I know the title of this “The Best…” list is a mouthful, but it was the best I could come-up with.  I wanted to distinguish it from two previous lists — The Best Places To Learn Web 2.0 Basics — 2007 and The Best Eleven Websites For Students To Learn About Computers.

Of course, people who find this list useful might very well want to take a look at those lists, too.

I just thought readers of this blog (and me!) might find it useful to have some good resources where non-tech-savvy people (like myself) can look for help related to technology trouble-shooting and software questions that might not be appropriate for those two lists.

To make it on this list, as in most of my “The Best…” lists, a resource must be available at no cost.

As usual, I’m certainly open to additional suggestions.

Here are my picks for The Best Places To Learn Computer Basics & How To Fix Tech Problems (not in order of preference):

Thanks to Paul Hamilton (who passed on info he received from Wesley Fryer) I learned about Tech-Ease. It has an incredible collection of resources, including video tutorials, and is a gold mine.  It’s worth reading their posts about the site.

Wonder How To is a huge instructional video site that has nearly 4,000 videos related to computers. There are also some videos on the site that have content not appropriate for the classroom, so you probably don’t want to have students use it. However, if you’re looking for online videos that would be okay for students, you might want to look at The Best Online Instructional Video Sites.  Even though those sites might not have quite the huge collection of computer-related tutorials that that Wonder How To does, you’ll certainly a lot of them.

Education World’s Techtorial Archives might have some dated material, but you can also find a lot of good current information.

I also like In Pictures, which has excellent picture-based tutorials for popular software that is very accessible to the non-tech-savvy person.

Custom Guides are simple, double-sided “cheat sheets” that can be printed out for many software applications.

KATE, the Kentucky Academy of Technology Education, has a nice collection of accessible software tutorials. Here is how they describe themselves:

KATE, the Kentucky Academy of Technology Education, collects the most innovative and successful technology practices in K–12 education and makes them available to the teachers and students of Kentucky — the United States — and the world.

The Goodwill Community Foundation (GCF) has great tutorials on a variety of software applications.

Job Scout has a number of interactive computer tutorials designed for people very new to tech, plus it also offers a guided tool for creating resumes. And they’re all free. TechCrunch says they have also just announced a Spanish version, but I haven’t been able to locate it online yet.

GCF Free Learning has lots of tutorials.

As I’ve mentioned, please let me know of sites I’ve missed.

If you found this post useful, you might want to look at previous “The Best…” lists and also consider subscribing to this blog for free.