Learn to do these 5 things and you will seen as a tech guru
Tuesday, October 24, 2017 at 06:21AM 
I only half-jokingly attribute my longevity as a technology director to my membership in a large, active service club (Kiwanis). This group met each Monday afternoon and consisted of influential people like city and county officials, school board members, college professors, and business leaders. And for many years, I was viewed as the technology guru of that organization since I could hook up about any laptop computer to our club's LCD projector. How could the school possibly fire anyone who was that tech savvy!
Here are 5 more skills you should master and you too can be considered a technology expert:
- Doing a GoogleSearch to solve a problem - but letting others assume you knew the solution all along.
- Getting a computer on the wireless network.
- Clearning a browser's cache to free memory.
- Doing a search for contents of a drive.
- Oh, and rebooting to solve about 95% of all technology problems.
As I admitted in my column "The Changing Role of the Technology Director" Educational Leadership, April 2013, my "tech skills" have changed:
Even though I couldn't install a router if my life depended on it, I can describe in plain English things like routers, packet shapers, firewalls, deployment servers, thin clients, Active Directory, DaaS, WAPs, and a whole host of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms)—what they are, what they do, why they are important, and what specs to think about when considering them.
But it is still kind of nice to be viewed as a hands-on tech whiz now and again.
What's the one magic trick you perform to cement your reputation as a techno-wizard?
Reader Comments (4)
In my previous life, I was always the person they called when a visiting presenter was trying to connect their MacBook to the network and/or meeting room projection system. IT's philosophy was "We don't support anything but Windows" but our building support guy knew that I used my own Mac and did this stuff all the time. It's one of those things I don't miss about the job. :)
Tim,
Good to be known as the person with the right dongles.
Doug
Although it might be hard to believe - Ctrl + A (Windows) to select all. The learning management system we use does not allow us to copy and paste HTML code into the submission fields (as all the text is actually wrapped in HTML) so I needed my students to copy their code, paste it into a Word document, and then submit that. It was difficult to see students try to click and drag their code and miss, then have to start again. Not sure if that makes me a wizard, but I have said the Lumos Solem spell quite often...
Hi Kenn,
Well, that takes me back. I remember how amazed teachers were when learning to use our Mac computers about Open Apple - A for select all. But what really got them was that you could "un-do" a action. I am sure many of us still wish we had that in our daily lives!
Thanks for the comment and keep being the guru!
Doug