Home educating on a modest income demands that resources are often allocated with a lot of thought towards the making-do. Sometimes that means opting for reconfiguring what you’ve got rather than the thrill of buying new. Couple that with a home educating red flag like screen time and, ugh, here comes another sensible financial decision to make.
Recently, the children’s Nana offered to buy them both computers. Mainstream schooling at home has, over the Covid year, been decrying the level of PC power households need to attend a live streaming class. Nana has gotten wind of this from my nephew who has been schooling at home in the US.
Whilst DW and I are certainly no luddites – we both use ageing iMacs for a great many things, including my WFH workload – it is unnecessary for 8 and 5 years old children to have top of the line computers. The limited screen time they have at their age, means that the kids won’t be using them to their capacity.
IT in home education
Nana would have preferred the ‘tad-dah!’ moment of unwrapping brand-new boxes of IT. So, rather than two new computers, we suggested a new plan:
- refurbish the two iMacs already in the house and hand them down to the children
- use some of the gift to create a new Nana-donated IT ‘wing’ in the kitchen
- reserve the rest of the gift for SaaS subscriptions or software and peripherals
The IT wing included installation of a shelf desk and buying decent chairs for both kids. In this way, this gift stays as relevant as possible for as long as possible.
Our local tech guy refurbished the iMacs. Although he says the machines won’t take another upgrade, he does think they’ll last another 5 years if we’re lucky. One iMac now sits in the kitchen – in our new IT ‘wing’ – along with an old Apple Pro keyboard from 2005 and a mouse the techie threw in for free.
But a s/low-tech workaround is all those children need at this stage as they get to grips with this new resource.