Top 3 Back To School Tech Tips – From an ex University IT Guy
It’s that time of the year again when schools are reopening, universities are slowly starting up again and students are getting ready to learn.
For many, this means sorting out new timetables, organising fresh notebooks, and making the most of the last few weeks of summer. But in today’s digital age, it also means ensuring your tech is up to scratch for the new academic year.
Whether you’re a fresher stepping onto campus for the first time or returning for another year of school, having the right tech setup can make a world of difference.
As an ex-university IT guy, I’ve seen it all—forgotten passwords, lost coursework, viruses, you name it.
With that in mind, here are my top three tech tips to help you start the academic year…
1. Get a Windows Laptop
This may surprise you, but unless you are studying a course where you need to use a Mac, I recommend investing in a decent Windows laptop.
There are a few reasons for that recommendation, but my main reason is that you will likely be using Windows to do class work on and for writing assignments. On top of that, If you are studying a technical course, your teacher may not be familiar with macOS and may not be able to help you.
The second reason is that your school or university may provide you with specialist software that is only compatible with Windows. This happened a lot when I was a university student. We had access to a professional software gallery, but the majority of the software was either only licensed to work with Windows or it was only compatible with Windows.
The third and final reason for me recommending a laptop is the price. If the laptop breaks, it’s much cheaper to replace a Windows laptop than a MacBook. You may think that it will never happen to you, but trust me it happened and it happened a lot.
From spilt drinks, to dropped laptops and hardware failure, it happens more often than you think.
2. Make the Most out of OneDrive
Your school or university will likely provide you with a Microsoft 365 subscription, which will provide you with access to software such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, and the rest of the office suite.
One notable tool you should be making use off is OneDrive, which is a cloud storage solution built in to the Microsoft 365 suite.
I highly recommend storing all your work in OneDrive, that way if your computer does break, at least you have a copy of your work that you can resume working on from a different device.
Furthermore, if you use apps like Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint and Microsoft Excel, when you save your work to OneDrive, you can have your work saved automatically. This will prevent you from forgetting to save your work.
I don’t know what it was, but students would often forget to save their work and in numerous instances, the versions we managed to recover were older versions of those documents.
3. Backup, Backup, Backup!
OneDrive is a great place to save your work, and it’s less likely to go missing there, but it can still happen, work can get corrupt or, in some cases, permanently deleted. That is why it is important to back up regularly.
Back in my student days, I invested in a basic portable hard drive which from memory cost around £40 and had 500 GB of storage. I also had a USB Flash drive which from memory had 32 GB of storage.
My backup strategy was simple, I primarily stored everything in OneDrive and at the end of the day, I backed everything up to the USB Flash drive. At the end of the week, I would back up everything from the flash drive to the portable hard drive.
This strategy may sound like an overkill, but it prevented me from losing my work on several occasions, like when the hard drive failed on my laptop or when my work became corrupt.
If you want to be even more secure, I recommend backing up the contents of your portable hard drive to a different cloud location. I remember receiving KnowHow Cloud (Not sponsored by them, nor am I advertising for them) for a decent deal with a laptop purchase. It provided me with 4 TB of online backup storage. I remember using that heavily throughout my time at university. But I primarily used it to back up my portable hard drive.
Final Thoughts
There are many tips I can give you based on my experience of working in IT at a university, but these are my top 3 tips that have helped me and many students in the past.
So if you are returning to school or university or are starting secondary school or university for the first time, these tips will serve you well!
What are your school or university tech tips? Let us now in the comments!