TDL have been doing our bit to help families home schooling during the COVID lockdown. Oliver explains why we have donated a few of our older laptops to help children with their remote working.
The team (and our clients) haven’t heard much from me during the pandemic and resulting lockdowns, as I’ve been ‘head down’ homeschooling a 5 year old and daddy-daycaring a 3 year old. It’s been a fascinating and eye-opening period of my life and I’ve been lucky enough to dedicate time to educating my children, facilitated by my wife working full time and the TDL team doing an amazing job of running the show at TDL.
I soon realised how important the technology was in homeschool, even at primary level. The school were using a platform called ‘Seesaw’ to send work out, receive it back, and to interact with the children. It’s really only handwriting that is helped by a hardcopy printout, while everything else can be typed, photographed, filmed, dictated or drawn on screen.
Being a designer I’m lucky enough to have all the most useful digital tools to ensure my child can make the most of the work sent out; a desktop computer for a larger image, an iPad for interacting with, a stylus for writing clearly on the iPad (so he gets used to holding a pen), and a good old printer! But I’m one of the lucky ones. Chatting to other parents, it soon became apparent the struggles families were having during homeschool, especially if there were multiple children of different ages. Laptops (if they had them) had to be shared, or the eldest had a laptop for whole day Zoom lessons while the youngest got a smartphone if they were lucky. It’s been tough for many families and schools, but the real losers might be the children down the line.
For these reasons TDL have decided to donate three of our older MacBook Pros to my children’s school via the Herefordshire ‘Laptops 2 Kids’ initiative; after we had done a secure factory reset, Laptop 2 Kids provided another level of added deletion too. It’s a drop in the ocean but it gets some of our older kit off our shelves (in an empty office!) into the hands of some people that really need it, not just during the current lockdown but for whatever the future is going to throw at our younger generations.
Many businesses are heavy users of computer tech that is constantly being updated, so why not see if there is a similar initiative in your local area, or chat to your local schools directly. I’m certain the teachers, parents and children will be very appreciative of your good deeds!
