tips and tricks

During the dry spell of summer, when our favorite TV shows were in their off season, my 10-year-old daughter and I got hooked on a fun Korean high-school drama series. But while we watched I noticed something I didn't expect: her reading…

My youngest child loves watching movies on our family iPad, but if your kids are like her, they can't help tapping and touching the screen which then requires you to rewind, fast forward, or turn it back on 400 times. So when I found out…

I'm packing up my family of six up for our exciting vacation to Hawaii (squee!), and like most parents, I'm making my tech list and checking it twice. Do we really need to bring a laptop (the answer here is NO!)? Inspired by Brian Chen's…

We're counting down the days to the total solar eclipse that we'll be experiencing on Monday, August 21. In case you haven't heard about it (what?), or might have missed all the helpful information we've been posting here on Cool Mom Tec…

When Snapchat (or just Snap , as it's being called these days) rolled out it's Snap Map feature earlier this summer, there was a lot of buzz about the safety risks it could present, especially with so many younger users. Basically, the S…

For ages now I've touted the wonderful benefits of Boomerang for Gmail to help me better manage my incoming and outgoing email, and it seems the folks at Google like the feature themselves. Because now Gmail has actually incorporated Boo…

You've probably seen the stories about how kids have pranked their parents using the Text Replacement feature on the iPhone. You know, they set it so that when their parents text the word "No," it gets replaced with the word "Yes." Oh ki…

If you're like me, then you've probably thought that force quitting apps on your iPhone or iPad (by tapping the home button twice and swiping up) would make your phone run faster and save your battery. Well, turns out that tip -- which I…

My kids love writing and they love doing art, but sometimes they don't know what to do with that blank sheet of paper or the empty Procreate screen . (That's my manga-obsessed daughter's digital illustration iPad app of choice, by the wa…

This past week, I was unable to pick up my son from hockey camp, which meant missing his big game. Womp, womp. But, thanks to a cool Facebook Live feature you might not know about, my fiancé was able to film the whole thing, and not have…

If you're like me, you probably have 6,782 photos sitting in your camera roll on your phone, hundreds of song downloads you never actually listen to, and tons of out-of-date unnecessary documents on your laptop. If that sounds familiar, …

If you're like me, then you do your best to manage screen time using myriad methods. In our house, I've done The Marble Jar to read for screens, and pretty much everything in between. And still, there are tantrums and arguments when it's…

I've been seeing a lot of research lately that seems to find a correlation between how much time we spend on our phones and our kids' behavior . Specifically, their bad behavior. The constant distraction of pings and alerts from my phone…

While it was announced on May 30, a lot of parents still don't know that the FTC announced refunds are now available for unauthorized in-app purchases on the Amazon Appstore . That means you, kids, and your itchy little in-app purchase-h…

I'm grateful to my daughter who (much to the chagrin of tweens and teens everywhere, I'm sure) tipped me off to a trick I wasn't aware of: Kids can easily download new apps to their devices without your knowledge, if you have Apple Famil…

We've probably all had photos we've shared on social media that we would very happily forget, like say my lovely "before" shot I took when I was starting a workout regimen a few months after having a baby that now pops up every single ti…

If you missed the boat on photo gifts for Father's Day or Mother's Day ...no, wait! You didn't! We all live in the land of the smartphone cam, after all, and if you've got a camera -- especially that dandy iPhone 7S -- and a place to pri…

When it comes to smart phone addiction , we've done our own experiments with putting away our phones around our kids here at Cool Mom Tech. We've even used various techniques to manage screen time for our own kids and tweens. That's why …

Wait, what? You're not listening to our Spawned podcast ? Well, we're just going to have to help you change that! We think it's a wonderful way to spend 30 minutes in your week, and we hope after listening that you think so too. If you'r…

When we saw the reports coming out of Manchester last night, we were completely devastated. And, we found ourselves thinking about what we would have done if our children (some of whom are tweens, and Ariana Grandé fans, by the way) had …

I'm still making good use out of my trusty, late 2013 MacBook Pro, but what I'm not making good use out of is the original power adapter and cord. It frayed (as with so many Apple cords over the years, sigh) and I immediately replaced it…

As someone who's not on Snapchat (what? I'm old!) I admit I'm excited about the novelty of the new Instagram 3D facial filters, as anyone who follows our @CoolMomPicks Instagram Stories can tell today. I put together the quick, Cliff's N…

Just yesterday I was chatting with a couple of my mom friends at my daughter's track club about podcasts and I was surprised to discover that neither of them knew that they could easily access podcasts right on their iPhone. "Wait, they'…

We're not huge fans of sending emails on the fly, even with the "Sent from our iPhone and talk-to-text hates us" warning at the bottom. But if we do, there are 3 handy iPhone email tricks we use to make them look as buttoned up as they w…