Teach Parents Tech; It May Be The Solution to Holiday Stress

It can happen any time of the year, but especially during the holidays. You come home to visit your family for the holidays and end up spending a good portion of the time helping your parents “fix” their computers. It can mean doing things like setting the clock, defragmenting the hard drive or just changing the desktop background.

The challenge with being in charge of tech support for your family is that if you fix their computer just once, from then on out, anything else that happens to it is going to be your fault. So, if you have family members who aren't tech-savvy, instead of just taking care of the issues they are having, why not help them get educated?

This year, Google is lending a hand to all of the stressed out, impromptu help desk agents. They are launching a website called Teach Parents Tech. The site hasn't been officially announced yet, but the website teachparentstech.org is registered to Google and it features computer skill tutorials hosted by Google employees. Here is a look at their promo:

The video tutorials offered are brief, with most of them lasting less than a minute. They cover a wide variety of issues and cross all platforms. Some of the topics are fairly simple, like “How to copy/paste.”, “How to attach a file to an email” and “How to change your wallpaper”. While others, are more complex and cover some more advanced issues like “How to set up an email autoresponder” or “How to find cheap flights.”

So, if you have people in your family who might need a little extra help with their computers, send them over to Teach Parents Tech and see if the instructional videos can help. And, if you aren't sure how to bring up the subject with your family, don't worry. The site even has a fill-in-the-blank referral form so that you can let them know that you support their efforts to get to know their computers.

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