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TeachParentsTech.org: keeping tech support a family business
December 13, 2010
Every December for as long as I can remember, I’ve come home to something like this:
If you couldn’t already tell, that’s a list of things my dad wants me to teach him how to do. Don’t get me wrong, I love teaching my dad how to do stuff on his computer—and he’s fairly tech-savvy as far as dads go—but sometimes trudging through that to-do list gets tedious.
Talking to fellow Googlers, I learned that I
wasn’t alone
in my role as the one-man family tech support team. In fact, I was hard pressed to find anyone who didn’t have a similar story about getting their parents up to speed.
This got a few of us thinking. Why isn’t there a site designed to help “kids” teach their parents about computer basics? So we put our heads together and built a new site:
TeachParentsTech.org
.
TeachParentsTech.org
lets you select from more than 50 basic how-to videos to send to mom, dad, your old college roommate, your neighbor or anyone else who could use a little help with tech tasks—whether it’s how to
copy & paste
to
how to share a big file
. Wrap up your video with a custom email and off it goes! The recipient will receive your message and a link to the video(s) you selected.
As an added treat, the first 10,000 people who send tech support care packages will also be able to send a real tech support care package in the (snail) mail to the recipient of their choice (U.S. only)—on us.
I hope this shaves off an hour or two of your family tech support duties this December—and beyond!
Update
6:04 PM
: Whoa, that was fast! We're now out of snail mail care packages.
Posted by Jason Toff, Toff Family Tech Support
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