Computer Support Blog

As technology improves, so too does everything we use it for, whether for work, communication, play, or any other purpose.  This is also true of the way children play and learn, and a startup called Pi’ikea Street looks to use the tech devices you utilize every day to help your child learn and grow.  It is a company with apps dedicated specifically to young children, even babies, that they can safely access without getting into anything else that you have stored on your tablet or smartphone or opening any other programs on it.  These apps have uses for both education and simple fun, and there are a variety of them to choose from.  Pi’ikea Street also has plenty to offer parents including a blog about their apps and future release plans, coloring pages, and crafts that parents can access on a mobile device or download and print to use with their children. Read more »

While advances in technology have vastly improved experiences in shopping, entertainment, education, parenting is a more difficult challenge.  The options that do exist online are mostly cluttered forums offering scattered information that can be misleading, and much of it is hearsay from unreliable sources.  Kinsights exists to offer a better user experience that can be helpful to parents as they learn with the help of others who have been there before.  It is information and record keeping built upon a trustworthy online community that exists to help parents particularly in the times between periodic checkups.  Among other things, it is an online “Pediatric Personal Health Record Keeper” freeing parents from the responsibility of keeping track of slips of paper or lugging files and folders containing their children’s health information.  It also aids in an emergency, allowing you to send the necessary health records to the ER or out-of-town doctor quickly when needed. Read more »

With the seemingly limitless information and media available online for anyone to see, parents know how difficult it can be to find quality content online that is safe for children.  Along with all of the good content that is available, it can be quite a chore to wade through all of the mind-numbing games and inappropriate videos.  Happly is an app from Daily Interactive, a company that produces digital apps and content as well as interactive products for large tech companies, that seeks to provide a solution.  It is an app that focuses on developing more educational content for the iPad to help parents assuage some of their guilt over their kids’ ever-increasing screen time, but with some features that distinguish it from rivals. Read more »

Reinforcing good behavior in the classroom is one of the most effective ways to get students to perform well in school.  However, creating a workable system to promote and reward positive behavior can be difficult for many teachers.  Finding a way to keep track of students’ actions over time so they can earn positive reinforcement requires a significant amount of work when teachers already have a significant amount of responsibilities.  In addition, students may get confused difficulties if every teacher in the school uses a different system, decreasing the likelihood that students will keep any sort of rewards system in mind when thinking about their actions.  Cool person in technology Matthew Rubinstein wants to fix these problems with his app LiveSchool.  LiveSchool presents teachers with a unified system for rewarding their students with the help of mobile technology.  Using a mobile device such as an iPad, teachers can easily mark when their students do something positive to earn “points”.  Rubinstein’s app keeps long-term track of every student’s points.  Kids can then use these points to cash in for rewards and incentives customized by the teachers themselves.  Any teacher who has issues while trying to use the LiveSchool app may have a broken device needing tablet computer repair. Read more »

It’s easy to forget about what happens to old and unused computers.  Technology updates so quickly that people often don’t have time to figure out what to do with their old machines and will leave them in storage, collecting dust for years.  Needless to say, this is not the best use for older technology that often works perfectly fine or could work fine with just a little computer repair.  The Outlook Foundation is a nonprofit that wants to take those old computers and technology and use them for a better purpose.  The charity takes older technology and repurposes it in order to donate it to children in need who can benefit from having access to a computer and the Internet.  The foundation also aids veterans who return from overseas without a job by giving them computers that can help them find a place in civilian life once again.  By giving technology who those who can benefit the most from it, the Outlook Foundation has found a much more effective and altruistic use for the computers that people have replaced with newer tech. Read more »

Any parent that has ever volunteered to be a leader of any extra-curricular activity for their kids knows that trying to organize children from dozens of families is a harrowing venture.  Cool person in technology Yuval Spector wants to use the Internet to make this task far more manageable and less intimidating.  Mass emails with broken threads, missed phone calls and numerous other problems usually complicate things when trying to plan activities for large groups of children.  However, Spector’s company UpToUs provides parents with numerous organizational tools that can help group leaders keep things organized when working out details with so many other parents.  Spector wants to reduce the potential for chaos when parents are trying to coordinate activities by giving them a central organizational system. Read more »

The standard phonetic method of teaching children to read, where kids learn the associated sounds with each letter individually before applying that knowledge to “sound out” the words they read on the page, can be a tedious and slow process for many children.  The makers of cool product WriteReader believe there is a better way to help children who are struggling with the phonetic method to learn to read.  WriteReader is an iPad app that engages kids in reading by teaching them to write simultaneously, intertwining the two learning processes more fluidly.  The developers based the app on research specifically done to find ways to decrease the time it takes for children to learn to read.  Researchers found great benefit in students learning to read and write concurrently.  This led the developers of WriteReader to take advantage of mobile and touch technology and create a tablet application that would give kids access to an alternative learning method.  If you have kids and want to download the application but struggle using your tablet, you should know that iPad support is always available.  Read more »