To celebrate silver surfers day, five pupils from Camborne Science and Community College gave a high-tech computer lesson to older residents at Coastline’s Veor House in Camborne.
The students started off by giving residents a presentation on the skills they would be learning, which included searching for things via Google, and watching video clips on You Tube. Residents then got the chance to have a play on some laptops to try their hand at surfing the web under the guidance of their young mentors.
Jacquie McQuaid, Supported Housing Officer with Coastline Housing, explained: “When we found out silver surfers day was coming up, we wanted to make sure our residents got involved, so we contacted Chris Jenkin, Director of Learning ICT/Business, at the school, who enthusiastically lent his support and arranged for the students to come along and help out.
“The group had a great time learning new skills and one lady was particularly thrilled to find her son’s house in New Zealand on Google Earth!”
Both generations found that they had something else in common too. They very much enjoyed tucking into a pasty lunch together before the afternoon IT session kicked off!
Meanwhile, over at another sheltered housing scheme in Helston, Hens-Horn Court, a resident computer-whizz Alan Healey worked with Supported Housing Officer Jonathan Warner to take residents on a trip around the ‘world’ without leaving the comfort of their arm chairs.
Alan demonstrated some practical uses for computers and had put together an interactive trip around parts of the globe, using the internet. This session resulted in eight older residents signing up for IT training sessions to become fully fledged silver surfers themselves.
Silver surfers day is the biggest, national campaign to promote use of digital technologies by older people. It is run by Digital Unite and was started in 2002.
On silver surfers day people and organisations all over the UK are encouraged to open their doors and give local older people a taste of what the digital world has to offer them at a silver surfers event.
Coastline is currently working on a number of projects to help more of its customers get online and bridge the ‘digital divide’. As well as donating a number of PCs to local residents associations, the company has also secured £20K of Social Enterprise Investment Funding to employ a consultant to scope out the barriers that are stopping tenants from getting online and to start pulling together a business plan for a social enterprise that could combat this issue.