Hope you all had a good summer and enjoyed graduations, weddings, family and friends. Welcome back to a new session offering exciting new courses and experiences.
Our two satellite campuses are doing well; OLLI DownTown is bursting at the seams. There were four courses last summer and all had healthy enrollments. OLLI Leisure World was also well attended.
The ice cream social for our quintessential volunteers, David and Jean Lowe, was a huge success; over 90 attended. The high point of the program was a prize winning video “A Day at the Office” written by Karin Covey and filmed and edited by Con Rader. It was a hilarious, farcical take off on the daily office routine at OLLI.
Save the date: Sunday, December 6, 2009, noon, for the OLLI Holiday party.
Janie Payan is working on another follies trip to Palm Springs for October.
OLLI is looking for instructors to teach at any of our three locations. Tell anyone who is interested about this wonderful opportunity to give back to the community by doing what one loves to do. Please call our office at 562- 985-8237.
Can you believe that one of our members, Garland Holt, who moved to the state of Washington, is still totally involved in OLLI. He attends the curriculum meetings using the Internet video and is temporarily in charge of special events. He planned two events last summer, Tom Hennessey’s lecture on the Press-Telegram and Doctor Salem’s lecture on Iraq.
Congratulations to member Renee Simon. Renee’s son Matthew who lives in Barcelona was invited to play the trumpet at Carnegie Hall in New York City.
Also, congratulations to my daughter Camryn who gave the commencement speech to the fine arts graduates at CSULB.
Have a superb semester filled with new knowledge, new friends, and good health.
How would you like to take a great computer class designed just for seniors? Our VERY FIRST COMPUTER CLASS is just that — for those who know very little or nothing at all about computers. Maybe your grandkids have been showing off their skills and that inspires you to want computer skills too. Perhaps you did use the computer for some specific procedure at work, but now want to learn to do more. Even if you just want to learn enough to play games, do e-mail and/or use the Internet, you will need to learn the mouse, the desktop, the keyboard and a few other basics.
Did someone give you an old computer to start your learning? We can give you help with it. Or if you want to purchase a new computer, we can give you ideas to help you decide what to buy.
The INTERMEDIATE COMPUTER course is more in depth and helps solidify what you learned in the beginning class with some added tasks, particularly in Microsoft Word, writing letters, announcements and other documents and filing them on the computer.
Beyond these two courses, we have others for the PC and some for the Mac, specific to Word, Excel, and file management. We have special fun courses in working the digital camera and using Photo Shop. Students learn about taking pictures, transferring them to the computer and enhancing them.
We have more fun courses for converting VHS tapes to DVD movies you can watch on TV, getting iTunes music on your computer, and exploring the social networking with YouTube, Flicker, Skype, iChat and Twitter.
We also have an open lab on Fridays, where you can benefit greatly from one-on-one help with your lessons and ask questions about your own computer. We have instructors and coaches who find great pleasure in helping others learn how to use this marvelous technological discovery of our lifetime, the computer.
