Getting Started: For full functionality in this online course, we recommend that you download and install the following Applications and Plug-ins. All of them are free. (If a web site offers you a better version for money, skip it and download the free one--it works just as well.) You may have downloaded from the internet a lot or not at all. If you haven't downloaded from the Internet it can be quite confusing the first few times. We have therefore included a step by step tutorial for each download that we recommend. Note: Once you have set up your computer and are studying online, if you have problems we have a Troubleshooting Checklist as well as a telephone contact page for Emergencies and Frustrations.

Set up your computer by downloading required and recommended performance-enhancing programs from the web

Links to Downloads. You can download programs off the internet that enhance your computer's performance and give it extra capabilities. The downloads which we require or recommend are all free of charge; the are also relatively standard so your computer may already have them. Further down this page you will find links to web sites where you can make free downloads.

Tutorials. Since many people haven't had a chance to learn to download from the internet, we provide a printable, step by step tutorial for the downloads on this page. If downloading from the web seems unfamiliar and confusing, we can at least suggest that downloading from the web is an important computer literacy skill in the current technological age. If you haven't done it before, learning to do it by reading our tutorials may be one of the most useful things you learn in this class.

We suggest that you print each Download Tutorial and refer to it as you download the corresponding product.

click here to download plug-in