Tapestry.