"Online-Program-X Won't Let Me Do Y!"

Those of you who are like me and have been online for years know the art of having to download multiple web browsers, but the rest of you may not be aware of this. Some of you may not even know what a web browser is, much less what other options there are besides Internet Explorer (or Safari on a Mac).'

If you're in that camp, let me temporarily redirect you to this site, so you can get caught up (click on the link to see it):

http://www.teachingideas.co.uk/welcome/browsers/page1.htm

If you've done that and are now caught up, let me explain what this has to do with our class. For some reason, Pinnacle and Blackboard seem to work better with different browsers. For example, I can do attendance on Pinnacle just fine when I use my Chrome browser (my personal favorite), but if I try to go to the gradebook, the browser either crashes or refuses to read the information. Thus, I have to go get on Internet Explorer instead (or Firefox).  On the other hand, as several of you have discovered, when you go to get on Blackboard to post a blog, you get an error message if you're using Internet Explorer. Ay-yi-yi! What's a person to do?

If you're on campus, most of the computers have both Internet Explorer (IE for short) and Firefox installed. If one doesn't work, close the web browser out and try the other.

If you're working from home and have your own computer, I highly recommend that you download a variety of browsers and keep them up to date. How do you do that? Well, just head on over to these sites to download their browsers:

For Google Chrome: https://www.google.com/chrome/?hl=en&brand=chmo
For Mozilla Firefox: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/
For Apple Safari: http://www.apple.com/safari/download/
For Microsoft Internet Explorer 9: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/internet-explorer/downloads/ie
For Opera: http://www.opera.com/

Depending on what you use the internet to do, you'll develop your own preference for which one is your favorite. If you use a lot of Google programs (i.e. Blogger, Gmail, Google+, etc.), for example, you're probably going to use Chrome the most. You'll all have different preferences... however, no matter your preference, it's best to have at least one or two other browsers installed, because issues pop up all the time withing ALL browsers (not just Internet Explorer... I promise).

So for those of you who've tried to blog and have been unable to do so this first week, I hope this clears up any confusion.