I have been teaching people about technology and how to use it since I was very young. One of my earliest memories of this is from primary school, showing my teacher how to fix a problem on the class computer. I would hope for the computer to break or the user to have an issue so I could figure out how to fix it.

At home, my mother created games for my brother and I on an early computer. It had green writing on a black screen, no Start Menu and Word was on a floppy disk. When my brother got his first computer, I would sit and watch my mum use her computer downstairs to change the music playing on my brother's computer upstairs. It took him about a few times to figure out what was going on. I was fascinated by the concept of remote accessing another computer. I was reminded of it when I first started reading about Cloud Computing and how remote access had evolved.

As I grew up, my cousin showed me how to take apart a computer and the inner workings of it, my brother then taught me about all the different software and operating systems. He also taught me about phones, music players and the general electronics around the house. This brought me into the world of technology and once I was in, I was hooked. I started doing jobs for friends, family and teachers. Every week I had a new laptop or something brought home to de-bug, repair and sometimes even revive. I would then bring it back to its owner, and show them how to avoid the same situation next time. But teaching requires something more than that, something that my grandmother would show me.

At second level, I wasn't very good at a lot of my subjects. I found the concepts difficult to grasp. Two of them in particular were history and geography. When both of them together, it was a disaster for me. When it came to understanding who conquered who at a particular place and when, I completely lost track and often gave up. My grandmother was a teacher and one of her subjects was history. She loved it. She spent hours with me going over chapter after chapter. But, despite her efforts, I just couldn't understand it. So she changed tack. She started asking me questions about why I understood some things, but not others. She asked me to explain in my own words what we had just gone over. Through this method, we finally got to the bottom of the problem. I began to understand and lessons started to stick. She taught me that just because you can't learn something the way other people learn it, doesn't mean you can't find another way to learn it. So this is how I taught others. Don't force people to learn your way, find how they learn and take that route.

So I began teaching, mostly my family, mostly my enthusiastic grandfather, as a metaphorical guinea pig and after a while decided to make a go of it. I loved doing it and it seemed to suit me. Since then I have taught basics (how to use a mouse, keyboard, basic maintenance) to beginner students; fixed computers of novices geeks and taught them how to protect their computers in the future; I've set-up new programs, connections and additional pieces of technology for advanced home users and set up email and cloud computing solutions for sole traders and companies in Ireland, the UK, and Australia.

After five years, my first guinea-pig-come-student is still learning more and more. Granddad now Skypes us from his holidays, he downloads his favourite music and radio shows to put on his music player, and he is currently making a move from a standard phone to an iPhone. I hope to teach him and others like him who want to learn more and discover what technology can do for them.