BFTP: Do these 5 things to be seen as a tech guru
Thursday, December 17, 2020 at 09:15AM 
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 at noon and consisted of influential people like city and county officials, school board members, college professors, and business leaders. 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" 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 (2)
What's the one magic trick I perform to cement my reputation as a techno-wizard? Honestly, it's meeting with a teacher who is having a problem on their computer. I ask them to show me the issue. They try to, but it suddenly works just fine without me doing anything. I brush my hands together and walk away saying, I fixed it!"
Erik,
I have an auto mechanic with the same skill set!
Doug