TechBoomers Update 2017: What We've Been Up To

Greetings TechBoomers users and partners!

It’s certainly been a while since you’ve heard from us. You might be thinking we’ve taken a break from working on the website, or at least slowed down on things, but nothing could be further from the truth! We’ve been working on many exciting things that we can’t wait to share with you, so read on to learn exactly what we’ve been up to!

Where we’ve come from, and what we have accomplished

It’s been just over two years since the website launched in January 2015 (wow, time sure does fly!). Our goal when we launched TechBoomers.com was to create as many up-to-date courses as we could to teach those who are new to the Internet how to use popular websites and apps, in a language they could understand. Well, we’re proud to say that by the end of 2016, we feel like we accomplished that first major goal. We currently offer over 100 free courses composed of 1100 video and article tutorials!

Early on, we realized how useful our free courses could be for digital literacy instructors, so we expanded our mission to help technology trainers around the world. We did so by making our free courses available for use, in any way they needed for their classes and programs. Organizations of all sizes have found our educational content to be a great asset to build their programs around, as it saves them the time and effort of preparing training materials for websites that are constantly changing. Our Partnership Manager, Ryan, has been working tirelessly to help spread the word and let instructors know about the resources we have available to them.

Already, more than 70 libraries across Canada and the U.S. are featuring TechBoomers as a digital literacy resource! TechBoomers can also be a valuable tool to encourage students to continue learning at home on their own time. If you want to see this in action, check out our recent blog post co-written with one of our library partners who decided to run TechBoomers Together tech training classes.

What we’ve been up to these last few months

It’s always been our mission to maintain the largest collection of high quality tutorials, and keeping them up-to-date has been a challenge at times. Fortunately, we hired two new awesome content creators to join Corbin and the rest of the TechBoomers team in mid-2016: Jessica and Kayleigh! After completing a continuous flow of courses until the end of December, we decided to focus the content team’s efforts on updating the massive collection of tutorials, which is why we haven’t been emailing you about our new weekly courses. We’ve updated all of our most popular courses, and are slowly working our way through the remaining tutorials. We’ve also added over 70 brand new videos to our YouTube channel, including accompaniments to our most popular tutorials.

You also may have noticed that we recently added a TechBoomers blog. We’ll be posting all kinds of new articles in it that don’t fit into our standard course structure. These will include useful website and app tips, long detailed guides, fun listicles, and much more! If you have any ideas for blog post topics, please comment anywhere on the site, or feel free to contact us directly. We’ve also been very active on social media – thanks to our Social Media Manager, Kris – and would love your feedback across all of our channels!

The future of TechBoomers

We’re also extremely excited to announce that we’ve started work on re-launching the website with a more intuitive and user-friendly design. Our Founder and CEO, Steve, has been working endlessly to try to create the perfect website for our users. Here are some highlights of the website that will be ready in 3-4 months:

New courses that focus on how to use operating systems, mobile phones, and other devices.
New menus that help you find exactly what you want – much faster.
An updated home page that features our newest content, so you don’t miss a thing.
More advanced courses on websites and apps we’ve already written about, including courses on how to sell on eBay, and how to rent your property on Airbnb.
Other types of fun and useful content like Listicles, Best of the Web, Online Guides, and much more!

Many of the ideas and suggestions from our users and partners have contributed to the upcoming website redesign and added features, so thank you for your feedback. We hope you’ll love the new-look of TechBoomers as much as we do!

As we work on the new website design, we’ll be posting at least three times a week on our blog, and releasing at least one new video each week on our YouTube channel. We’ll also be starting up our weekly partner newsletter and user newsletters again. These will highlight our favourite blog posts and video(s) from the previous week.

For more information on how you can partner with TechBoomers and support our organization, check out the following pages:

Lastly, from the bottom of our hearts, thank you so much for all of the support you have given us. We wouldn’t be where we are today without you.

Sincerely,
The TechBoomers Team!