Public Engagement
Tea & Tech
With funding from East End Community Foundation, Engage Here carried out 12 digital skills workshops, some of which have been covered in previous journal posts. These were held at Sundial Centre, Caxton Hall, Russia Lane Day Centre, Poplar Union, Republic Campus, Men’s Cabin and Plaistow Library. Each session included a creative activity, a practical activity and introductions to digital services relevant to older people – as well as answering specific questions participants might have about being online.
The creative applications we engaged with were all free and included: Google Canvas for drawing, Google Experiments for colouring-in, simulating pottery and drawing to prompts; Radioooo for listening to music around the world, Playlist for Life for building playlists on Spotify; Canva for text and image compositions which could be shared through social media; and Chat GPT for creative writing.
The practical activities were sometimes connected to the creative activities, but more generally showed participants the potential of improving their lives through the internet such as: setting up and sending an email; planning journeys and checking bus times with Google Maps; using social media such as Instagram and Facebook; comparing prices for shopping with Google Product and SkyScanner; and finding recipes using BBC food.
This project has given over 70 people access to laptops, that wouldn't ordinarily engage with technology. From the outset we looked to build older peoples confidence in technology through a sense of enjoyment in using it – which we believe leads to more participants wanting to carry out practical tasks online. With East End Community Foundation’s support we now permanently have our own devices that we can continue to run digital based workshops with the centres involved in this project, giving scope to develop the skills we have touched on. Further to that, this project has supported Sundial Centre in receiving six permanent laptops.
Each workshop also looked to improve wellbeing and prevent isolation of older people. This was tackled through the creative tasks, which in turn provided participants with output they could share with friends and family, through email or social media, depending on ability. We then anchored this digital connectivity to real life by showing participants how they could use the internet to venture beyond the locations we were interacting with them in, using websites that listed local activities and Google Maps to show them how to get there.
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Our guests are truly be getting so much from the laptops, we have even managed to create a whole set of pictures that we could print out and display on the wall.” Joycelyn
Carer of Sundial Centre
Though we anticipated helping more participants with tasks such as booking medical appointments, we believe we provided participants with skills that will help them be less dependent on healthcare services and more independent. Overall we found tremendous appetite from older people to engage with technology, and saw how showing the basic aspects of the internet fostered a willingness to explore the devices independently. One significant challenge is the physical impairments many older participants experience. Dexterity and visual difficulties can make the devices hard to use in a simple way. We deliberately bought devices which included touch screens and keypads to increase the number of ways participants could interact with the devices, but as we move forward with these workshops we will try to integrate devices with larger screens for increased accessibility further.
This project has been made possible by the East End Community Fund.
