TeachParentsTech.org: keeping tech support a family business
December 13th, 2010 | Published in Google Blog
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!