This has been a big week for my little niece – it has been her first week at High School. As you can imagine and I am sure sympathies with this seems to be a much bigger deal for the adults in the family than it is for her. All of a sudden our cute little girl that used to put the bows from presents in her hair on Christmas morning is far too cool for us. Her big brother has just started 5th year and his thoughts are now turned towards university (I think we have successfully now convinced him that International Rock God may not necessarily be the wisest career choice!)
With this on my mind and also the English exam results being received yesterday it got me thinking about kids going off to Uni with their backpacks, text books and pencils.....wait a minute! That was 10 years ago - now they go off surely with a Laptop, EBook and iPod???
The university experience has changed – instead of notebooks and pens in their backpack, students now carry to class the latest laptop with a copy of windows 7 and office 2010 Home and Student edition to help with all those essays and projects. Not only is this technology great for students but it also works well for parents whose kids are leaving home to go and study – just make sure that you install Skype on the laptop and you can talk to your kids while looking at them on screen. Also, this is a great way to ensure that your little cherub doesn’t have pink hair or a new piercing!
Text books you would think would survive technological advances and to a certain extent they do, but so many course text books are being converted to E-Book format. It would be silly to lug around massive heavy books if you could carry them round in a neat little E-book reader like the incredibly popular Amazon Kindle which has (finally!!) being released for sale in the UK at a very reasonable £109.
A lot of universities are also encouraging their lecturers to record and upload their classes as podcasts. I think this is such a fantastic idea - as it gets closer to exam time to be able to actually go back and listen to exactly what your lectures have said 10 months or ever years earlier in a class is invaluable.
Now for the serious part of this blog – with all this technology being used in such a vital way for you or your kid’s education it is absolutely essential that they are backing up their laptop as many ways are possible. As a minimum it should be backed up to an external hard drive every day and if you wanted to be really safe you should be backing up to an online backup facility of which there are many.
This laptop will have all the class notes, essays and projects stored on it, it may possibly have text books and class podcasts so be careful get a good anti-virus and a good backup plan and that way the only thing to worry about is the amount of washing they will bring home at Christmas!