Our 8-week digital inclusion project at Daisyfield Grange Retirement Home has come to an end. Funded by Places for People, our sessions offered digital support to residents and loaning our tablet devices. The residents at Daisyfield had no experience with devices other than their phones, however, we welcomed this challenge! We were able to help the most vulnerable groups that are digitally isolated.
In June 2021 our incredible placement student Kyra kicked off the project with the help of our student volunteers!
Seeing the success of our Digital Cafe style group sessions at Bramley Elderly Action, we mirrored this style at Daisyfield. We found delivering digital support in a group setting allowed members to help, encourage and learn from each other. Working in the Common Room at Daisyfield allowed passersby to also come in to learn about the work we were doing and join in!
In addition to our digital support, we also loaned out 6, 4G-enabled tablets to older adults. The larger screen and more amenities on the tablets allowed participants to further explore and develop their digital skills both in our sessions and at home.
Throughout our sessions, we help residents learn to use their tablets, send emails, download apps, online shop and checkout safely, use FaceTime and Zoom, online bank, attach documents to emails, stream live TV, films and shows and much more! Our regular ladies, aged 68-82 are now completely digital!
After seeing this success, Places for People then funded the purchase of tablets for the participant to keep permanently. This involved a switch from Android to Apple. We were able to support our participants through this change, changing sims, setting the iPads and Apple IDs and generally getting them used to the new Apple system.
This project has gone to show that although you are an older adult in a retirement home, some of whom have little to no immediate family, it doesn’t mean you have to be disconnected from people and socialization as well as what is going on in the outside world. With the funding from Places for People, we were able to make this project completely free and accessible. We have also been able to help older adults who are perhaps slightly more reclusive and who hadn’t otherwise had experience online and with technology. This activity has allowed us to strengthen connections in the community with not only the older adults but with organisations such as Daisyfirled Grange, 100% Digital and Places for People.
Although we loved this project and found it to be successful, here are some challenges we faced when providing a digitally inclusive service for older adults.
- We found a huge importance of patience for our digital workers and volunteers when helping older adults, especially when setting up tablets needing email/password information. Therefore we made each session, everyone had a notepad and pen with them to write down anything important they needed to remember like passwords etc.
- We found many older adults were slightly set in their ways and reluctant to try out the tablets, opting to use their mobile phones, on which they were more confident on. However, we found the social setting of sessions and having everyone on the same type of device, encouraged residents to support and encourage each other.
- Over the weeks we had our ups and downs where some sessions went better than others and felt like great progress was made and others were slower.
- We found participants would feel very confident on something we taught at the end of a session, but upon returning the next week would have completely forgotten the steps and therefore not practised. So we decided to create lesson plans, summaries and printouts of instructions per activity in our lessons. We also had a cheat sheet with symbols and meanings for their tablets. These resources allowed participants to practice at home, remember lessons and have something to refer back to when struggling.
However, we found there to be other, unpredicted positive outcomes to this project. In addition to offering digital support to residents, we were also able to share with them information about the other activities we run such as our walking football. Marge, one of our now digital champions, has become a member of our walking football team who meet every Friday morning! We were also able to get residents onto our Get Active and Online fitness classes which we offer live on Zoom. From their enjoyment of these classes, we have now started to offer Daisyfield residents a cardio aerobic class in person at their residence. We are so happy we were able to merge our goals of both promoting digital inclusion and encouraging activity and fitness for older adults in this project!
Having ended our weekly sessions as Daisyfield, we will be continuing monthly drop-ins, providing more informal, one on one support to answer any specific questions for residents!
Overall, we’ve loved working at Daisyfield and are excited to continue our support on a less frequent basis and take what we’ve learned to our new Digital cafes at Holt Park Active and OWLS!
