While the annual back-to-school expedition filled my kids with excitement, I dreaded it. My own schooldays are a dim and distant memory but we didn’t have highlighters or tempting colored pens, nor did we have trendy or stylish backpacks. My schooldays were about paper and pencils and fountain pens! Fast forward twenty-five years and now I was expected to figure out different colored binders, folders and planners to help keep my kids organized. 
While I was focused on productivity and budget, my kids were worried about appearance and particulars. Why was it that the items they selected always seemed to be more expensive than the ones I thought would suffice? Why did we have to debate buying new supplies when there were supplies leftover from the last school year that I thought were good enough? Thanks to technology, however, our back-to-school expeditions have been getting easier. A couple of years ago my son was diagnosed with dysgraphia. The most visible symptom of this is illegible handwriting, but there is more to it than that. One of the accommodations for this is that he is able to use a laptop, with applications like Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium, during all his classes for note-taking, assignments and tests. The benefits are many:
- He’s able to organize his notes by unit within each subject and can easily continue notes where he left off from the last lesson
- He’s able to read his notes
- He’s able to better express his knowledge during tests and assignments
- His teachers are able to read his work
- He can draft his assignments and share them with me or his classmates for editing and review
- Missing but completed assignments are easy to find and resubmit
Initially he was self-conscious that he was using a laptop and his classmates weren’t. Now it doesn’t bother him. I think that’s because he knows the technology has enabled him to succeed and that has given him more self-confidence. It could also be his classmates are envious: according to Microsoft’s recent education and technology survey students think that a desktop, laptop or tablet is a must-have for back-to-school and 81% of parents think that it is important for their child to have a laptop to be successful. For me, the technology has been a huge relief – no more therapy sessions or extra tutorials to improve his handwriting and finally academic results that reflected his ability. I’m not alone in my love of computer software like Microsoft Office 365 – Microsoft’s survey found that 93 percent of parents feel it is an important tool in helping their child achieve success in school. More than that, almost all parents and teens agree that software and online tools are critical for both academic (87 percent and 93 percent respectively) and professional (91 percent and 94 percent) success. There is no doubt in my mind that had my son grown up during my generation he would have been at high risk for dropping out of school, destined to a lifetime of minimum wage jobs. This year he’ll be a high-school senior and his focus now is on applying to college, taking him one step closer to his dream of being a video-game designer.