Teens help unravel the mysteries of smartphones
BETWEEN the apps, mail, messages, wifi, bluetooth, settings, maps, GPS and God knows what else it’s no wonder that people might feel they’d need to go away and get educated to be as smart as their smartphones.
Failing that there’s the option of handing the damn thing over to the nearest available teenager, but not everybody is willing to endure the indignity.
It’s a dilemma for sure and one that Pobalscoil Chorca Dhuibhne students Eddie Sheehy and Armand Muftaliev have set out to solve with the publication of their guide to using smartphones. Entitled ‘How To Be As Smart as Your Smartphone’, the booklet provides simple, step-by-step instructions to help people make more use of the phones they carry around in their pockets.
The inspiration for the booklet came from the two lads’ participation in a Fís programme in the Pobalscoil in which students gave technology classes to their elders. In their role as teachers, Eddie and Armand soon realised that a lot of people in the greying generation know very little about using the features and facilities in their smartphones.
“A lot of people were surprised at what their phones could do. They knew nothing about how to access the App Store and, for example, we had to devote an entire class to teaching people how to download the RTE Player,” said Eddie.
Teaching the classes was an eye-opening experience that Armand and Eddie were able to draw on last September when they decided to produce a smartphone instruction booklet for their Transition Year mini business project.
The booklet, in which Eddie writes about Apple phones while Armand deals with the Android (Google) version, gives simple, clear instruction on transferring data between phones, connecting to the internet, downloading apps and even the often insurmountable challenge of creating an ‘Apple ID’.
The pair wrote and designed the booklet themselves and, doing most of the work at school, they had most of it completed by Christmas. It’s due back from the printers in Dublin this week and will be available at the end of this week in the Dingle Bookshop on Green Street, the Education Centre at the Canon’s Corner and Wavelength Hairdressers in Orchard Lane. The booklet costs €12 and with only a limited number of copies available it’s likely to sell out quickly.