Key lessons that I learned while I was teaching technology to seniors. [2/3]
TL;DR: As usual, there is a summary of the whole article at the end!
![Key lessons that I learned while I was teaching technology to seniors. part [2/3] Course material — Sepideh Yazdi — by sepidy.com](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*bpoeT9cv7UN_BBXTuJWfsg.png)
We are in the second part of a three-part series about my experience in teaching the internet course to seniors. In the below diagram, you can see the road map of this series.
In the previous section, we discussed Important points while teaching seniors. If you haven’t seen that, I encourage you to read that first. If you don’t have time, you can find a summary of that article by the end of it.
In this part, we will dig deep into the course material that is appropriate to teach seniors.
2. Course material
In this section, I explained the materials that we taught in the classroom. We had to change and adjust the material as we went forward. I also explained the things that we learned and subjects that we found important for seniors. We also identified a couple of confusing topics and a couple of fun subjects. You can see the material that we taught below.
1. Explain all the basics.
The whole concept of the internet, browses, tabs, and URLs was a confusing subject for them. You can make examples to make it easier to understand. For the URL, we explained it as an address in blue format. For the browser, we explained it as the door to the internet. The tabs were a little trickier. We said that your browser is getting doubled. Although we explained these concepts a lot (pretty much in every session😅), I’m sure that I couldn’t pass that knowledge to them to the degree that I wanted.
2. Explain bookmarks.
Most seniors use the internet to do these things:
- Read the news.
- Checking town events.
- Play online games.
- Attending online video calls.
- Checking Facebook.
- Sending and receiving pictures from their family and friends.
Bookmarks can significantly help them find these things easier. Help them set up bookmarks for their most used pages.
3. Explain passwords.
All of them had frustrations with their password. Let’s face it; it even bothers us. But for them, it’s much more severe. Some of them don’t know the exact meaning of the username and password. They might confuse the application password with their device password. And almost all of them forget their password, and sometimes it’s impossible to retrieve because they forgot multiple passwords. They have different approaches to their passwords. Some of them write them in a notebook. Some have sticky notes on their devices. And none of them knows anything about password managers. So this is a key concept to teach. If they learn about that, they can automatically store their passwords, and it will be more accessible when they change devices.
4. Explain icons.
These Icons that we all know and believe are pretty clear were a big mystery for almost all of the seniors in the class. They always referred to them as symbols. And one of them told us how we suppose to know what’s the meaning of these signs and symbols.
This question hit me! I always thought icons were easy to understand. Seniors asked us to recommend a book with all those signs. I knew I couldn’t find one. Who writes a book about icons and their meaning? So I had to create a document for them myself. When I was preparing that document, I realized that many icons have the same appearance, but their meaning is different based on the context. It’s funny that we don’t pay attention to these details because we get used to them. Below you can see the document I created based on material design icons.
5. Explain autocorrect, autocomplete, and speech-to-text features.
Many seniors have handshakes, and typing is hard for them. Many of them aren’t used to keyboards. (Unless they have been typists before, we had a grandma who could type very fast with ten fingures😎) They don’t know about autocorrect, autocomplete features, and voice commands. If you teach these to them, they would be revealed that they don’t have to type everything character per character. Especially the voice commands for searching addresses in Google Maps or searching on the internet. They might forget that in the next session, but keep reminding them that they don’t have to type everything.
6. Teach Google Maps.
The session, we talked about Google Maps, was great. All of them find it very interesting and helpful. They were fascinated by the features and how easy it is to find an address and see the 360-degree location images on Google Street View. Below you can see some workbook pages for this session.
7. Teach about Email.
Email is one of the most useful tools for seniors, and it’s important for all of them to learn it. Some of them are familiar with it to some degree. Bus some have no idea about it. Cover these topics in Email sessions:
- How to write an Email and send it.
- How to attach something to an Email.
- How to reply to an Email.
- How to forward an Email.
Don’t mention other details. Just cover the basics and ask them to do it a couple of times. The process of creating the Email is challenging for them to do. Do it yourself, and just teach them briefly how to log in. Even the login is not that important because their device stored that info, and when they want to change their device, they probably forget what you taught them.
8. Short brief about streaming services.
Most seniors have free time, and it’s fun for them to learn how they can use online entertainment. So we decided to teach a short brief about different streaming services. Unfortunately, we didn’t have much time to cover all the parts. We just introduced a couple of stream services to them. Most of them knew about Youtube, but they didn’t know how the subscription works and what values are offered. Their main question was why we should get a message for premium activation all the time and whether it is worth the money.
We introduced services for movies and music. They wanted to know whether they could find old movies and old classic songs or not. When we explained they could, they were thrilled. We helped one of them find an old TV series online, and she was so happy about it. So if you want to make your grandparents happy, help them find their favorite old movies or songs! You can’t imagine how glad they will be when they see those things.
Summary
This is the end of the second part of this three-part series. Feel free to share it with any of your friends if you think it will be helpful. Comment below if you have any questions or suggestions for future articles.💭 You can follow and subscribe to my email list to get notified when the next helpful part is out. If you liked this article, please give it a clap.👏🏼
If you haven’t read the first part, you can find it here!
I’m waiting for you on the last part!
