 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host Krista Burns here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. We are a webinar, we are a webcast, we're an online show, call us what you want, the terminology is up for debate apparently. Whatever we are we are here live online every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. But if you are unable to join us on Wednesday mornings that's fine. We do always record the show each week so you can always come back and watch it as you are this is convenient to you. We have our all of our recordings for all our shows going back to very beginning in on our website which I'll show you at the end of today's session so you can see how to get to them and see today's show or anything else we have posted. We do a mixture of things here, presentations, book reviews, many training sessions, interviews, basically anything if it's related to libraries we are happy to put it on the show. We also have we have the Nebraska Library Commission staff do presentations sometimes but we sometimes also bring in guest speakers and that's what we've done this morning. On the line with us is Steve Black from at TechBoomers.com and you are in Eastern time zone correct Steve? Yes. You get hit with any of the snow that we've been having? Not so much lately it's actually pretty warm here it's you know like 12th degrees Celsius. Nice I have no idea what that is in Fahrenheit nice well that's good for you yes we're all able to make it today we had a big storm here last yesterday I was not in but made it in today so we are all good so yeah so Steve is the as I said founder and CEO of TechBoomers.com new website relatively new what year two year yeah with has a lot of great training for both you your staff so he's gonna tell us all about their website and some other resources you can find out there so I'm just gonna hand over to you Steve to take it away. Okay great thanks thanks Chris I really appreciate the opportunity it's been exciting for us over the last year since we launched we've been lucky enough to connect with so many people and organizations that are passionate about digital literacy and digital inclusion and you know we've learned so much along the way and this is a great opportunity for us to share some of what we've learned including how TechBoomers can be integrated in your digital literacy programs other great resources we found along the way and just general tips that we've learned from people that have been teaching digital literacy a lot longer than we have. This is my I think fourth library focused webinar I've reused there might be some usually there's some people that I've seen the names I've seen in past webinars but don't worry I've reviewed some of the content from past presentations but I've really tried to expand and broaden the topics covered beyond just what is Tech Boomers and how to use it so I think I have probably an extra 15 slides or something like that so I'll try to get through them relatively quickly. As Chris to mention we're gonna have links pointing up I'm gonna be referring to a lot of websites and pages on TechBoomers and elsewhere but we'll have links at the end and this slide deck will also be available I think on the NLC website and on slideshow I'll show you a link at the end of the presentation. I ideally really like this presentation to be as interactive as possible so feel free to post questions in the comments section I'll keep an eye on that and maybe if I don't see that if I get wrapped up in what I'm saying Chris that can point out any questions but I'll do my best to answer as many questions as they come up as possible. To get things started I'm curious. I'm willing to I'll interrupt as necessary don't worry. I like asking at the beginning I'm curious I see we have 31 attendees right now which is great but I'm curious to know where everybody is from and what their roles might be at the at their respective libraries I just wouldn't mind learning about that. Obviously I'd imagine there's a number of people from Nebraska here but yeah if you don't mind posting the chat I'd love to. Yeah go ahead and type in the question section anybody if you want to just say where you're from and what you're what you are at what you do there. Oh I type in the question. No they will they they will yeah yeah you won't be able to see these coming in but I'm got a head of adult services in Freeport Illinois Public Library deputy director in Phoenix, Arizona library director Atlanta Atlantic Public Library in Iowa, Jesper County, Gearing, Nebraska, yep, Floresville, Texas Library director, Tech Coordinator director, Assistant Librarian of the Focus and Technology and Technology Training in Hollis, New Hampshire, Wisconsin Small Rural Library director. Oh cool. Oh yeah, Omaha, Nebraska, Little Falls, New Jersey, Digital Services and Serial Specialists. Sorry for anyone if I'm not catching yours or going by kind of fast and grabbing the ones again. Oh somebody from snowy northern Nebraska is a library director and snow shoveler yes we did get dumped on as I said last day or so. Campus librarian in a technical college in Omaha so yeah we're all over the place. Great okay so I won't be able to see the chat so you'll just pop up with any questions. Okay that sounds good that works too. Cool. Okay so hopping into the presentation this is a new slide that some people mentioned that they'd like to know a little bit more about my background. So yeah a quick bit about my history and past experiences and kind of skill set. I started off often post-secondary education as a software engineering student. I took a quite a diversion of a career path after that. In third year I actually left school to play professional poker. It's one of my more unique bits of my history. I did that full-time for a couple years. I wasn't super happy. I didn't really want to become a computer program the rest of my life although I did like aspects of software engineering I found it interesting but yeah I did that for a couple years traveled around quite a bit and then got bored of it and went back to school and then ended up starting a company in 2007 that built a social network for poker players called Pokerspace.com. That was my first real entrepreneurial experience. Learned to learn quite a bit with that. Ran that company for about four and a half years. Started to wanted to move on to something else. I was always looking for at least in the later years of Pokerspace something more a little more purposeful in the entrepreneur opportunity I was seeking. Most of my business ideas at the time revolved around publishing free content online. Obviously tech boomers falls under that category. It was kind of the main idea that I had. So I got into search engine optimization consulting in 2013 which for those of you who aren't familiar that's basically driving optimizing websites and adding articles and content to websites to get traffic from search engines like Google. That was a great experience. I'm still doing that on a side to actually pay the tech boomers bills as we're starting to add some advertising to drive revenue to pay the bills. But yeah in 2015 my team and I launched TechBoomers.com. We started working on that. I started working on that about six seven months prior and a little personal bit tidbit. Our entire team works from home and that's mostly so I can hang up my dog and run with him every day. That's a little picture of him as a puppy. He's a cute chocolate lab. I say that kind of to bring it up. If you do hear a dog barking in the background he's kind of sleeping in my bedroom right now but he might bark. So I apologize for that in advance if that happens. Not a problem. I'm sure that'll be fine. So the idea for TechBoomers was actually originally inspired by my mom Linda. She used email actively, did some online banking, and dabbled with a few websites here and there. But technology in general and all these different websites and apps were always really overwhelmed her. But she was always interested in learning more. She wanted to learn how to use Skype to make pretty long-distance phone calls through Grand Sun Michael with video chat. Another example she wanted to use Facebook obviously to share and post photos for friends and family to see. Netflix really interested her as well. She hated paying her expensive monthly cable bill and loved the idea of watching basically unlimited TV shows and movies for any nine a month, commercial free. So there are all these different other websites and apps that she wanted to try out. And there's so many other ones that she randomly hear of and she knew that all of them existed. I wanted to help her as much as I could but I wasn't always necessarily around to teach her. And the other aspect too that she knew about and this is you know one of the most important aspects of digital literacy is just being able to protect yourself and use technology and the internet safely. Because whether people like it or not in general a lot of things are going online these days. As an example there are some Canadian forms like government forms that you basically have to fill out online. And to do that you need to really understand the dangers of the internet from a safety perspective in that case but also from a privacy perspective if you're using social media or other types. So you have to use proper protection, anti-virus software, other tools like password managers. And just use best practices and staying up to date about internet threats and risks is just so important. So that's such a big aspect of digital literacy and really focus on those. We have a couple different courses on internet safety and privacy and passwords but we also touch upon it as much as possible with tips and tricks of how to make you know Facebook more private. For example we have three different tutorials on Facebook privacy. But for my mom it was how to get started that was the tough part and it is for so many other people too. Friends and family are a great way to kind of start to learn but usually there's time limitations. In my case I lived over an hour away. I went online to see if there was kind of a Coursera style website where she could self-learn and I didn't find anything. A lot of what I found were articles that were out of date and missing information and confusing and just not in the structured learning environment that she needed. Since then I found some other great resources which I'll mention in the future or later in this presentation but for the most part when it came to learning how to use websites and apps that could improve her lives like the ones I mentioned. There isn't a ton of good training content and it's difficult to find for the most part. And you know we all know that the Internet can be overwhelming and intimidating at times especially for those new to technology and it's so hard for those people that are new to technology to know which websites are right for them and can they trust the website or app and how can they protect themselves and how much it really costs and etc. etc. That's really why we built Technumers.com. Like I said inspired by my mom but she really is kind of that our main user. So far we have 60 courses free courses they range in tutorials between 6 and 25 some of our longer courses have but overall we have close to a thousand free video and article tutorials. We release a new course every Monday around noon. Early on we added a feature that allowed we started off more of a library of kind of structured content but some of our early partners including a lot of librarians we're suggesting that we add some course functionality where people can create account and track their progress. Overall our mission is really to improve the lives of older adults by empowering them to use technology or just anybody that wants to empower their own lives to use technology really. Just to give you some metrics of kind of where we're at right now and how we get our traffic. Last month we had over 95,000 people across 100 countries visit our website to learn how to use technology in one way or the other. Most of our traffic as I mentioned comes from maybe I didn't mention this but my expertise in search engine optimization has been quite useful. About 85 sometimes 90% of our traffic comes from organic search. So people will search things like what is Netflix and we're ranked in the top three for that one or how to create a Facebook account or how to delete accounts. All of our articles or at least most of them are optimized for a search phrase that someone who is looking for a good piece of content to help them find us and ideally help them sign up to TechLumors and start the learning process from there. We are forecasting a good growth trajectory. We're actually expecting a year from now to be having about three quarters million monthly students or monthly visitors to a website at least that are learning and at least using one article or more. We are definitely all over the world. Basically wherever anybody is searching something in English. Primarily in the US I think we're about 70% US last time I checked maybe 65 but in the UK and Canada and like I said wherever anybody's searching something in English we have a presence and we drive some traffic from that country. One question I always get asked early so I like to make this as clear as possible how we make money or courses at least the ones that are on TechLumors right now. The main courses on TechLumors will always be free for both users and partners. I say that the main ones down the road we might add some more advanced courses that we might charge for but all the ones that are on TechLumors right now will always be free. I promise you that in the future it might be like how to create a paid course that's like how to promote your business on Facebook or something like that but the core training will always be free. We will be focusing on advertising websites and online services that we teach. In the future we'll also be looking to establish partnerships with different types of online sites and services that we teach people how to use and another question that gets asked quite commonly is if we'll ever sell usage data and we won't. Online privacy is really important to us and our partners and our users. So who is TechLumors built for? Like I said my mom was kind of the inspiration for it. She's a 50 plus older adult that's our main target and we phrase in a lot of our tutorials and use examples that are specific to the 50 plus audience but it's really for anybody that has limited computer skills. It was also built for tech teachers so anybody who teaches friends and family had to use technology and then something early on we realized how useful what we're doing can be for tech training organizations libraries and nonprofits and even for profits and we'll talk a little bit about that right now too. So yeah early on actually a friend of mine mentioned she used to work at a library mentioned how useful and how libraries do digital literacy training which I knew about but I didn't know too much about it. So I went to a library conference the super conference here in Ontario Canada and connected with a lot of librarians and there was a lot of excitement in their voice when they talked about how you know TechLumors could be useful for them because it can be difficult and time-consuming to create training materials on their own. So we've been working with tech training partners ever since and many mostly libraries to be honest and it's been great for us too. It's a great two-way street because they provided early adopters who provided feedback like I said about the course functionality that was recommended by a lot of our early partners and one thing I always like to make clear to what we're doing at TechLumors I really think goes hand-in-hand with the in-person training. We're certainly not trying to replace that it's especially for an early on but I think a good mix of online and in-person training is ideal for people that are learning even if they're savvy enough to just be learning from TechLumors on their own I still think the in-person classes are so important to maintain that engagement and motivation for sure. So as we started working with tech training organizations we really started to get more involved in the digital inclusion and digital literacy community and we just discovered and learned about all these different organizations you know including that we're involved in this kind of movement I guess you could you could call it but yeah tech training organizations online safety organizations like Stay Safe Online and the Family Online Safety Institute we're partnered with them we do some a lot of guest posts and we help promote each other when we can. Digital inclusion organizations that are helping people who don't have access to broadband like Internet Essentials, community websites which we'll talk about there's so many interactive tools for computer basics out there and then the training material resources which is you know TechLumors falls under and I'll mention some of the other great ones as well that I've learned about since we launched. So a couple of the community websites digitallearn.org I'm sure a lot of you have heard about it it's fantastic I highly recommend you sign up for their bi-monthly newsletter it has a lot of great news and information about digital literacy in general and about webinars that are coming up and and they have a forum section where digital literacy teachers or anybody can post in there and ask questions and it's great I know they are in the middle of adding more content to their website because they also have training and and upgrading their website in general I'm excited to see what those changes bring in 2016 and TechSoup slash I guess TechSoup global slash TechSoup for libraries they have a forum section they focus on a lot of topics as I'm sure you've any of you know about them but they do have a specific form that are kind of revolves around digital literacy but they also have great webinars and you know resources and news so I recommend them as another website and kind of community to to get involved in. We learned early on as well about some digital literacy tools there are many many of these across the internet and they're great for teaching people you know the basics of how to use a keyboard and how to use a mouse here a couple of the ones that we think are really really good GCF learn free which I'll be talking about throughout this presentation there the work they do is great and they have some interactive tools that are awesome senior net has a great metalous exercise tool and there's so many of these out there these are some that we recommend for how to use a mouse and how to use the keyboard these links will be available afterwards you know don't be scrambling to write them down quickly but yeah when it comes to free educational websites when I think when it comes to kind of total content the amount of content tech boomers in GCF learn free org I think we're probably you know in at least have the most content for sure we focus on slightly different niches as I mentioned tech boomers is how to use websites and apps to improve quality of life with an older adult focus whereas what I've gathered from GCF learn free is their their website is more for career skills development obviously that includes a big part of that is how to use technology and they have some awesome tutorials especially on how to use Microsoft Office computer basics like the very basics as well and operating systems and they have a ton of great content there to mention a couple other sites get google.com slash tips you guys might have noticed there was a website called teach parents tech that got actually pretty viral back in the day when it was employees from Google that provided video very short video tutorials on how to do this different things like copy and paste and a whole other number of things they moved all that content to this slash google.com slash tips website it is only about at this point Google products and services but there's just a lot of very short videos that are useful so you can go through there to see if your students might like any of those and mention digital learn org they have a lot of video content and they're going to be expanding that and a couple other ones digital unite.com and I recently found out about computer hope too which I'm surprised it took me so long to find out about because they have a ton of content mostly about kind of computer basics not really about the internet too much but still a ton of great content so we I recommend them as well and then a couple directory pages I guess I guess didgeriliteracy.gov is a directory site whereas the second link there to the Alaska.gov they were actually gracious enough to let me do our first library webinar and this was probably eight months ago so that got me started with the webinars and they have a great section on their website that lists a lot of these great resources and in most cases I they're on the sites that I've mentioned on the slide so now we get into six different ways that you can leverage these educational resources usually I this slide is six different ways you can leverage tech boomers but I think they most of these broadly apply to GCF and freeing the other resources I've mentioned although you have to check with their their rules and regulations and guidelines for some of these especially number six there but I won't read off them right now because we're going to go into a slide about each of them so number one obviously these are just great resources that you can recommend your for your students where they can self-learn so you can recommend tech boomers or another one of these sites if you don't offer a class about that specific topic or if you don't have time for one-on-one training or if you just aren't familiar with that specific website or app you can recommend it to the student and it may be yourself go to go to that course on the website and start learning we do have a couple resource pages in our footer that you can use to help recommend or to help build awareness about tech boomers we have a page go a marketing designs page which is accessible via our footer where you can download different flyer and postcard and bookmark designs that you can put up in your computer lab or or hand out to people I know GCF and free they have flyers as well that they can you can download I think that's accessible via their footer too so it's an easy way to just you know recommend it to people that are in your computer lab and looking to learn and then also adding links to tech boomers and these sites on your website if you have resource pages or you want to you know you some of some libraries some of our partners even linked to us from their menu or from their home page they'll put up our our logo and a brief description about what tech boomers is it's just a kind of a no-brainer way to recommend people to tech to tech boomers and the other sites another big way that you can leverage our resources to kind of expand your your patrons knowledge is to just share our content with your social media followers it can be time consuming at times for all social media managers including us at tech boomers to you continuously find engaging and useful content for your followers and you know reposting or posting our content sharing it on tech boomers and all the other sites it's a great way to motivate and excite students about different types of websites and apps and gave them a resource in which they can start learning and you know with 900 tutorials on tech boomers and many many on GCF learn free and other websites there's just a wealth of worthy content to share so you can on our site and on GCF and I think most of these sites they have social sharing bookmarks which I'll point out I'm gonna give a site tour shortly so you can share the content just browse our websites find a course page that you like or find a tutorial that you think your social media followers would find interesting and to share it directly from from that page we also at tech boomers and I'm sure some of the other education websites as well like digital learn for example have newsletter so I recommend signing up for for those we send out at tech boomers a newsletter every Tuesday in the morning basically we highlight the course that we just released on Monday we also provide some links to other popular content that was the newsletter was actually requested by some of our partners early on as a way to stay up to date with the new and most popular content so they can you know find things to share easily so the idea is on Tuesday morning here's a new course and here's a bunch of tutorials that maybe they can plug into their social media or scheduled social media posts for the week but moving on to really the main way that we're trying to help libraries is encouraging them to leverage our training materials and to use in their existing programs it can be really difficult and time-consuming as I've heard to maintain up-to-date training materials for websites and apps that are constantly changing this is especially true for smaller organizations and smaller libraries that where you know digital literacy teacher is only a part of their the role at that library and some cases they only have a few hours a week to actually do it so you know if you run a course on Facebook and you realize or you notice that Facebook just changed their entire interface and now you have to spend 20 hours updating all the training materials you know look towards other resources to to leverage that content because we keep our articles up to date I would bet that GCF when free does as well and many of these other websites so you know this content is free and it's online so you know so I tech boomers and I know GCF too you can print up the tutorials and use them as handouts share the video tutorials with your students in the class and another great way to is a sign online tutorials for homework to continue learning at home so if you run a sorry so if you run let's say a introduction to Facebook two-hour class and then you plan on having another kind of follow-up class next week maybe suggest that they go home and after they create an account and learn the basics about Facebook maybe suggest they go to tech boomers and learn about Facebook privacy and kind of assign those as homework yeah for them to continue learning at home and continue that that self-learning process in addition to obviously leveraging our content for existing classes can always start new classes using our training materials at tech boomers like I said we have over 60 courses from websites and apps highlighted a couple of ones that are particular interest the libraries I found ancestry and Linda calm and overdrive those were all actually suggested by librarians and yeah so also let me know about any other websites you'd like us to teach we're always looking for suggestions and feedback and so those are some tech boomers courses I mentioned GCF land-free I've said they have great courses on computer basics operating systems MS office social media and another kind of structure of class that we've talked to our partners about and we're all kind of excited about is what we call drop-in self-learning sessions and the general idea behind these is that students or you set up regular classes where students come in with their own devices or maybe they use some in your computer lab and the students just choose a topic on tech boomers or another site and just start working their way through the tutorials and self-learning and then ask questions to the teachers as they come up the benefits of this class obviously this encourages self-learning you can teach more students at the time and very importantly there's no ongoing preparation for the teachers you don't have to maybe aside from familiarizing yourself with a variety of these topics but yeah you don't have to prepare a bunch of training materials and know what you're gonna talk about during that class for for two hours or whatever the amount of time in so I'd recommend running these types of classes as experiments to see if they work yeah there I think there you know could be really useful especially for those digital literacy teachers that don't have a lot of time on their hands and it's a great way to encourage students to self-learn so the last way and this this might be only specific to tech boomers I'm not sure about the other websites but one thing that we've done from the from the beginning is we've written a lot of guest posts for our library partners and our nonprofit partners they've asked us they've seen our content and they you know we've reached out to them and asked them if they want us to do any guest posts because blogging you know can be very very time-consuming to know what to write about and then actually write it we've written over 40 guest posts I think so far but as I mentioned it can be very time-consuming and it has been for us too and we have a very small team so what we decided to do is basically make a number of our articles available for you to repost on your blogs there's a bit I said 20 it says 20 there we just launched this literally a couple days ago I think there's 15 right now but that should get up to 20 probably within a couple weeks so as far as the types of posts so far they're mostly introductions to popular websites and apps so for example one of them is what is Facebook and its most popular eight features or how to get the most out of Instagram and those types of things we also have will have more on internet safety and privacy one of the ones that we have right now is best antivirus software solutions and it kind of explains what antivirus software is in the first place too and in the future we'll have kind of top ten lists and best of the web lists as well but if you're interested we have a footer page post our articles is the name of it and if you just want to learn more you can email me as well yeah Steve I was just noticing that you had the when I saw that they're at the bottom of your page of also that you have I think the Creative Commons license I thought that was very cool yes that was a chance suggested by our partners they asked me about you know what what is our position on that and I didn't even know what it was to be honest it looks up and yeah you know we have a lot of a lot of content on our site so we wanted to kind of put people I use by adding that structure yeah it's a creative commons share with attribution meaning you guys can reshare it use it but make sure that you just cite the fact of where you got it from yeah yeah we so on that poster tutorials page we go into detail about how to provide proper attribution in that and if any of that's confusing yet please feel free to get in touch and ask me we can work through it together yeah that's very important yeah okay cool so well time is fine it's already 35 after so have a bunch of slides like eight more but I want to do a quick site tour that's no problem for anyone who's online officially we do go 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. central time an hour but if we do run long we'll just keep going until everything's wrapped up until I'll seize them with this presentation and all of your questions are answered so if you do need to leave right when we officially end that's fine it's all being recorded you'll come back and watch it later okay perfect good to know that yeah if I run a little bit long okay perfect perfect so here's tech boomers so I'll give you guys a quick site to her point some things out yeah let's hop into that so as I mentioned you can sign up for an account through tech boomers to track your progress we added the functionality so you can quickly create an account with a social media account or Google account or you can do it the old-fashioned way by name email address and password so I'm just going to log in myself with an account that I've used and log in via Facebook so you start off on our homepage but one of the kind of the hub of the logged in pages is the my courses page you see the link at the top here this basically just lists all of the courses that you've joined or completed one tutorial in and then at the bottom this account hasn't completed any courses but they would be displayed down here so hop into our Facebook course so as you can see I've completed six of the 18 tutorials I will point out that a lot of our courses they have also have some additional resources at the end these aren't part of our actual courses but they're just extra tutorials that many of our users have requested and found useful like how to change your password we didn't include it these in our courses because they're not really necessary until they are necessary so usually the people will know to check to see if you know if they're ever looking to delete their Facebook account they know that we have a lot of deletion or how to delete your account articles as well so moving back up to the top so basically if there's a green check mark beside the name of the tutorial that means it's completed or you've marked it as complete oh here's the sofa sharing icons and our bookmarks on the left on our course pages we also have them in the top right which is a bit of overkill we'll probably remove them soon but on our tutorial pages they're just in the left column here so I'll go to the next logical tutorial which is the last one in the Facebook privacy section which is using Facebook list for privacy so I mentioned that we have both video and article tutorials unfortunately we fell quite behind in our videos to go with the tutorials and in the future we definitely will be playing catch up creating videos just takes a lot more resources and time than than our articles so but we do plan on catching up at least for the most used kind of social media and online shopping and entertainment courses and most popular courses we do plan on catching up with so I want to be able to check them out but all of our tutorials they have yeah they have generally have a lot of screenshots with red boxes to point things out we bold you know things and then highlight them in the in the tutorial or in the screenshots yeah a lot of big screenshots yeah we also have in some cases these little yellow buttons on the screenshots and they're basically just a little pop-up so point those out so we use them a lot when we have menus or we have screenshots of menus or account page settings pages basically there's so much to write about for each of these little areas that it's a great way to kind of interactively click to see what different things are once you've done a tutorial there is a mark as completed button at the bottom it's also in the top right here but once you click that it turns green mark says tutorial completed and you basically just mark this tutorial as complete obviously as the word say and then you can go to the previous or the next tutorial so we'll click next for the tour tutorial and then you know starting fresh again and yeah here's another screenshot a lot of these little yellow buttons to point out different things on it I mentioned that we encourage people to print our tutorials and here's the gray button to do that so you just click it and then from here you can print it directly or you can create a PDF and then print that up yourself or you can also email it as well can change the text sizes remove the images this is kind of a useful plug-in that we've been using another button that's somewhat useful go back to the course page which I'll click now and as you can see now seven of eighteen tutorials are completed and we have your standard my account page where you can change your email address and password and all that Chris appointed out in the footer we have the created Creative Commons license information I've mentioned a number of these pages throughout the presentation already like our partner newsletter page our marketing designs page I'll pull these up very quickly we have a course directory page which is a quick way to do that one first basically a quick way to see all of our courses on one page sorted by category which by the way are different menu items so basically if you're looking for a specific course try to think of which menu item it would fall under whether it's an educational website a shopping website every day is kind of a little bit vague we're going to be working on that and probably changing it but just basically websites and apps that are useful that you use every day a marketing designs page I mentioned so you can click any of these boxes to download via Dropbox flyers and bookmark designs and logos and you know any type of marketing design you'll you'll potentially need partner newsletter very simple little form to fill out and this will join you automatically you can also email me at Steve at TechBoomers.com and I can sign you up myself and add you manually I mentioned the link to us page really just some suggestions on where you can link to TechBoomers and then some actual instructions on how to do it if you're not familiar with adding code or HTML code to your website and here is the art of the page that has information on how posting your articles on your blogs your blog works this is a big download link that will take you to Dropbox directory or folder that has access to the 15 posts right now that you can download and within that folder we have you know as you as you saw a lot of our tutorials have screenshots so we'll within each of the folders that for each of the articles that you could download we also provide all the images so that you don't have to you know pull the images directly from our website they're easily and easily easy to download and upload to your editor or however you do it on your blog so I think that covers all the main bases contact form pretty standard so I'll get back to the presentation now bear with me no problem we do have a question about your courses asking about a specific one and I'm not sure if you're gonna get into that but do you have courses to teach some things like windows specifically windows 10 that people are now potentially being forced into and are confused by we do not it's something from the beginning I thought we'd actually do sooner than later however we didn't because I'll be honest GCF learn free is doing it already and they're doing a pretty good job so we thought we'd really focused on areas and websites and apps and technologies that weren't covered already pretty well so I'm not sure GCF learn free has it but I would bet they do and if they don't have it now I'm sure they'll have it soon yeah yeah I've used that site before let's see I'm just checking now yeah I'm looking to see let's see if I can just do a search in here but if they don't have it there may be lots of places in it as well they do okay great yeah if you go to their there we go page in technology and then look under windows and it's windows 10 yep they do yeah I did a search there's that at the bottom of their page they've got a search screen and it's got free windows 10 tutorial features getting started free glass questions tips yeah a whole bunch of different things so you see if learn free.org and we'll have that included in the links afterwards for the shows you'd be able to jump to that quickly if you can't just Google it okay great yeah as I said they they have a lot of great tutorials on that so we didn't really want to spend time you know duplicating content you know the whole point of tech boomers and sharing it with libraries is to reduce redundant content on the internet or you know reduce the amount of the requirement of other people to create the same content so we've stayed away from that we might add it in the future but that's not on the radar anytime soon yeah okay so we'll be not to some general slides about how to engage and motivate students this particularly I would say mostly well not mostly but it applies especially to older adults who are familiar with technology a lot of the time it's you know they're they'll just say to themselves or to their potential teacher or someone who's saying oh try this out you know my life is find the way it is and to get past that barrier as I'm sure many of you know you know it's so important to establish real relevancy and providing as much relevancy as possible and don't overwhelm them with information and we find the best way to do this or we've yeah is to you know find a very specific targeted example of how technology can improve their life and really focus just on that one thing whether it's you know maybe they have a hobby or a passion about gardening for example and there's a great gardening website where you can learn about plants and flowers and etc. or maybe they have transportation issues and something like uber would be awesome for them or they can't go out grocery shopping and there's all these grocery delivery websites these days or whatever the reason is you know get to know the person as much as possible and have a conversation with them and you know try to find an online solution for that that problem or that potential way that can improve their life and you know I'll go through these sites pretty quickly but as we said there's just so many ways and so many examples out there Facebook and Skype to communicate with family and you know e-harmony even to meet new people and Twitter for you know real-time news and information saving money on entertainment with Netflix and YouTube or one specific example which is very specific but you know let's say you're the person you're trying to encourage to use technology loves playing hearts or another card game like Uker to show them you know that you can play online if they only get to play once a week with their friends show them that they can go online to play with their friends or play with other people and just use that one specific example to to encourage them and and just focus on that one and of course many other websites to save money online learning anything for free online is amazing these days you know the Corsair and all the University course websites Wikipedia Ted comm is one of my favorites has like the latest findings of in the world of tech and science and all basically any type of niche really it's fantastic and technology can just make life simpler like shopping from your own home or you're always getting lost when you're driving Google Maps is a pretty great solution or you help to find a great place to eat if you just move to a new city some general other tips for engaging students you know in your content that you create just comparing digital things to real life actions and real-life things comparing you know the most basic example I can think of is comparing the email to just mailing a letter snail mail I guess people call it sometimes but you know using you know real-life examples to compare or make parallels to digital digital topics is a great thing to do your lesson should be as interactive as possible and one way you guys to have them complete tasks in the moment don't just run a two hour seminar on how to use Facebook where people just listen about you know all the different things you can do have them you know after you maybe talk about it for 20 minutes or 10 minutes or even less have them create an account and then have them a tour while they're clicking around themselves they'll generally learn a lot quicker when they're when they're you know performing tasks encourage self-learning as much as possible that's what we're all about in the classroom and at home and when possible provide both video and text-based training again that's been a something that would be we're gonna be definitely working towards on tech boomers in the future but if you can if you can find both options people learn in different ways so if you can offer both that's that's ideal and you know I can't say enough how important it is to you know continuously motivate your students or even your potential students and provide regular touch points with students or with your patrons to just to continuously get them motivated by mentioning just different types of online products and services by word of mouth social media we talked about newsletter which can also be physical not just the digital newsletter and then blogging as well and that goes hand-in-hand with you know the social media and the newsletter but I just can't say enough about providing a lot of different examples to your students and potential students about just all the ways they can improve their lives because that's you know really what it's all about and that is my last slide we're at about 1050 so what we like to do at the end of each of our webinars is to get feedback from the attendees of one a specific poll so we have a poll lined up as far as which of these five websites would you or I guess they're all websites this time yeah would you like us to teach in the future and then also if you can type into chat any other suggestions that you have for other topics that obviously aren't one of these five and or on tech rumors already cool all right um before we jump into that um yeah we're gonna put a poll up to get your answers for that and here why don't I get that going now I'm gonna pull back control to my screen there we go and then there it is you should see the poll come up in just a second on your screen there it is there you go so go ahead and choose which one you think you would want I can see the poll from progress here you can't see yet but you'll see when I get the final answer that looks like Google Drive is way ahead of everyone else yeah I know we do many things both personal and work related it's been very useful yes yeah we have a course on Dropbox which is what I personally use I'm a little biased towards it but Google Drive is I think you get a lot more space for free so it's a good one and it's one that we've been putting off since we did have the kind of the alternative solution with Dropbox but okay leave it for another minute or so about 75% of you have voted it tells me that too so I know that not everybody has made a choice that's okay yeah usually we get about 75% in total so and if you have anything to mention too is that if if the attendees have any questions for me at all this is a good time to ask that and you could relay them Krista yeah definitely if you have any other questions about the presentation or anything else to ask Steve about tech boomers about or about digital training digital literacy training in general typed in there but also you had mentioned any other ideas for things you guys can cover on tech boomer someone else already did say what about one drive through Microsoft do you already have something on that or we do not that's a good idea and it's probably one we should definitely check off the list in the future if we're doing Google Drive well if Google Drive wins this we're gonna be releasing that course within the next month so my drive will put that on the list for the next online storage solution but probably not for a little while they are pushing it a lot to people I see a lot of things about that one drive I mean well I'll look into it to see how see the benefits of it you know kind of compare them and look at a review and see how much free storage space because that's a big one people select one of the other yeah and related to Google Drive one of our attendees says I think one thing to include with Google Drive is privacy concerns and terms of use they are different from drop box unless you have Google apps for education because that Google does have their whole education side to so that would be something to maybe look into I'm not sure if you guys already are doing that that there is the Google apps for ed specifically that they do offer to schools educational institutions that be slightly different than straight off just Google Drive that you know you and I as a regular person would use okay yeah definitely look into that thanks all right I'm going to close up the poll now so we can see the answers not even close yeah it's pretty much yeah Google Drive is up there and the other yeah meet-up Pandora well Udemy Udemy is the second place than Pandora and travel I see a meet-up at a tie last place so I guess that's who will be next yes so we will release that in within the next month we're actually putting up Kickstarter on Monday but we'll get started on Google Drive it's it's probably going to be a bigger one than the average course and yeah we'll have that up and I'll be sure to mention to you Krista once it is up and if you could maybe add that course link to the page or let the attendees know if possible yeah I know we can promote it out to our arm yeah out that way yeah some other well another suggestion is um Hoopla which is a good library-centric one it's a have you do you know anything yeah yeah that that's something that a lot of libraries are getting into now it's been promoted to them as a good service to offer digital movies music free and a lot of libraries are providing that so that would be something if you're looking to go towards the library specific world yeah absolutely I mean we have overdrive there now and that was requested at one of the I think the Alaska State Library webinar maybe with the one a different one but um yeah I know who plays one and there's a couple other ones out there too trying to remember the other trying to remember the other library focus services can't think of them now there's also free go that they use and yeah um and well there's something else I was thinking oh Zinio for magazines yep Zinio that's one that mentioned yep we have uh we have like a roadmap and excel spreadsheet with all of the suggestions um or all the potential ones and uh all of those are on it for sure um there's just so many websites and apps out there right oh yeah yeah and then overdrive someone mentions that something specifically a service that libraries provide that's um that the libraries have to pay for to get that one so overdrive for ebooks and the audio books we actually have a group subscription here in Nebraska for our libraries too oh cool yeah we do have the an overdrive course that's the one we oh cool all right there you go there you go jump go to their page and look search for overdrive um all right I'm gonna get rid of the poll here now um do you want me to put back to your screen uh Steve or do you have anything else to show um no just kind of a final slide that has um well I'll just say my email address is steve at tech boomers dot com um I love connecting with with librarians and any digital literacy teachers out there so um yeah please email me if you want to just talk about digital literacy talk about tech boomers talk about anything at all um I'd love to hear from you great all right um we do have some questions that came in if you do have any other questions or suggestions um I'll also be able to pass this on to you afterwards as well Steve if you didn't get all these uh ideas and things from the chat um do you have a video about tech boomers that we could show patrons about the benefits of using your site um obviously this training the our recording here will be available but I think you're thinking about something shorter like a yeah a couple of minute long here's our sales pitch yeah we do actually uh we don't yet um and we actually have a um a library version of that too but yeah we'll have a it'll be up on our home page I'm hoping within three weeks four weeks we've already filmed some footage and um created the audio files we just need to kind of piece it all together but it will kind of be like an explainer video a two minute of quick tour and that kind of thing which I think will help explain it to people that come to the site for the first time we do have a um a page in that I should have pointed this out but in the top right of all of our pages in the header we have a page that um you'll see in a green button it says first time start here um oh yeah there it is I think on your screen yeah yeah I don't know new users start here I used to say first time start here um and that that really kind of explains tech boomers at a high level um a video would be much more effective though so we that's why we decided to add that as well yeah some people like to watch a cute quick quick little thing there and then here's some ideas about what you can get yeah and and one thing to point out too is that we actually have a course on how to use tech boomers in the learn section as well um yeah very meta um okay and then um oh and I think you might have mentioned this earlier but I know people are coming in um how is tech boomers funded yeah so I've been bootstrapping tech boomers I spent about 15-20 hours a week doing SEO consulting um myself that's just to pay the bills for now um in the one slide I mentioned um how we make money and that's probably that's going to be basically through advertising all of our courses that are on the site right now and all the ones coming up in the foreseeable future will be free forever um which is kind of necessary because um we drive our traffic through search engines and if we hide our hit our tutorials and courses behind a paid wall google wouldn't access them and you know we wouldn't have our marketing channel but yeah different types of advertising um it really we want to focus our ads on websites and apps that we teach people how to use so you'll see on our site right now we have um amazon ads so a lot of those um is going to be our are going to be our main focus and in the future we're going to look to establish partnerships kind of tighter partnerships with um kind of one main website or app in each niche so there are many ways to stream music online what we'd hope to do is partner with one of them and promote them throughout that's that section in those pages on our website but we need to get a lot more traffic uh for those people to want to pay us yeah yeah and here's some things that I don't know if any of these like any of these you could mention these earlier in your presentation the security and online safety organizations I'm not sure if they would be something that would if they would uh be helpful in that area they're non-profits so we're not going to ask them to pay us anything we just have kind of mutually beneficial partnerships we promote each other in social media we do guest posting um you know they're just kind of other organizations that are trying to achieve really the same high level goals that we are so um yeah we're just trying to help each other build awareness as much as possible great okay um any other questions got it worked we just hit 11 o'clock on my clock but we did sort of a couple of minutes late so if you have any other last minute questions to throw at Steve you can um one someone did ask about the link to the slides um Steve will be sending me his slides and we will be posting them onto our um Encompass Live website here we are um this is our main page for um the show and right beneath our upcoming shows are our archive so in here is where it will be posted and everyone here will be sent a link to when it is available and up um there when our um recording is processed when the slides have been uploaded and they will be here available through the library commission slide share account so that's where you'll be able to view and download the slides um and watch recording on our youtube channel yeah we'll be adding that to ours as well yeah or linking to it at least from and all of the links that we were mentioned i'm going to go through it again just make sure i didn't miss anything because there were quite a whole lot that were mentioned um we'll go here in our delicious account so you can see we've got links all the different tech boomers pages and then all the other sites that you might have mentioned um that were um of used to people so that will be there as well as you can see here we do that we always have the recording presentations any slides handouts that are included and then the links um you'll get the same kind of thing for um today's show oh perfect it makes it easy no yeah why don't we try like gather it all in one spot yeah exactly so any other questions nothing can come in right now while we were talking so i'm going to assume we are good um if anybody does have questions uh steve at tech boomers dot com right yeah right yeah steve at tech boomers dot com is his email address um so thank you very much steve this was great um uh you said this was inspired by your mom and it reminded me a lot of helping my mother get into these same kind of things um i'm a librarian my sister is a librarian so she does depend on us a lot for any sort of um how do i make this thing work um so i will definitely i think be sharing your site and some of those other ones with her as well okay great i appreciate that yeah um anything else you want to say to wrap up nope nope just uh one last reminder to you know for anybody to get in touch with me i'd be happy to chat with them great all right well thank you very much steve thank you everyone for attending um i'm looking to see what i got going here okay cool all right um that will wrap it up for today's show as i said it was recorded and we'll be able available on that archive page potentially later today depends on how long it takes it to process it for me to get it all done um usually it goes pretty quickly it depends the slowest thing generally is youtube i mean we upload it there and they have to process it and yeah we'll see how that goes um and then i hope you join us for next week's show which was just added to our schedule a little last minute thing feeding the hungry at the library um dave mixtors from our south susan city nebraska public library um they do its great program um of teaching community how to grow and and grow food their own food um gardening cooking all those kind of things together so he's going to be on the show next week so definitely join us for that show and any of our upcoming shows it was usually about a month or two ahead listed here and new ones coming on all the time so definitely take a look at there and um sign up for any of our upcoming shows and if you are a facebook user we are also on facebook so definitely pop over here to our facebook page page give us a like we do um post reminders of of when the current today's show is going so here's today's reminder went up right before the show letting people know they could pop in on the fly um when the recordings are available i post over here as well so if you are a big facebook user definitely like us over there to keep up with what the show is doing um other than that that wraps it up for this week's show thank you very much and we will see you next week on Encompass Live. Bye-bye.