Call in the Technician

Time Machine Screen Shot
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Last Friday night I called in the experts. Before heading off to San Francisco I bought myself a 500GB wireless Time Capsule that took 72 hours to do the back-up. Hardly lightning speed! And it only backed up once after that. Even after a two hour call to a help desk in Australia!

I relented and called in Pete the Geek whose fingers flew like a concert pianist across my keyboard and now I have a heap of back-ups at good speed and I can now print wirelessly to my printer. I now just find myself clicking on the Time Capsule just to see the magic of the interface. Awesome.I don’t even pretend to be technically minded but I do know when the task is beyond me and when I should call in technical help.

It’s a pity more primary schools don’t do the same. On my travels I see teachers trying to be all things to all people and being called on to spend hours setting up and cloning laptops, delving into the school’s server, making printers print, fixing problems. Teachers should be teachers. This technical work is sapping their energy for their day job. A technician can do those jobs in lightning speed and save a heap of time for the teacher whose passion and energy is being drained away trying to fix technical issues that they don’t have the time, expertise or resources to fix. It’s a false economy to have a teacher spending days cloning laptops instead of preparing for teaching.