Blog Archives

A couple days ago I witnessed another small, hopeful sign that actual paper books will not die out.  My 10 year-old granddaughter asked if I would buy a book for her from amazon.com.  Now, I did give all four of my granddaughters Kindle Fires for Christmas, so I assumed she would want the kindle book.  Happily, she told me that she really likes her Kindle Fire, but that when it comes to books, she prefers actual books.  The paperback version cost a dollar less than the kindle book and since it was a Prime item, it should arrive today, with free shipping.  My 13 year-old granddaughter also prefers to have actual books and she and her 10 year-old sister love keeping their bookcase in their room neatly arranged with their growing collection of books, stuffed animals and other knick knacks.

In other tech news from the homefront, where the technologically clueless, like yours truly, encounter and attempt to understand the brave new computer world, recently I’ve been watching my granddaughters use a program from school that they can access on any PC – Wixie, an online authoring platform.  It amazed me how easily they could import photos, graphics, record narration, draw their own pictures and rearrange their page designs with blocks of text.  Of course, one of my sons tried to burst my bubble and tell me that it’s just a kid version of Power Point, but regardless, thinking back to writing journals and trying to assemble my own scrapbooks and booklets as a kid, well, this Wixie program won me over completely.  The girls have used their Kindle Fire tablets and their school Ipads, which they can bring home, to take their own photos and import them into these journals they’ve written and they’re creating professional looking journals that make my blog look paltry.  My 10 year-old granddaughter just won the 5th grade essay contest for the school district with her story on the Holocaust, that she put together using this Wixie program.

Small things for small minds the techno-types will scoff, but it’s really nice that the technology designers keep creating new programs which even idiots like me can easily use.  And when I get confused, I’ve got four granddaughters who can show me what to do, a habit developed in the 80s,  when my own kids were mere toddlers and I handed them the remote to figure out first the VCR player and later the DVD player.  Now, if I could only get my smartphone to connect correctly to the bluetooth in my car.  My old phone connected with no problem, but even following the car manual instructions, this new phone isn’t connected properly – incoming calls come through on the car’s bluetooth and if I make a call from my smart phone from inside my car, the car’s bluetooth turns on, but I can’t use the bluetooth controls on the steering wheel to initiate a call.  Perhaps, I need to hand my phone to my granddaughters and tell them to figure it out.