Getting parents the tech help they need

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It’s wild to think our children will never know a world without computers. Likewise it’s harder for aging parents to adjust to the leaps and bounds of technology that has occurred in their lifetimes. It’s easy to get frustrated by the continuous stream of computer questions that certain parents stream at you and sometimes it’s hard to admit that you don’t know everything when they so depend on you for answers.

Google to the rescue… the search engine giant realized that kids telling their parents to “Google it’ wasn’t always sufficient when it came to tech help questions. Odds are if the parents knew how to Google it in the first place, they wouldn’t have bothered to ask their child. So Google has created a web service called Teach Parents Tech available at http://www.teachparentstech.org/ .

On the site, users create a custom “care package” of video tutorials to send to their parents. It shows them simply and easily how to do things as basic as copy & paste or as complicated as create a FAT32 hard Drive partition… not really.







But it does allow users to choose from 5 areas of interest: The Basics, World Wide Web, Communication, Media, and Finding Information. Each category has several videos of different hurdles parents try to overcome. With a few clicks Google bundles them up and sends a personalized email from you to your folks that will help them out without making them feel bad (unless those are the check boxes you choose).

It’s a really nice site functionality, layout and design wise. The concept is excellent but it is a Google sponsored experience so all of the videos pertain specifically to Google or its subsidiary products. Maybe I would prefer to chat with my mom on Skype, if that’s the case I’ll have to find a tutorial and send it to her myself. The site just launched though and it’s already had over 22,000 care packages sent.

For more information on tech careers, visithttp://www.techcareers.com/

By Heather Fairchild - Heather is a writer and blogger for Nexxt. She researches and writes about job search tactics, training, and topics.

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