6 Useful Tips for Your Devices

Our team of educators and parents spend their days managing devices, apps and kids. They have come across many of their own struggles and often field questions about apps and devices from the greater KinderTown community. This series of blog posts contains their answers to frequently asked questions, plus tips for maximizing time and limiting issues when dealing with apps and devices. (While these suggestions are for Apple devices, they may be useful with Android devices, too.)

Tips for Your Devices

Questions answered below:

• How can I make my battery last longer?
• How do I take a picture of my screen?
• What can I do to help my favorite developers?

How can I make my battery last longer?

Below are tips we perfected during Hurricane Sandy which devastated portions of the Northeastern and Mid Atlantic United States, as well as the Caribbean, leaving many without power in 2013. (fortunately, the KinderTown team made it through with minimal damage.)

Whether it’s an impending natural disaster, or just a long trip away from home, you can use these tips to make your iPad or iPhone battery last longer.

Adjust screen brightness – This is the biggest thing you can do to conserve battery. Go to Settings > Brightness to change. We recommend lowering it to about 30%. Make sure “Auto-Brightness” is turned to Off.

Turn off Wi-Fi – By design, most great children’s apps don’t require an internet connection. Turning off Wi-Fi not only saves your battery, it prevents your kids from accessing inappropriate content. Go to Settings > Wi-Fi and set Wi-Fi to Off.

Turn off cellular data – Do this with any iPhone or any iPad which you connect to the cellular networks. Go to Settings > Cellular and set Cellular Data to Off. This also prevents your little one from making unwanted phone calls.

Use the “Sleep” button – Your device is probably set to go to sleep (also called “Auto-Lock”) after a certain time interval, but it’s still a great habit to put it to sleep immediately when you’re done using it by pressing the “Sleep/Wake” button on the top. To change your Auto-Lock interval go to Settings > General > Auto-Lock

Turn off push mail – If you choose to stay connected to Wi-Fi or data networks, you can still preserve battery life by turning off push mail. Go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data and set Push to Off. The same logic applies to other apps with push data as well.

Read more about optimizing battery life on Apple’s website.

How do I take a picture of my screen?

Veterans of iDevices probably already know this one, but someone once told them how to do it, so now we’re paying it forward.

To take a picture of your screen and have it saved to “Photos,” press the home button and the Sleep/Wake button on top of your phone at same time. This is especially helpful when you look up directions, an address, a phone number etc. and you want to save it somewhere you can easily find it later.

What can I do to help my favorite developers?

Maybe this isn’t a frequently asked question, but we wish it was.

If you like an app or even if you like the developer and you don’t like the app, the easiest, most helpful thing you can do is leave a rating and a comment in the App Store. Even if your rating and comment are negative, they let developers know what users are thinking and how they might improve.