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Holiday MicroProject: Teach Your Parents Technology
In MOUSE Squad, you probably find yourself helping teachers and fellow students with computer issues all the time, but do you ever find your parents, grandparents, or other family members asking you for help with computer stuff too? You are not alone! These days, with technology changing so fast, many adults have a hard time staying up to speed and end up giving up on using the internet, their printer or their computer hardware all together. This is where you come to the rescue!
For this month’s MicroProject, use your time this holiday season to teach someone in your family something you have learned in MOUSE Squad, then work with each other to blog about it together!
Choose a topic to teach your family member:
- Teach your family member HTML. Make a blog or website together using images, links, and as many other HTML tags as you can. At the bottom of this post you will find a number of free blogging and site building tools.
- Teach your family member to set up your home network. Explain the difference between a router, hub and switch (check the kbase (short for "knowledge base") if you need help with this).
- Teach your family member about computer hardware. Draw a diagram together of the insides of a computer and what they do.
Click HERE to check out our example!
Our MOUSE Training Specialist Maggie taught her mom a little bit about computer hardware and then taught her how to make her own blog. She uploaded the picture they made together in a blog post with a description of what they did, and included a link to the blog she helped her mom make. What are you going to teach your family members?
Bonus Points
Take your teaching even further! For bonus points, teach your parents all kinds of extra useful tech tips. Just make sure to show us what you did or tell us how you explained everything. Here are some sample bonus topics:
- How to set up an email account
- How to use the Internet safely and guard against identity theft
- How to guard against viruses and malware
- How to back up your data and why it's important
Free Tools
If you are teaching your family members HTML, you can use any of the following sites to create a free blog. Your family members can then make their blog their own!
- http://pastehtml.com/ - Use PasteHTML.com to put a HTML file online, quickly and with no registration.
- Wordpress - Lets you get started with a new and free WordPress-based blog in seconds.
- Blogger - Whatever you have to say, Blogger can help you say it.
- Thoughts.com - Thoughts.com is an evolving and unique blogging community that drives social conversation and connects like-minded people through its community forums and live discussions.
- Weebly - Easily create personal sites and blogs.
If you are teaching your family members about networking or hardware you can use the free image editors at Aviary to create a diagram to help them learn more about the parts of a computer!
When you are done, blog about it here!
When you've completed your project, remember to:
- make a squad blog post with your family member explaining what they learned, how you taught it and show us an example of your process.
- Make sure you use HTML in your blog post! If you need a reminder on how that works, click here!.
- Title it "Holiday MicroProject" so we can easily find it!
- Holiday MicroProjects must be submitted by 11:59pm on Tuesday, January 31st, 2012 (you have TWO months to complete this project). The Grand Prize will go to the best explanation that shows the most work.
MicroProject winners receive:
- a $60 Best Buy gift card for the Grand Prize winner!
- Papertronics Lunar Modules for runners up! Papertronics are paper toys with paper electronic circuits in them that you build yourself!
