Bits & Bytes for Fall 2023

BUTLER-BREMER COMMUNICATIONS • 319 . 276 . 4458 • but l er-bremer. com 7 Homework Tips for the New School Year Here’s a refresher course in homework basics to share with the young students in your family: 1. Use a quiet room with an uncluttered desk and a supportive desk chair. 2. Sit up straight in the chair to get your blood flowing evenly and help prevent drowsiness. 3. Start by writing a to-do list of your homework, ordering your tasks from hardest to easiest. 4. Do the hardest tasks first. 5. Stay off social media, or anything else that will distract you. 6. Speak aloud as you do your homework. This works to maintain focus and reinforce concepts. It can be especially helpful when doing math problems. 7. When you can’t seem to finish an assignment no matter what you try, stop and switch to another task for awhile. This can help clear your head. After you’re feeling more positive, take a fresh look at that challenging assignment. Good luck to all students, parents, and teachers during this upcoming school year! Internet access—in dial-up form—was first sold to consumers in 1995, and virtually nothing about daily life has been the same since. Just for fun, we’re taking a trip down memory lane to look back at the way things used to be. When you mentioned Amazon, people would think of the river in South America. These days, Amazon first brings to mind the enormous e-commerce company. Families had sets of encyclopedias for research purposes. Before the internet and Google arrived, you had to look up topics in the encyclopedia to learn about them. More thorough research would require a trip to the local library. Messages for everyone to see were posted on a real wall. The predecessors to social media posts were printed flyers attached to walls or bulletin boards and messages scrawled on the whiteboards hung on dorm room doors. Trolls were mythical creatures or dolls with big hair. Don’t you long for the time when the term “troll” simply meant a creature from folklore or a strange little doll whose hair was taller than it was? Today internet trolls hide behind the relative anonymity of some platforms to spew mean messages. People used paper maps for navigation. These maps were your only option, other than stopping for directions at a gas station, to figure out how to get where you wanted to go. Plus, you had to figure out how to fold them back up again when you were done! Personal letters were sent often. There was no email yet and long distance calls were expensive, so letters via “snail mail” were how people kept in touch with out-oftown family and friends. Although the pace was slow, writing and receiving letters was a treasured activity. Now that we’ve looked back at the pre-internet years, let’s look forward to what your household’s internet needs will be down the road. Call us at 319.276.4458 if your internet use is growing and you want to discuss a speed upgrade. Remember What Life Was Like Before the Internet?

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