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How to change the screensaver on a Mac
December 24, 2010
This post is the last edition of the
“Teach Your Parents Tech” series
where Googlers help provide some tips and tricks you can gift your parents with this Holiday Season.
Like most people, I look forward to going home for the holidays and enjoying the good food, good company and much needed rest and relaxation. But as the techie in the family (read: I know what the control panel does), I also look forward to setting my parents up with whichever ‘cool’ technologies the evening news happened to mention since the last time I was home. This year I’m guessing I’ll be opening up a Twitter account for Dad and downloading Angry Birds for Mom.
Any time I go home though, I also try to teach them something they’ll be able to do themselves later on. This time, I’m going to show my parents how to change a screensaver on a Mac. Of course, first I’ll have to explain to them what the screensaver is. Here's how I imagine this conversation going:
Me: Want to see how to change your screensaver?
Mom: Sure... what’s a screensaver?
Me: That program on your computer that shows pictures of the family when you’re away.
Mom: Why does my computer show pictures of us when I’m away?
Dad: Computers get lonely, too.
(My dad is the comedian in the family, clearly.)
So instead of going through all that, I decided I’d just make this video instead. A bunch of my friends made videos, too, which you've probably seen over the last few weeks. We figured if we use Youtube to cover the computer stuff, you’ll have more time to play snow football. Of course, you might still have to teach your parents how to watch Youtube videos...
Hopefully you and your parents will find value in these videos, and Happy Holidays!
My mom, dad and brother and me circa when plastic glasses frames were cool the first time.
Posted by Gopal Shah, SketchUp Marketing
Spell “oscilloscope” perfectly
December 23, 2010
This post is part of the
“Teach Your Parents Tech” series
where Googlers help provide some tips and tricks you can gift your parents with this Holiday Season.
In my video for my family, I demo a quick way to get the correct spelling of a word. Instead of using a spell checker or a physical dictionary (so 90’s), you can use familiar Google Search to learn whether to write “
sharlaton
” or “charlatan,” for example.
This trick even works when communicating with relatives who speak a different language. When I want to wish my mom’s Swiss family and friends a happy new year, I can type “es guetes Nöis” into the Google Switzerland search bar. Google returns the correct spelling “
es guets Nöis
”, scoring me kudos with the family until the next year’s holidays.
My mom, brother, and me wearing our fashionable holiday finest
Posted by Nathalie Arbel, Local Marketing
Giving the Gift of Email
December 22, 2010
This post is part of the
“Teach Your Parents Tech” series
where Googlers help provide some tips and tricks you can gift your parents with this Holiday Season.
When I go home for the holidays, I usually brace myself for a couple things: cold weather, fighting over the remote with my sister, and the shocking state of my parents’ overflowing email inboxes. Last year my mom asked me how I kept track of it all, and I gave her her favorite Christmas gift yet: teaching her how to start fresh with a new email address.
Maybe, like my dad, you created your email address 15 years ago when your family first got dial-up internet, and it’s time for an update. Or maybe you’ve been hearing your kids brag about a cool email service provider that you’d like to try out. Regardless of why you want to switch, a new email address is a great way to start the new year off with a clean slate and a clean inbox.
If you ask my mom why she switched to Gmail, she might say that she likes using labels to organize her inbox, or that she can archive messages without actually deleting them. But really, I think it’s because after the holidays are over and my sister and I head back across the country, she can chat with us through Gmail whenever she wants. Just ask her what her new favorite emoticon is (hint: it’s the heart! <3).
My mom, sister, me, and dad, reveling in the glory of the 90s.
Posted by Lauren Barbato, Online Sales
How to transfer naked baby photos to your mom’s computer
December 21, 2010
This post is part of the
“Teach Your Parents Tech” series
where Googlers help provide some tips and tricks you can gift your parents with this Holiday Season.
Sharing photos, documents, video and other files with my family is something I frequently do around the holidays. In particular, I find myself sharing photos of my recent adventures and happenings with my parents.
My Dad is a big photography buff and tech geek (Love you, Dad :) ). Growing up, he always had a nice camera draped around his neck and recently he digitized (scanned) our thousands of family photos and put them onto the home computer. So, we have a stockpile of photos of my basketball games, my sister’s horse shows, naked baby bubble baths, easter egg hunts, trips to the beach, etc.
My Mom is not a tech geek. Recently she told me that she has heard of copy and paste, but doesn’t know how to use it. I recently taught her how to text message and my sister taught her how to book airfare online. However, my mom loves to look at family photos. The easiest way I’ve found to trasnfer photos onto my mom’s computer is by using a USB stick. I hope with the following video, I’ll be able to teach my mom how to transfer photos at any time:
For more videos of Googlers teaching their parents tech, check out
TeachParentsTech.org
.
My mom, me, and dad near Lake Tahoe, CA many summers ago.
Posted by Will Patrick, Enterprise Marketing Team
Copying and pasting - not as ubiquitous as you think
December 20, 2010
This post is part of the
“Teach Your Parents Tech” series
where Googlers help provide some tips and tricks you can gift your parents with this Holiday Season.
Copying and pasting definitely would have come in handy back in 1996 when I was typing out college application after college application, one by one, on my (at the time) super sophisticated word processor. Thankfully, my mother split the process up with me and helped me crank out 6 neatly typed applications, with minimal need for White Out.
Fast forward to 2010. I was at home chatting with my mom as she filled out an offer for one of her clients (she’s a real estate agent), when I noticed that she was typing each of her clients’ names, letter by letter, over and over again throughout the form.
And that’s the moment that copying and pasting forever changed her life.
Posted by Michael Bolognino, Product Marketing Manager
Searching for the sunshine and snow
December 17, 2010
This post is part of the
“Teach Your Parents Tech” series
where Googlers help provide some tips and tricks you can gift your parents with this Holiday Season.
In the town where I grew up, the average temperature fluctuates from 66°F to 83°F. I remember the weather guy on the local news spending more time telling funny stories than sharing the weather forecast. It wasn’t until I moved away for college, where clear skies could give way to thunderstorms in just minutes, that I learned the real value of quick access to a weather report. That’s also when I taught my mom how to check the weather report right from Google for any location in the world. By just typing “weather 08544” she could easily decide whether or not to call and remind me to bundle up.
Looking at the weather forecast is a great way to stir up nostalgia, prepare for a vacation, or decide what to wear in the morning. Whether you’re hoping for sunshine or snow, cross your fingers and head over to Google.com to search for the weather.
Before I knew why weather forecasts exist
Posted by Laura Melahn, Product Marketing Manager
Find a great place to eat in the neighborhood
December 16, 2010
This post is part of the
“Teach Your Parents Tech” series
where Googlers help provide some tips and tricks you can gift your parents with this Holiday Season.
For my mom, learning new technology can be pretty overwhelming. Except, of course, when that new technology makes her life easier in a very direct way. (The shopping center really didn’t know what hit it when she got a hold of a bar code scanning app on her mobile phone.)
Since my mom’s a big-time foodie, I thought it’d be perfect to show her how to find great local restaurants using Google Search.
Who knows? Maybe if she finds one she likes, she’ll feel inspired to take her darling son out for a bite to eat (hint, hint, Mom). If you’d like to get more quick videos to help your parents use technology in their everyday lives, check out www.TeachParentsTech.org.
My parents and I at a theme park around 1996. Any guesses as to who was most excited to be there?
Posted by Miles Johnson, Search Marketing Team
Your desktop background is your palate
December 15, 2010
This post is part of the
“Teach Your Parents Tech” series
where Googlers help provide some tips and tricks you can gift your parents with this Holiday Season.
Last holiday season was the first time that I accumulated enough funds (read: got a “real job” and stopped living on my mother’s account) to purchase a substantial holiday present for the person who gave me life. The gift? A new laptop to replace her archaic machine from the Ninth Circle. Simply gifting someone else’s creation wasn’t enough, though--I wanted to personalize the experience.
My mother’s a hopeless sap: all of her online passwords are variations of her children’s names (please don’t hack her!); she can never find anything in her purse because it’s engorged by our baby pictures; and her visceral reaction to the question “how are you doing?” is “oh, they (my sister and I) are doing quite well!” So to personalize the laptop, my sister engaged her masterful design skills to produce a desktop background of my mother’s Two Wonders of the World: her daughter and son, with a mint green background, no less (her favorite color). When the day arrived, she ecstatically expressed her appreciation for “a real present...finally!”; the real ringer, however, came when she saw the illuminated screen. She was brought to tears.
Your desktop background is more than the tone with which you begin your computing experience; it’s your palate. Make it dynamic and fun, but most importantly, make it you.
I constantly change my desktop background. Here are a few instances:
Commemorate an important event or holiday, like a birthday or a national day
Promote or anticipate a major upcoming event, like a new movie or sports event
Rectify a bad day (or week) with a motivational quote or inspirational figures (a silhouette of Martin Luther King Jr. is a personal favorite)
Demonstrate loyalty to “your side” if you’re part of a rivalry--from sports teams to mobile phone operating systems (e.g. I’ve had an Android army robot before)
Mirror seasonal or environmental changes, such as a snowy background for the holidays or a beach during the summer
My mother and I, when I still listened to her attentively
Posted by Bing Chen, YouTube Partnerships and Platform Marketing
Searching for the right movie
December 14, 2010
This post is part of the
“Teach Your Parents Tech” series
where Googlers help provide some tips and tricks you can gift your parents with this Holiday Season.
When I head home for the holidays, I most look forward to seeing my family and labradoodles. I know I’ll also be catching up on sleep, reading, and seeing some new movies. While picking up Jane Austen will be an easy decision, figuring out which movies to see will be a tougher choice. My brothers, parents and I will have the inevitable debate between low-brow humor and action options.
When I was home for Thanksgiving, we decided on a movie we wanted to see, only to research showtimes and find that the time didn’t work for everyone. To help your families make the movie selection process easier, I’m sharing some guidance on how you can easily find movie listings and showtimes by searching on Google.com.
While we know this won’t solve all of the comedy versus action movie debates, we hope this will help you find some great movies to watch with your family over the holidays. To see more videos on easy ways to help your parents with technology, visit
www.TeachParentsTech.org
.
When the only movies I watched were cartoons
Posted by Katie Mandel, Product Marketing Manager, Google Maps
Teaching your parents tech
December 13, 2010
This post is the first in a new series especially for the Holidays around taking technology home with you this year. Stay tuned for more tips for the next ten days and check out
http://teachparentstech.org
to learn more.
We all know that coming home for the holidays can hold some serious responsibilities for students. Not only are you required to eat a lot, open gifts, and rejoice in some well-deserved time off from studying, but sometimes you’re also expected to serve as the in-house tech support team for your own family. Did you get your mom a new camera? Then you better get ready to teach her how to get the photos she takes from this little thing (camera) onto that bigger thing (computer).
This task is the motivation behind our recently launched campaign to “Teach Parents Tech”. Instead of spending hours trying to explain to your parents what a blog or browser is, wouldn’t it be easier to use
this nifty website
to send your parents (or grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings...) a few tutorial videos that can teach them everything they’ve ever wanted to know about how they can use Google tools and products just like you do?
A bunch of us Googlers often have the same problem, which is why we actually filmed these videos for our own parents. For me personally, I chose to teach my dad how he can use a URL shortener (like
goo.gl
) to keep things short and simple. Just like his long-winded phone calls, he has a tendency to use Gmail chat and text messages (which he only refers to as “SMSes”, by the way) as if they are full-fledged conversations. My gift to him – and myself – this holiday season is to try and teach him how he can simplify his messages and his URLs.
With all the holiday countdowns this time of year (like the
8 days of Hanukkah
,
12 days of Christmas
, or
7 candles for Kwanzaa
) we thought it would make sense to post one of these every day on the Student blog for the next ten days. We hope you (and your parents) find them useful.
A shorter version of me and my and dad circa 1987
Posted by Miriam Schneider, Google Apps for Education team
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