iPad Class

 

The Virginia Department of Business Assistance recently offered a free class for business people to learn some tricks with their iPad.  Lots of people have an iPad and there are scads of things you can do with it.  But most people don't use it to its full potential.

The class was held in the Greenfield Center.  I was familiar with Greenfield because of a few occasions I have had to sit in on the Board of Supervisors meetings.  It is a beautiful place.  It has plenty of parking and friendly people to direct you.  Go check it out.

 


A lot of the class covered the new features you get with the latest ios7 update.  I wanted to download the update, but my iPad kept telling me I was no longer connected to the internet.  This despite the fact that I was getting my emails.  I mentioned this to the instructor, Sandy Ratliff, before class and she explained this happened some times and I needed to do a hard reboot.  I felt like Bill Cosby with his Noah routine.  ("Riiight.  What's an ark?")  What's a hard reboot?  She explained that it was similar to turning off your computer to restart it when it freezes.  Simply hold down the power button in the upper right corner and the home button in the center of the bottom edge of the screen.

I had to do it twice and then the computer recognized that I was connected.  But it was going to take about 4 hours.   And I would need to be plugged into a power source so the computer wouldn't die in the middle of the download. Oh.  I waited until I got home and did it there.

Already it was worth the cost of the class.  OK.  The class was free.  But already it was worth the trip to the class.

The new update does tons of things.  More than I could grasp in one class.  But then it also did the things I hate.  The icons look different.  The computer forgot the password to our Wi-Fi.  My email looks and acts differently.  You know.  All those annoying things that make it a pain to figure out what you knew how to do a few hours ago!

Do you know how to get Siri, your personal assistant?  Not anyone connected to Tom Cruise.  Once you go to SETTING, then GENERAL and turn on Siri you can do a lot of things by voice command alone.  You can look up things on the Internet and send emails without touching the iPad.  And she is very responsive.  And she types faster and more accurately than I do.  Plus, she doesn't even need to use spell check!  You can even correct her pronunciation. That's fun for me, but imagine someone who is disabled.  Now they can send emails or get into tweeting.  I don't tweet or twitter, but I do send emails!

A lot of time was spent on saving information in the cloud.  Then if your computer or iPad dies or is stolen you can still have access to all your data.  There are a lot of free sites for a limited amount of data.  If you need to store more data, you will need to store it in different places or just pay for the additional space.  I am not ready to  explore this, but will need to do so soon.  Or perhaps I can hire a third grader to come and help me.

Ms. Ratliff showed us a bunch of useful apps that you could get for free and some she liked that cost a few dollars.  She was good at explaining things and used humor to keep us listening.  A great teacher. 

The iPad will also do some photo and video editing, something I would like to explore.  Maybe I need another class for that.  Or just time to sit and fool around with it.  Or that third grader.

 

She also showed us how to get Emoji on our keyboard.  This lets you expand way beyond a smiley face.

 

This is an app that allows you to add a bunch of different emoticons to your typing/emails. 

 

I don't know how much I will use it, but it was fun to find!  ( SETTINGS/GENERAL/KEYBOARD/INTERNATIONAL/EMOJI)
 
 

Sure, she showed us a bunch about remote printing and data storage and work related things, but we had time to do some fun things, too.

It was a fun class and I am looking forward to taking more classes at Greenfield.