Teaching Teachers how to Solve Their Own Tech Problems

Perhaps the most important troubleshooting tip you can give to your staff is that if they are unsure of how to do something (e.g. make Safari the default browser), suggest they use google or youtube. By the time they ask someone how to solve a tech (or any other) problem, be it by email or walking to a classroom to find you, they could have solved it on their own using google or youtube. It appears as though many edtech mentors are ending up being troubleshooters at their school, and this suggestion may reduce some of this.

For specific searches, suggest that if they are looking to solve a tech problem about using their laptop, they should put the word macbook in the search field. Other tips include the use of quotes to search for specific terms (setting up hot corners yields 83 million results, whereas "setting up hot corners" yields 333 results); however the first page of the search with 83 million results will usually provide sites with their answer. They can also use the minus sign (-) to exclulde search words / terms.