 Welcome. Thank you for joining us for today's TechSoup for Libraries webinar, Digital Skills for Older Adults Teaching Technology in Public Libraries. My name is Crystal and I'll be your host. We have two guests today who will talk about some free digital literacy resources that you can integrate into your library's services and programming. They'll also share some ideas and examples of how libraries can effectively provide digital literacy training to older adults. But before we begin, I have just a few announcements to share. We will be using the ReadyTalk platform for our meeting today. Please use the chat in the lower left corner to send questions and comments to the presenters. We will be tracking your questions throughout the webinar and will answer them at the designated Q&A section at the end. All of your chat comments will only come to the presenters, but if you have comments or ideas to share, we will forward them back out to the entire group. You do not need to raise your hand to ask a question. Simply type it into the chat box. Should you get disconnected during the webinar, you can reconnect using the same link in your confirmation email. You should be hearing the conference audio through your computer speakers, but if your audio connection is unclear, you can dial in using the phone number in your confirmation email. If you're having technical issues, please send us a chat message and we'll try to assist. This webinar is being recorded and will be archived on the TechSoup website. If you're called away from the webinar or if you have connection issues, you can watch a full recording of this webinar later. You will receive an archived email within a few days that will include a link to the recording, the PowerPoint slides, and any additional links or resources shared during the session. If you're live tweeting this webinar, please use the hashtag PS4LIBF. We have someone from TechSoup also live tweeting this event, so please join us in the conversation there. TechSoup Global is dedicated to serving the world's nonprofit organizations and libraries. TechSoup was founded in 1987 with a global network of partners. We connect libraries and nonprofits to technology, resources, and support so that you can operate at your full potential, more effectively deliver programs and services, and better achieve your missions. TechSoup has distributed over 14 million software and hardware donations to date through our product donation program. We offer a wide range of software, hardware, and services, including software like Microsoft Office and refurbished computers. For more information about TechSoup product donations or services, please visit TechSoup.org and click on Get Products and Services. And we have two guests joining us today. Steve Black is the founder of TechBoomers.com, a free training resource that teaches technology skills. He is committed to helping libraries and other technology training organizations teach digital literacy. Kathy Fabian teaches computer classes at the Leonardtown branch of the St. Mary's County Library. Her primary interest and passion is technology programming for older adults. My name is Crystal Schimpf, and I'll be your host for today's webinar. Assisting us with chat and Twitter, we have Ginny Meese and Becky Wiegand from the TechSoup team. And again, we will be on Twitter using at TechSoup for Libs handle and the hashtag T-S-4-L-I-B-S. Now we will have time for questions throughout the webinar, so please send your questions using the chat as they arise and we will address as many as we are able to. If you ask a question that we're not able to answer during the webinar, we will follow up later via email with a response. And again, as a reminder, the webinar is being recorded today and all of the slides, resources, and materials will be included in the archive and you will receive an email with that within a few days. Now today we'll start off by hearing from Steve about TechBoomers.com and he will give us an overview of what is available and we'll also share some ideas for how libraries can integrate TechBoomers tutorials into their training programs. And then Kathy will share some information specific to helping older adults with technology. She will discuss how to reach older adults, how to meet the technology training needs of older adults, and how to evaluate those services. Again, we'll have questions during the webinar and at the end, so send in your questions as they arise. And also at the end of this webinar, I'll share details about a forum that we will be holding in the TechSoup Community Forum following today's webinar if you would like to continue the conversation there. So I will share that information with you at the end. Now there are many resources out there to teach digital skills, some of which are free and some of which have a fee or are paid. And TechBoomers.com that we're going to talk about today is one of those free resources as is DigitalLearn.org and GCFLearnfree.org and those two are sites we've also featured recently on TechSoup. And there are also paid resources including Linda.com. Some libraries I know have a subscription to that resource. And also Atomic Training which is a paid resource and is available at a discounted rate through TechSoup's product donation program. So this is just to give you some context of the many different types of resources that are out there and available to you. And today we'll be focusing on TechBoomers.com. Now before I hand the controls over to Steve, we'd love to hear from you. If you knew about TechBoomers prior to this webinar, so please select the response that applies to you by clicking the radio button and clicking Submit. And we will see then everybody's results. I'll give you a few moments to think about that and respond. And of course maybe you've heard of it and you have used it before. See the small percentage that identify with that response. Maybe you've heard of it but never actually used it. A few more there. And I can see the vast majority and it still seems to be holding true that many of you are hearing about TechBoomers for the first time today. And that is great to hear. We're always happy to introduce people to new free resources that are out there. So I'm glad to see that. I'll give just a couple more seconds for this poll. I can see responses are still coming in but that margin is not changing too much. We've definitely seen the majority of people saying they haven't heard of it before. Now if you have used it or have heard of it and have used it before, I think you may still gain some new ideas in hearing from Steve today. And then of course we will all benefit from the tips that Kathy is going to share with us later on about engaging and working with older adults. Okay, it looks like most of our responses have come in so I'm going to go ahead and close this poll now. And if you didn't already see the responses now you'll see them on your screen. So definitely the vast majority, 84% saying this is their first time hearing of TechBoomers. So welcome to all of you and I hope you all learned something new today. But now I'm going to hand things over to Steve and he's going to tell us about teaching digital literacy with TechBoomers.com. Steve? Great. Thank you very much, Crystal. It's awesome to be here. I really appreciate the opportunity. It's been very exciting for our team since we launched last year. We've been connecting with so many different people and organizations that are passionate about digital literacy and we've learned so much along the way from them. And I'm an entrepreneur who has always looked for a more purposeful social entrepreneurial opportunity and just so grateful to be here to share the TechBoomers story and share how we're trying to help libraries teach digital literacy and for 250 people to be here that haven't heard of us is just such an amazing opportunity. So thank you for that. I'm going to start off just by kind of sharing a bit of the TechBoomers story. The idea for the website was inspired by my mom, actually Linda. She used email actively, did some online banking, and dabbled with a few other websites here and there, but she was always interested in learning more. One example is she wanted to learn how to use Skype to make free long distance video chat phone calls to her grandson Michael. She also wanted to learn how to share and post photos online to share with friends and family. And Netflix was always interesting to her. She hated paying the expensive monthly cable bill. She loved the idea of unlimited commercial-free TV and movies and thousands of on-demand shows and movies to choose from. And I think we can all agree that technology can just improve life in so many ways, whether it's becoming more social online with friends and family, meeting new people with online dating websites, and just communicating with people with email and Skype and all that. Saving money you can do it in a number of ways, booking travel online, buying used goods, finding discounts, finding less expensive entertainment options like Netflix. And technology and the Internet can just make life easier in a lot of ways, whether it's using Google Maps instead of an expensive GPS hardware or ordering groceries to your home if you don't have a car or online cloud storage, websites and apps can just make life easier. And lifelong learning is really, really important as well. And there's so many resources online these days that people of all ages can use. But the problem for my mom was in a lot of other people is how to get started. I'd help her whenever I could, but I was running a company at the time when I came up with this idea and I lived over an hour away so I wasn't always available. I went online and searched in Google for article and video tutorials, but most of which I found were either out of date or missing information and probably most importantly just not in a structured learning environment that my mom needed to really self-learn. And the Internet can certainly be overwhelming and intimidating at times for those who need the technology. It's difficult to know which websites you can trust and how much they really cost and of course how to actually use them. So that's why we built TechBoomers.com. We launched last year in January. We currently have over 80 free courses composed of close to 1,100 video and article tutorials now. We release a new course every Monday. Each course usually covers a specific website or app from everything from what it is to how to use it and even how to delete your account if you don't want to use it anymore. We also have courses on topics like Internet safety and privacy as well. In the middle of last year, about four or five months after we launched, we also added the ability for website visitors to create an account to track their progress. That was actually a feature that was requested by a number of our library partners so they kind of inspired that idea and that's been really useful for teacher literacy teachers and obviously their students so they can track their progress and remember where they left off in the different courses they signed up to and joined. Our overall mission is really to improve the quality of lives of older adults or just anybody really who's new to technology or just looking to expand their online horizons with different types of websites and apps. For TechBoomers actually, we drive most of our traffic through search engine optimization which basically means when someone searches a query like what is Netflix or how to create a Facebook account, we're generally ranked pretty high on the first page and that's how we get a lot of our traffic. In that sense, we're very happy with that because that allows us to teach technology to website visitors all around the world. Last month we taught over 160,000 people across 100 countries how to use technology. We're expecting that number to grow. We've been growing at about 20 to 30% month over month traffic so we're really hoping to get that number closer to a million students a year from now. One of the most common questions when I'm chatting with digital literacy teachers and librarians is how do you make money and do your courses cost anything? As Crystal mentioned earlier, all of our courses will always be free for both our users and our partners including libraries and any type of digital literacy training organization. We do make money through advertising to keep the lights on. We are really trying to focus especially in the future to only advertise websites and online services that we're already teaching people how to use. And we're also going to be looking down the road to establish sponsorship partners with different types of online services. Again, focusing on websites and apps like Amazon and Ebay that we're already teaching people how to use. Another popular question that I get from librarians and other digital literacy teachers is do you have any plans on selling third-party usage data? And we absolutely will not. Online privacy is just very important to us and our partners and our users especially those new to the Internet. They want to make sure that what they're doing is private and so that's something we've set as a standard for our website. So moving on to who Tech Boomers was built for, it really started off with the older adult focus with my parents in mind and boomer generation but it's really useful for anybody with limited computer skills. I'm discovering more and more that people that live in rural areas that are using online or getting high speed Internet for the first time are finding it useful and that can be across all ages. Tech Boomers was also built for technology teachers obviously including myself who taught friends and family throughout my life teaching them how to use technology. And actually shortly after we launched I realized how useful Tech Boomers and our free courses can be for tech training organizations. My girlfriend just after we launched she posted on Facebook and one of her friends worked at Guelph Public Library here in Ontario, Canada. And she mentioned that she wasn't teaching digital literacy herself but she knew of a couple of the people that were at that library and she was saying how useful it can really be because they're often left to their own devices to create the context for the classes and that. So right away we just saw a lot of opportunity to do whatever we can to help libraries and other tech training organizations. And with thousands of libraries and nonprofits teaching digital literacy across North America and even obviously even more around the world we just saw a lot of opportunity to help them however we could because in a lot of cases they're left to their own devices to create their own training materials. So really we're trying to help them exactly however we could. And it's been a great two-way shoot as well. Our library partners have been some of our best early adopters. They provided great feedback about the website, courses, which courses to create and then how to improve the content itself. So it's been awesome for us too. And something I always like to point out too is that with what we're doing on TechBoomers we're certainly not trying to replace the in-person training. We think that's super important especially for someone getting online for the first time but also on an ongoing basis as well. I think the in-person training is very obviously it's social and it's more engaging and to have that one-on-one in-group training session we think is super important and it really goes hand-in-hand with online training where people can self-learn at home once the class ends in person. So moving on to kind of the meat of the presentation, we're going to be covering six different ways librarians can leverage TechBoomers to teach and promote digital literacy. The first is kind of a no-brainer. TechBoomers is just a free resource for students to self-learn. So if you have a patron that comes in asking about a specific topic and maybe you don't have a class or a program on that topic or you don't have time for one-on-one training or perhaps you're just not familiar with that website or app, there's a very good chance we have over 80 courses that we have a course for that one. So feel free through Wood of Mouth to make recommendations to try out TechBoomers. We also have a number of different marketing designs that our library partners love using. They'll post, we have a couple different flyer designs and they can post them in their computer labs. Bookmarks are also very popular. We actually just came out with the new bookmark design a couple days ago so we have I think three now. But librarians will print them up at their library and then hand them out when people come in with questions or they'll even put them in books as they check out the books for the patrons. So we have a page that's accessible via our footer and there's the URL right there, Marketing Designs. And another probably one of the best ways as well in addition to Wood of Mouth and the Marketing Designs, adding a link to TechBoomers on your website. A lot of our partners will add links and library partners will have links on their home page or they'll add a direct link in maybe a resources menu. And also a lot of library websites have specific resource pages already focusing on older adults or technology training. So we invite you to add a link in whichever area of your website that you think makes the most sense. And that can, you know, where you can build awareness about TechBoomers and for people that are interested in learning about how to use websites and apps. Number two is sharing content with your social media followers. You might have a number of patrons that follow your library on Facebook but maybe haven't wandered to use different other types of websites and apps. And sharing on our content, our courses, and tutorials is a great way to motivate and excite learners about different websites and apps to try and to provide specific resources where they can actually learn how to use them. On TechBoomers we have, like I said, close to 1,100 tutorials and 80 courses. So there's a wealth of worthy content to share. There's also a lot of great content on other websites as well. So if you can start to share that, you can help build awareness especially if you're sharing our content. As you're mentioning other programs and classes and digital literacy at your library, it's a great way to build excitement and to motivate people. On most websites you can share the course and tutorial pages directly from the sites and TechBoomers is the same. And last thing I want to mention on this slide is that we have a partner newsletter that we send out every Tuesday, a day after we launch our new course that has information about the new course and other popular tutorials and courses that you can share with your social media followers. We also have in that like pre-made tweets to make your lives easier if you just want to plug it into your social media calendar. So you can sign up for that at that URL there at pages, partner newsletter pages accessible via our footer. Or you can email me at Steve at TechBoomers.com. So number three, in getting into leveraging our content, we encourage our partners to leverage our content however they want in their existing programs and classes. It can be difficult and time-consuming to maintain up-to-date training materials for websites and apps that are constantly changing. So we encourage anyone really to print up our tutorials and use them as handouts or share our tutorial videos with your student. And a lot of our partners as well that teach technology, they love to assign online tutorials for homework to continue the educational process at home. And then select, say for example, you're running a two-hour introduction to Facebook and then you have weekly classes after that for three or four weeks. You can encourage them maybe after you teach them give them a tour in your class and they all create accounts. You can encourage them to go to TechBoomers to learn about Facebook privacy while they're at home because we have three different tutorials for that one. So that's another way to encourage self-learning at home. And very similar to number three, number four is creating new classes with our training materials. You can use TechBoomers literally as a textbook for the entire curriculum for your class to save you the effort of creating any new training materials at all. Whether it's a group setting where people are learning together or a self-paced setting, like I said use TechBoomers as a textbook. And we already talked about some of the different websites and types of websites, but social, educational, entertainment, online shopping, we kind of covered the whole spectrum of different types of websites and apps that people are looking to learn how to use. And we're also always looking for feedback of other websites and apps that you'd like us to add a course for. So if you have any ideas that aren't already on TechBoomers, please email me at Steve at TechBoomers.com. You can also post on most of our pages in the Facebook comments at the bottom of the pages and make recommendations. We're always connecting with different people there. A new type of class that some of our partners are trying out and they've been pretty successful is what we call drop-in self-learning sessions. And the general idea behind these is that you run a weekly class or a bi-weekly class where learners come in with their own devices, or the library can provide them as well. And students basically just choose a topic on TechBoomers and start working their way through the tutorials. And ask questions as they come up to the teacher there if there's multiple teachers. I think there's a lot of benefits to these types of class. It's really important to encourage self-learning. You potentially can teach more students at the same time because it's not one-on-one training, people will be learning on their own. And that's especially true if you have students who have a little bit more familiarity with using websites and the Internet and they just want to kind of expand the horizons. And probably the best part potentially is that there's no ongoing preparation for teachers, which is great. And number six, this is something we started doing relatively recently. We used to do a lot of guest posting for our library partner websites and nonprofit partner websites. But it started to become very time consuming for us and it can be for the people that are writing the blog posts on these blogs as well. So what we decided to do instead is create a pool of, I think it's over 30 articles now, that basically you can repost on your blog. And these are articles already on TechBoomers. And the cover of a variety of different types of posts, most of them right now are introductions to popular websites and apps. So we'll introduce what it is, why it's useful, and some tips and tricks on how to get the most of it. We also have some posts on Internet Safety and Privacy. And down the road we're going to have some funner posts about the best of the web posts as we're calling them, or top 10 gardening websites for example, that kind of thing. So you can learn more about this campaign in our Post or Articles page. There's the URL and it's successful via our footer as well. Or you can email me Steve at TechBoomers.com. So those are the six ways that librarians can leverage TechBoomers. To get started, I should mention there's no registration, there's no sign-up, there's no partnership agreement. We have our Creative Common license. So if you want to start using our tutorials tomorrow, by all means, in any way that you will find useful. And with all of those different six ways you can use TechBoomers. So that covers the main topics. So I guess if there's any questions, I'm sure there might be some with this many people. Yeah, Steve, thanks for sharing all of this great information on what TechBoomers includes and how people might use it in their libraries, and also in whatever nonprofit or other instance they may choose to use it. We have gotten some questions, so I'll be giving you some of those. And yeah, we have a great audience today. So we certainly have a lot of questions we will get to some right now and we will also have time at the end of the webinar to respond to more questions. And if we don't get to your question live, we will respond via email, but we will do as many as we can. So Steve, one thing I know you said is just to reiterate, so this is a free resource for libraries, for nonprofits, for anyone who wants to use it, correct? Absolutely, yep. Great. I know it's one of those things I know. It seems like it's too good to be true, so we get a lot of questions just to clarify that. Now one thing we didn't get to see is really what the tutorials look like once you're in TechBoomers. And I don't know if you might be able to just describe to us what type of content is in the tutorials, and how maybe it is different from other types of tutorials that are out there. Yeah, for sure. So we have a lot of different types of tutorials. Some are more informational. We usually have at least three that introduce the website or app and answer basic questions before someone gets started, what it is, why it's useful, how much does it cost, is it safe, those kinds of questions. And then we move on to, we even have a review that goes over the pros and cons of the website in an unbiased way. And then kind of the meat of each of the courses are obviously how to use it. So we'll have tutorials on how to sign up, how to use specific features. We have a lot of tour tutorials. And the tutorials themselves, we try to write them as clearly as possible, not to make them too, too long, but we like to keep them very detailed. They do generally target the older adult audience when we come up with relevant examples for example. So our Skype tutorial may mention you can use Skype to have a video chat with your grandkids, but again those examples can be applicable to everyone. We have a lot of screenshots that we have. We have a lot of numbered lists and below every numbered step is a big screenshot. We have these little kind of buttons within the screenshots that are kind of pop-up buttons that you can click to get more information about a specific section of a page. I mean I mentioned we have video tutorials. We have them for a lot of our most popular courses, like Facebook and Twitter for example. We haven't created videos for a little while. We do have a small team with limited resources, so videos take a lot more to create. But we do plan on playing video catch-up with more of our courses in the near future. So expect a lot of those to come probably later this year. Great. Now have you heard of any libraries that are using this as a resource to teach others within their library like staff or volunteers? Anything like that, or would you recommend that? Yeah, absolutely. I think I had that in one of my past presentations. But yeah, absolutely. I mean to bring people up to speed at the library to train staff, it's just as applicable for them as it is for the patrons. Excellent. We had a couple of questions, people wondering if you plan to provide training in other languages, especially Spanish seems to be the one that pops up the most. Yeah, we absolutely do. Unfortunately, we have a small team with limited budget, but I think that's something we will really push for in early 2017. Excellent. And I know you didn't have a lot of time to talk about all of the different topics you're covering currently, but we've had people ask about specific topics. One person asks if you have tutorials on how to use devices, not just websites and apps. Not yet, but it is definitely something. Again, in the future we really want to expand our content offering beyond just websites and apps. We want to get to devices, whether it's smart phones and cameras and tablets. So definitely down the road. Right now our focus is really on the websites and apps, but I would probably say within three or four months we will be expanding that to devices. Excellent. And I know this is obviously might be giving you a lot of ideas as well as we get these questions in. So we'll have a poll in just a minute where we'll actually get a little bit more feedback there. Now another person asked is, and I think that this question is about the website itself. Is there an app available for tech boomers, or is that in your plan for the future? So I don't think it's in the plan for the future because the website is mobile friendly. So it can be used on a device as small as an iPhone 5 for example. Might be not as ideal if you're looking at big screenshots on a small screen, but it is mobile friendly on all devices. We might consider an app down the road, but as long as I think that visitors and our students can access it on a mobile device, I think that's kind of the main goal with that. And we've got so many questions coming in. I'm trying to find a good one we haven't already responded to. So is there a login or account? Do people create a login and track their progress? And also I'll tie into that. Are there certificates available when people finish, or is it just that you get to the end and you're done with it? Yeah, so anybody can create an account just with an email address and a password. You can even use a Facebook or Google account, and then they can track their progress. And it's basically self-paced. So once you finish reading a tutorial, there's a couple buttons where you can click to just mark it as complete. So there's not really any quizzes or anything at the end. It's self-regulated I guess is a good way to say it. We don't currently offer any certificates for completing courses. We give a nice congratulations message at the end, but that's about it for now. And that is something we're hoping to look at next year as well. Great. All right. Well, we will hold the rest of these questions for the end. I'm going to try to just mention a few things. So everybody hears it now if you've just joined us. All of the links from the presentation so far and the PowerPoint slides will be included in the archives. You'll have access to all of this later. And you will automatically receive an email with all of that within the next couple of days. Also, this tool we've been talking about, TechBoomers.com is a free resource. And yes, you can use it in your library to teach classes and to share it with patrons. And I did see that one person sent us a message and said, TechBoomers is listed on my eResource handout that I give out during computer classes. So Kim, thanks for sharing that comment. And it's great to see so much interest in this. So we'll try to get to some of these questions at the end. And if we don't get to your question live, we will respond later via email. So keep sending those questions in. Actually, we have now a question for all of you. And as we mentioned, Steve is always looking for ideas for new topics. And I saw a few comments come through. And Steve, these are some of the topics you've already kind of identified as potentials for the next slate of tutorials you'll develop. Is that right? Yes, yeah. Great. So these are some of popular apps and social media type tools that your patrons, your library users might be interested in. So we'll just give another quick poll here. And let us know what topics you would like to see taught in the future on TechBoomers.com if these would be useful for you. You can select all that apply. And we'll see which ones rise to the top here. And we'll give you a few minutes to think about that. So Steve, it looks like Pandora is definitely leading, and Audible and Travelocity are also up there. Is that a surprise to you? Or what do you think about that? No, I think Pandora is a pretty popular one. I expected Audible to be up there. Meetup has been requested a number of times. I mean, all of these have been requested at least once by our partners and our users. And we'll probably have all of them made within the next four months or so. But it's great to discover which ones are most desired by our partners, or potential library partners I guess. Excellent. And I have to confess, Kik, I am not familiar with that. Can you tell me what that is? Maybe everybody else would like to know as well for others. Yeah, I probably should have put. It's a messaging app basically. It's very similar to WhatsApp if you're familiar with that one. All right, so instant messaging. Yeah, and I see some people have selected other, and you can certainly type in the chat and I'll share all those responses with Steve after the webinar is over. It's great to get those ideas in, and we appreciate hearing from you as to what you're interested in. I know Steve told me he appreciates that as well. So I'm going to close this poll in just a couple of seconds so if you will make your final selections. And we'll go ahead and close the poll in 3, 2, and 1. All right, so there are the final results. Thank you so much for giving us your feedback there. And with that, Steve, I'm going to say thank you so much. We'll bring you back on for questions at the end. Okay, great. Thank you. All right, and now it's time to turn the controls over to Kathy who's going to talk about older adults, technology, and the library. Kathy? Thanks, Crystal. Hi everyone. I'm Kathy, and I've been polishing and perfecting our adult digital literacy options here at the Wintertown Library for about four years now. What I've noticed about teaching technology is that the emphasis should be on teaching and not technology. Having a great knowledge of how the latest technology works does no good unless you're able to pass on that knowledge. This seems especially important with older adults. I find it works best when I take my time, give them time to understand, and above all, let them do it. Studies show that older adults are the fastest growing segment of the population in the U.S. and also the fastest growing segment of library users. In the past, the primary focus of library seems to have been on early literacy for children. It's only recently that I've seen an uptick in adult and older adult programming and services. This group is underserved and underrepresented. It's more important than ever to aid this population with technology so they can cross the digital divide. Lack of access to technology and or training to use technology are key problems which we try to address. I've seen plenty of folks come into the library because they need a specific IRS form to file taxes, or because they need to print a benefit letter for Social Security Administration, or because they need to email medical documentation. No matter how you look at it, we live in a society where it's getting increasingly difficult to avoid using the Internet for basic needs. I don't assume all older adults are either uninterested or unable to learn technology. The Internet grandma meme is quite the stereotype. More often than not, I've noticed that if they want to invest the time to learn, they absolutely can learn given the right tools. What's the best way to reach older adults? How do we let them know what the library can offer in the way of technology training? Let's do a poll. We'd like to know which of these you are directly involved in providing at your library or nonprofit, meaning that you do these as part of your job or volunteer role. Please select up to three that apply to your job by clicking the radio button and then click submit. Once you submit your response, you'll see a summary of all the responses. If you have any ideas that you'd like to share, please put them in the chat and we'll try to share out as many of your chat responses as we can. Looks like visitors at the library is really running the majority here. Some word of mouth, some online, some other. I'd like to see what some of the other suggestions are, how you reach out to your community. We'll give it just a few more seconds before we close the poll. Some last minute stuff you can add in, how you reach your patrons. Look at that, 90% because they come to the library in the first place. That's interesting. Okay, I'm going to close in 3, 2, 1. All right, if you didn't see the results before, you can see them now. It looks like 90% of you definitely try to reach out as people visit the library and that's really good. But actually, I think the answer should be all of the above. And if you look at studies, what they say is the most effective way is through the newspaper. I wouldn't think about that, but that's what it says is usually the way that older adults can be reached best. Our weekly library links are published in the local paper and many of the older adults who take my classes say they found out about what the library offers because they read it in the newspaper. After every class, we have all the participants fill out a paper survey. We then enter the surveys as is on our Zoho.com login to keep track of statistics. We don't have the participants fill out the survey online themselves because many have just taken a very basic class and they just learned to use a mouse properly. Statistically, since January 2014, about 954 class surveys have been collected at St. Mary's County Library and about 55%, about half of our survey respondents learned of the class through reading the newspaper or by walking into the library. Also been helpful to put up flyers and a brochure with a list of classes for the next few months around the library for those who are regular users. We get less of a response from older adults using online listservs or social media. However, I don't assume that all older adults are not computer users as studies show online use among older adults is increasing. About 21% of my survey respondents said they learned of our classes online. Interestingly, about 10% said that they'd heard about the class through a friend. Don't underestimate the word of mouse factor. It really does count. Another great venue is outreach into the community. We go to the health fairs, try to connect with the Department of Aging, partner with the VA home that's next to one of our branches, and provide delivery service options when possible to senior centers. The more we are intertwined with the community, the better I like it. Plus, the more partners we have, the lighter the workload on our staff to meet the technology needs. And if you're like me, you don't have a large amount of time off desk to invest in exploring different resources for technology training. Here are some of the resources that I found to be the most useful. Digital Learn is a great place for librarians to go for technology training resources. Its community forum is also a good place to exchange ideas. Many who follow this site have posted their own lesson plans and valuable advice. If you look at the top of this screen, you'll see the Help Learners tab, and that's a very useful place to go if you're a librarian looking for ideas. Tech Boomers is another excellent resource I share with the older adults in my library and every computer class I mentioned the Tech Boomers site as well. This site is very senior-friendly, easy to follow, written with the user in mind. It's not too technical. Its tutorials are step-by-step clear instructions, and there's a community forum to exchange information. If you notice on the right-hand side, there's an Internet 101 tab as well. I really like that part. Denver Public Library has a fantastic list of classes which break down into short sessions easily, and they don't mind if other librarians use them. I use the DPL lesson plans when I teach lessons like Privacy or Safety Online. Because I've had a lot of requests for practice with cloud storage, we now teach a Google Drive class. I also look at what they have already done when I'm going to plan a new class. Why reinvent the wheel? They have so many good resources here. Five Star Programming and Services for your 55-plus library customers by BarberMates is an ALA programming guide and an excellent resource if you're thinking of ways you can better serve older adults. The checklist on the right contains ideas or aids such as trackball mice, large-letter keyboards, zoom screens, non-glare lighting, and it highlights the importance of including older adults in planning for services. The more invested they are in the process, the better. I know all of these sound like common sense, but how many of these does your library have in place? We have a patron who comes in regularly who's legally blind and has some troubles with dexterity, and although she's always willing to learn new technology, these are the kinds of things we have to have available to her for her to be successful. Games are often thought to be helpful. Even older adults want to have fun while they learn. The mouse-sized program is a great way to see if dexterity will be a problem with using a mouse. Click-and-drag is not easy for everyone. Simple games such as Solitaire are also a great way to practice, especially with touchscreen technology. All practice is good practice. Being ADA or Americans with Disability Act compliant is always a good idea in the library. Trying to think in terms of wheelchairs, walkers, vision, hearing, and dexterity difficulties when you're teaching technology, but address these to maintain dignity, privacy, and independence as much as possible. Many older adults can't drive themselves, so technology training should be offered at times when a ride or the bus will most likely be available. Relevance is so key. Most of the time older adults know what their information need is, but it's up to us to show them how to use the technology to get to that information. They need to know what is useful and usable right away. So for example, so many seniors come into the library and tell me they don't have time to learn all that computer stuff, but then they follow it up with something like, can you help me get into my Facebook? I need to see the new pictures of the grandkids, and I think that's a real teachable moment. That's when you can sit down and show them how. Many adults want someone to help them one-on-one. Most often they come into the library holding the tablet, the kids got them for the holidays, and hand it over to the library, and then they say something like, I am stupid about computers. Can you help me with this? In my opinion, it's not a question of stupid. The problem is that no one's taken the time to show them how to use the device. I always keep in mind that older adults have not grown up with technology around them, although many, particularly the younger older adults or baby boomers, have learned to use computers in their jobs, or are trying to learn since they've retired. But if you walk them through how it works, most catch on relatively quickly. I would recommend that all libraries allow for one-on-one appointments as it is a valuable training tool. It's also important to remember that not everyone has Wi-Fi or roaming service, so the library may be the only way to online access. This is a picture of our reference library, Elizabeth, showing a 95-year-old veteran how to use his tablet to download e-books and audiobooks. Studies show that small group learning can be very effective for teaching technology. The availability of an instructor to help with questions, and the social sharing of others in the class make this an effective tech tool. Have you given up on this at your library because of no shows or low attendance? This is where the feedback is so valuable. Maybe it's the time, maybe it's the class size, maybe it's something else. Try and try again from a different tack. This is where you really need a librarian who likes to engage and teach. The other thing I find very effective is a reminder phone call. Keep an active waiting list. Let folks know if they can't make it, there's someone waiting for their spot. The older adults seem to like the courtesy call reminder, especially if they don't check the email that their kids set up for them. During classes is how I get out the word about one-on-one appointments, future classes, useful online tutorials, and I think this is a great way to connect with the community. This is a picture of our laptop lab. We have nine total laptops, and we set them up in our meeting room for each class. Our Lexington Park branch has a dedicated lab which is open to the public when it's not being used for computer classes or Minecraft groups. I've had several people tell me how much they like the small group setting to learn. And next to the photograph is a comment from one of our surveys that we collect. The Computer Basic series we offer is a four-part series that covers hardware, operating systems, the Internet, and email. Usually the group starts and ends together, although that's not required. They can take the classes at any of our branches anytime they are offered. Studies show that repetition and building on prior knowledge, especially within a short time period, is the way to retain the technology knowledge. You can see from the comment above that it gets a smiley face. We do a certificate of attendance for those who complete the classes. Our local job source learned of our Microsoft Office series, and they send folks to us to take this series. Why? Because the classes are free. And one of the first things many potential employers ask is, do you know anything about Microsoft Office? Many older adults are not opting to retire until later in life, and they need these skills even when they have had awesome prior work experience. Hands-on practice is needed to feel confident that you can do it, and we can help. I fail all the time. It's how I learn what not to do the next time. For example, I tried teaching the Computer Basics one in the evening, and I got lots of requests for evening classes. Attendance was abysmal. And why? Probably because the older adults who are the folks who overwhelmingly take this particular first class the most don't like to drive at night. Let them learn. Don't offer it at night. That's not the time for it. Do you do class evaluations? My class surveys in Zoho can quickly and easily tap into which classes are most requested or what folks liked about the classes. And from these I can tell what else folks would be interested in learning by their responses. Technology surveys also give a good big picture of community needs. We just completed one of these for our library last month, and the link to those results is on our library website, which will be in your archives. Do you keep statistics? Our monthly PCs or public computer statistics tell us how often and long our public computers are used. We keep statistics for our one-on-one sessions and any questions we answer at the information desk about apps for Overdrive, Hoopla, and even Zinnia. It's another way to know what training the older adults need. Libraries are key in crossing the digital divide. Access and training provided free by the library are key to bringing the whole community to emerging technology. A digital inclusion team or a digital inclusion plan are important for outlining what your library system wants to do. Our digital inclusion team has made a three-year plan of steps to meet our community's technology needs. Partnerships are also key. For example, we started a partnership with our local community college this year. They send us their IT students as service learners, a.k.a. volunteers, and we get extra hands to help with the technology needs, especially during classes, and that's been very successful. This is where I get my best feedback from those who have taken a class at the library. Suggestions have included different hours or days to have the classes, doing a next level up after the basic level, expanding to photography or for digital photo editing or how to save your photos. I'm seeing a lot more requests for social media classes as well. And folks often say thanks for having a free option to learn. I love reading the comments like the ones you see there. We are constantly upgrading, changing, adding classes, refurbishing classes. In short, we read and consider all the comments and requests we get on the surveys. In addition to our digital inclusion team, we also have a computer class team made up of one member from each of our branches. The team meets twice a year to answer what are we doing right and what do we need to do to better serve the community. We will never get the numbers. Most children's programs pack in hundreds, and I'm happy when my laptop lab has a full complement of eight. But then I remind myself that I'm fulfilling my library's mission to help one person at a time in the community. And when I read the surveys after class for feedback, and I realize that I'm contributing to someone's lifelong learning, that is when I know I'm giving quality service. This is a picture of Frankie. He comes into our library almost daily and works on his computer to preserve the documents for our local historical society. There are many options for the future. I'm always trying to think of the next big idea that we could latch onto and explore. Since we have laptop labs and cases, there's the possibility of traveling technology. Or as part of our outreach, maybe we could do a tablet day at the area senior centers. I would like to explore more options of taking the library to the older adults who often have limited means to get to the library, to be a library without borders. More mobile and more mobile. We are currently in process of building a new branch which will share space with the local senior center. We will have a computer lab which will be steps from the other activities for the older adults. I would love to partner with Tech Boomers to do weekly guided tutorials for the year at learning new technologies, especially if the seniors get to choose the tutorial and they have written and viewing options. That would be awesome. This is a list of a few of the references that I've used. I was writing a literature review on the topic of older adults using the Internet for an online master's class at San Jose State University. And you'll have access to this list in the archive as well. Ready to increase the digital literacy in your older adult library users? Hopefully you have the talent, the tech, and now some tools to help make it happen. If you have any questions, please feel free to email me and thank you. Kathy, thank you so much. I'm sorry to jump in at the end too early there, but you had so much great information to share. And we do have some questions, just a reminder before I get to those questions that all of these references and the links that we've talked about so far will be included in the archive. Kathy, one of the links that we've been getting questions about is you mentioned a survey tool, and I just wanted to make sure we know what that is so we can include a link to it. So will you tell us the name of that again? Sure. It's ZohoZOHO.com. Great. That's what I thought. It's a place where you can create a login to keep track of statistics. Excellent. So that's one tool that's available. Is that a free tool to use or is there a fee for it? I don't know off the top of my head. I would have to check, but I can get back and let you know. Okay. We'll take a look at that as well. Excellent. So that answers one of the big questions we had was what was that survey tool. We had another question, and someone was just wondering if you have an office of aging in your town or in your service area and if you have partnered with them at all? Yes. We do have a department of aging, and yes, we do partner with them. In fact, they're doing a program here tomorrow on the services that they offer to the community. We have a very thriving senior community in our area, and I think it's three senior centers. So yeah, we're trying to do more with them, especially as we're approaching the area when we will share space. Excellent. Another question to come in is just wondering how you will define older adults, whether that's for your programs or maybe what you've seen in the research you've done so far. What's the definition that you use for older adults? Oh, that's a good question. You know, it's interesting. A lot of the studies that I read on this community would say, well, you have to call them older adults because they're negative connotations with seniors or baby boomers or old people or elderly. So that's why I generally use the term older adults because I've been reading it so much recently. But from my mind, I always think 65 and above, but it really is a very different subset of groups. And a lot of the studies that are being done now are actually breaking it down into groups. For example, your baby boomer generation, which are senior citizens, are not going to have the same experiences or the same needs as, for example, someone who's 80-plus years old. So a lot of the studies that are being done now actually do break it down into different age groups within the older adult category. But from my mind, I always think in terms of about 65 up. Okay, all right. And I noticed on that ALA Programming Guide, sometimes we see it down as low as 55 and up, and I think that was what was made and listed on that Programming Guide. So there's definitely a bit of a gray zone on the lower end of that age range, right? Sure. And in fact, I think I could qualify to enter a senior center at 50, and that's pretty close for me. Right, so there's a bit of a gray area there, but thanks for providing a bit more context there that helps us understand. So we've also gotten some questions specific to working with seniors and older adults. Matilda asks, how do you work with seniors with memory problems? And I once helped a patron who had the same question at every visit. I have the same thing, Matilda. So it's patient. You just have to be patient. Recognize that a lot of older adults are going to come back to you with the same question over and over again. I've shown one older adult in our library how to use, how to download to overdrive on his tablet three times. And if he comes in a fourth time, I'll show him again. You know, the library is their free resource. It's their place to have someone who doesn't rush them through. A lot of folks are lucky enough to have kids to help them, but a lot of times the kids don't have the patience, but some of them don't even have that. And we're there for them. That's our job. So if I have to do it over and over again, that's what I do. Yeah. And a similar question, and I know you did address this somewhat when you talked about working one-on-one with older adults. But Phillip asks, how do you work to overcome the essential anxiety often voiced as I don't know how to use one of these things or I'll never learn? So is there anything you do to help people get started and assess if it's keyboard and mouse skills, that sort of thing? I would say probably, I run into that a lot, of course, the lack of confidence is a huge thing, which is why the small group classes work so well, because they're usually there with people in the same boat. And it's funny, by the end of the class they're helping each other out, showing each other, and they gain some confidence from that. But above and beyond that, I would say, I try not to be, I try to keep in mind that everybody lacks confidence when they first start these things. Every time I open something new in a computer or learn a new technology, I'm like, I don't know if I can do this. So I try to remember that when I'm working with people. Take the time to sit down, talk to them, grab the mouse or start grabbing their tablet and do it for them. I mean, it may take 10 minutes for them to be able to get the overdrive out, downloaded, but once they do it themselves, they learn it. And then they're not so worried about messing it up and wanting to hand it to you to do it for them. Does that make sense? It does, it does. And I'm just going to point out that there's a theme here that has to do with allowing the time and that patience that it takes to learn new things, which I have also seen some of the comments people talking about perhaps not having the staff time available to really spend that. So that's certainly one of the challenges we face. But that seems to be a theme in your response, that just allowing the older adults the time it takes to learn and letting them know that's okay, can help ease the anxiety and also over time is a better way to deal with those memory issues. And also, I have to say I've been thrilled with the local community college IT majors have been really wonderful. And generally I worry a little bit when it's an intergenerational kind of thing, when it's the younger generation trying to help the older generation, but they've just been wonderful and very patient and just great. So it's nice to have those volunteers and that does help cut down on some of the staff time. Those partnerships really help with staff hours. All right, well Kathy, thank you very much. I do want to bring Steve back on for one more question before we sign off. We're just about out of time for the day. But Kathy, thank you so much for your expertise that you've shared with us today. A lot of great information there. So thank you. Thank you. All right, so Steve, I know one question and I thought this would be a good time to bring it in. We've seen a lot of people asking about the average length of your tutorials and that also kind of ties to this concept. We were just talking about with the need for more time, sometimes on particular topics or to address something with older adults. So Steve, could you just give us an idea of the Tech Boomers Tutorials? What is the range of length for those? How long do you think it generally takes people to complete the idea there? Yeah, it's a great question. And it can vary quite a bit as you might imagine. If we're covering a relatively simple topic like how much does Netflix cost, obviously we can answer that quite quickly. But then if we have, like for Facebook, for example, we have different tutorials on the different kind of big features like Facebook groups. And there's a lot of content to cover on how to, what are groups, how to join a group, how to edit a group, how to create a group. So there's a lot of topics. Those can probably take up to an hour. But those are, that's certainly the longest that we have of all of them. Most of them I would better about 15 to 20 minutes. Great, great. All right, so a little bite-size chunks that people can take a little bit at a time. So that's great to hear. Well, we are just about out of time and I have a few announcements. And I hope you'll stay on the line so you can take just a brief survey at the end to tell us about your experience today. But for those of you who are still awaiting answers on questions, we'll get back to you via email. And the archive will be available shortly and you will receive an email with that information once it is ready. So thank you for staying on the line. Again, just a few announcements very briefly here. We are having a forum after today's webinar. So if you'd like to continue this conversation, Becky has just shared a link to that in the chat and you can go over there. And this will be like a discussion forum where you can add your comments and questions there. So we'd love to hear more about what you learned today. And also what you'd like to learn more about in the future, especially related to this topic as we look to having more information on helping older adults with technology. Also just a few upcoming TechSoup webinars that you might be interested in. Next Tuesday we're having a webinar on maximizing technology services through TechSoup product donations. So you can register for that. It's a free webinar. And then you might mark your calendar for June 15th on the Changing Landscape of Library Privacy. Another library-specific webinar on a very hot topic in our libraries today. So we hope that you'll join us for one of those. And you can explore our webinar archives and upcoming webinar offerings at TechSoup.org. Also TechSoup for Libraries has our blog, library-specific information, our newsletter. You can sign up there. And you can also share your story with us if you'd like to share something with the larger library community. You can submit it there. All right. So that's it for my announcements. Again, stay on the line for just one more minute and we'll share a brief survey with you about today's webinar. Thanks again to Steve and Kathy for sharing the expertise on this important topic. And thanks to ReadyTalk for being our webinar sponsor. Thanks for joining us and have a great afternoon.