For a decade now, my mother has been a home economics teacher at my old high school in New Jersey. Because I’m biased – as all good sons should be – I’m firmly convinced that she’s the best home ec teacher in the world. She’s a very naturally sweet, intelligent and personable person that genuinely enjoys her job and loves to teach, and is an excellent and versatile cook. I never had the opportunity to have her class, but I’m sure that the kids go in there as novices and come out as either this or this.
Unfortunately, as good as she is in the classroom, she’s almost completely computer illiterate. Bless her heart, she tries her best – incredibly enough, she managed to get her masters in something called “Educational Technology” just through sheer hard work – but computers are completely foreign to her. Give her a pantry full of ingredients and an oven and she’s a MacGyver in the kitchen; give her a computer and she’s hopelessly lost.
It wasn’t such a bad thing when she first started out in the teaching world, when grades were written down in leather-bound journals, presentations were given on overhead projectors and directions were passed out in class. In the modern would, though, where grades are recorded in an online database, presentations are given on PowerPoint, and recipes and homework are e-mailed directly to students … she has to at least know the basics.
She muddles through well enough, but – understandably – my mother gets a little paranoid when it comes to backing up her files. She’s got acres and acres of stuff she downloads – recipes, pictures, lesson plans, success stories, hilarious disasters, clips of old cooking shows, each one of them corresponding to a different day in the classroom. If she lost these, she told me once, the year would go straight down the drain.
Now, she backs up all her files on ElephantDrive, so she’s got some peace of mind before she heads off to the classroom every morning. If you ever have any questions about the ease of use for the service, relax and trust me: if my mom can figure out how to upload her stuff using the ElephantDrive service, you will be able too. She does it with no problems whatsoever. It’s a good thing she has figured it out, too because since her stuff has been uploaded to ElephantDrive she’s managed to lose two thumb drives with a month’s worth of different materials and accidentally deleted all the materials for her January lesson plans (she’s a bit of a klutz, too).
Luckily, they were safe and sound online in the cloud, so she could log in and retrieve her lesson materials with nary a hiccup. She could go right on ahead and start cooking delicious meals for her students – all while I’m having Cheerios for dinner. Yeah, I’m a little jealous.
