 Welcome back everyone to the final session, the final presentation of Big Talk from Small Libraries 2015. This is Michael Kristin Laura here at the Nebraska Library Commission in Lincoln, Nebraska. And we are wrapping the day up here. And so just to remind everybody, everything is being recorded. These slides and the videos will be put up starting next week after all of this is over. We can edit everything apart. If you have any questions or comments during our final session here, you can submit them via the questions and answers area in the GoToWebinar interface or via Twitter using the hashtag BTSL. So with us for our final presentation of the day is Doris Ann Mertz, the Library Director of Custer County Library in South Dakota. Speaking on the senior connection, helping technology make sense to seniors. Welcome Doris Ann. Take it away. Thank you and thank you for allowing me to present and talk about how we have started getting our seniors updated with the newest technology. First of all, I want to say I'm not an expert at presenting a webinar. I've never done this before, so you may have to bear with me. And I also need to say that I'm not a technology expert either. But that's one of my points in this presentation is that you don't have to know everything to start helping seniors. You just have to know more than they do in order to help them. Okay, I want to talk about why we want to reach out to seniors. Why is this the purpose of the library? And at our library, I was kind of encouraged to do this by my library board. When I came here in 2011, we spent some time trying to improve our children's programs. And then later, we moved on to the teen programs. And then at my last performance evaluation, they always give me three goals for the coming year. And this year, one of them was a focused outreach to seniors. And it also fits into our mission statement, the mission of our libraries to provide resources and services in a welcoming environment to support a diverse community of lifelong learners. And I think sometimes we forget that seniors are still learners. They need to be served and we need to help teach them. And also, it helps us with our accreditation standards in the state of South Dakota. We have to host and evaluate outcomes of programs for children, teens, and adults. And this gives us a kind of a different type of adult program that we can put on besides just book discussions and writing workshops and gives us a chance to evaluate if we're helping our community by doing this. And I think that all libraries in every community should reach out to seniors because there's a need there. Seniors need a place to go to for help with technology. The grandkids know how to do it, but they don't actually slow down enough to show them. They just end up taking over the device or the computer and doing it for them. And they go so fast that it just kind of leaves them more intimidated instead of less. So basically you can choose to meet that need, not to meet that need, or you can serve that need on an unorganized drop-in basis, which is what we used to do. Or you can formalize the training and make it more effective. Any time I try to start a new venture, I see if there's a suitable partner in my community that it would make sense to work with and so we could both help our patrons and the ones we serve. So if it's the kids programming, I work with the Y. And of course with the seniors, I wanted to reach out to the senior center. And I think most communities have senior centers. We are a county library and we have a senior center here in the larger town of Custer, and we also have one over in Hermosa. So I think most small communities have senior centers, so it's good to reach out and involve them. For one thing, they can help you with scheduling. They know the habits of the people who come to the senior center, the people they serve, and they can help you pick a time that is the best to host programs. And sometimes that's a challenge, is figuring out the best time to schedule a program so you get the most people able to come. And they also are great at helping promote the events. We have a senior center newsletter and it's read by all the senior citizens. I hear them talking about what they read in the newsletter when they come into the library. So she can promote it in her building and in the newsletter, and that really helps me out. So if you form a partnership with any group like the senior center, it can be formal or informal. We're just kind of an informal community here, so ours is informal. And we both have the common goal, wanting to provide programs to enhance the lives of seniors. So we just coordinate, determine what classes they'd like. We set a date and time, and then we determine how the best promote it. There's a lot of benefits to reaching out to seniors and to partnering with the senior center. Well, the first thing is obvious. It helps you fulfill a need in the community. And I'm sure even if you're not providing senior focused programming, you know that there's a need to help them with technology and helps to enhance the lives of seniors. Once you get them on to overdrive books, those large print readers have so much more of a variety than what they get just in your library in large print books, because they can change the font size on any book they check out. So it enhances their lives and being able to check and see grandkids pictures on Facebook, that definitely helps them to be more in touch with their family. You have improved attendance at programs from partnering with the senior center because of what we talked about scheduling and promotion. You have an increased use of library resources, whether it be more checkouts through overdrive or more use of your electronic resources like Ancestry. And you increase the library's footprint in your community. By partnering with the senior center, we become more visible in the community and we're increasing our support base. So I've heard a lot of presenters talk about this already today. Sometimes you've got to take the library to the community before you get the community coming into your library more. So I went down to the senior center, met with the director there, and we decided we're going to provide these technology programs and we provide the first one at the senior center because it's a familiar environment for them where they feel comfortable. We scheduled the program for early afternoon. They come in town a lot for the senior lunch and they could just stay after that and take advantage of our program. When we got together, we talked about some ideals of programs they might like and of course one of the obvious ones was the introduction to Facebook. We also talked about a bring your own device kind of session where they could come and learn how to use overdrive to check out downloadable e-books and audio books. We decided to offer a Tablets 101 class where it's not just focused on overdrive but on using tablets or smartphones either one for any use that they had that they wanted to learn to use it for. We talked about Book of Librarian where we could promote that they can call and make an appointment and I could sit down with them one-on-one and we'd work on the things they want to learn to do with their tablet or smartphone. Of course, Ancestry Library. A lot of seniors are interested in genealogy, family tree type stuff so we thought we would do that. That's all we've done so far. We just had the Ancestry class last week but we're going to have some other classes on the other electronic resources like maybe Mango Languages. I have some seniors who come in here want to learn new languages. Sometimes they go on trips and they want to learn that language somewhat before they go on their trip so I think that will be our next session. Our first class was an introduction to Facebook. Seniors, even if they don't really want to get on it their own they feel pressured to get on Facebook because they want to see pictures of their grandkids and hardly anyone mails photos in the mail and they also rarely email the pictures anymore. They just tell them to get on Facebook and they can see their grandkids. This is the one we held at the senior center. We focused on several things like developing a profile, adjusting the privacy settings, adjusting the notification settings. A lot of times on the privacy they're worried everybody can see it. They need to be aware that they can manage what people see and if they adjust them people can only see their cover photos and they get to see everything else. A lot of people didn't like Facebook because of their email getting full of notifications from Facebook and we showed them how you can adjust that and make Facebook less intrusive into their life. Some wanted to know how to upload photos so we talked about that. We talked about how to message privately. We've gotten trouble with their family for posting something on the wall of a family member and they've been told you should have sent that in a private message mom so everyone can see it. They actually sometimes don't know how to send a private message so we talked about how to do that. We talked about how to add and remove friends because sometimes they don't know how to expand their list of friends and we went through how to do that and how to search for friends and how to look at some of the family members they're already friends with and see who their friends are and send friend requests to them. And we talked about unfollowing certain friends which is kind of important because sometimes you accept a friend request from someone and their posts are very annoying and you don't want to have to see them so we talked about how they can unfollow friends and not unfriend them where the friend would notice but they can unfollow the friend and that friend doesn't know that you're not being bothered with their posts in your news feed. So we're going to talk about some things that worked for us some things I think are good ideas and some things that are not and stuff throughout this session but one thing you'll hear me say over and over is to provide handouts for them to take home if you tell them up front you're giving them handouts then they don't write notes furiously while you're talking and they try to focus more on playing on the computer or on the application so if you just tell them you're providing these to take home you can give them to them beforehand if you like I didn't I just wanted to focus on using it but showing them that the handouts they took home would have pictures and help them remember how to do everything that makes them be able to relax a little bit so to make handouts I think it's good to make handouts of the actual you know the Facebook page and I just use a snooping tool that's in the accessories on my computer to take pictures of certain sections of the screen and then I insert the pictures into Word documents and add you know text and arrows and circles and stuff to help them find what we're talking about in the notes they're not fancy handouts I'm not a fancy person but they do find them helpful and it does help them to remember what we went over if you don't provide some kind of handout there they're probably never going to remember that you go to this little arrow and then go to settings and that's how you get to the area where you adjust your notifications so you need to you know provide handouts with pictures to help them through this it's just not intuitive to them at this point to click on that little arrow they won't remember they'll just think how did we get to that place where we managed our notifications so and I know these don't look great on slides but consider these are handouts they take them home the font's pretty big when you're looking at it on a handout it's just not great for a slide alright here's some things I've learned from the class and you can benefit from what I've learned I didn't specify that the class was for laptops and PCs so I had none of them had laptops and PCs and then one had the Facebook app on an iPad which is just enough different to that they're left out of the loop a little so I had to spend time with everybody on the laptops and then work with her individually afterwards so you probably want to specify if the Facebook class is for laptops or for apps and if it is for apps you'll need to make a separate set of take-home handouts okay next thing is you need to start the class by determining the needs of the group when everyone showed up I had to ask them where they were at and all but one already had an account so it wasn't starting from scratch and I found out that most just wanted to be able to view other people's stuff and not to post some did want to upload photos but it didn't seem like they were interested in you know posting everything they've done lately like younger groups are so we talked about that providing take-home handouts already and you need to know what your Wi-Fi can handle I'd have liked to have held more classes at the senior center than just this one but it turned out their Wi-Fi couldn't handle a lot of action so we were we spent a lot of time waiting on responses on the laptops so you need to probably figure that out beforehand how many people could get on a laptop on that Wi-Fi and it still work so we've had to hold the rest of the classes here at the library because we have a little better Wi-Fi connection this is I think important for seniors you need to help them distinguish between their timeline and their newsfeed because some of them get upset that they think everything everyone else is posting and that showing up on their newsfeed is what people can see when they go to their page so you need to help them understand that the timeline is what people see when they go to their page and they can control what's on there they can even control you know if people tag them they might have to review it and allow it on their timeline instead of just allowing anything on there they kind of get nervous that some of this stuff they think is inappropriate is showing up on their newsfeed and they think people can see that when they go to their site and just remember to help them learn how to unfollow people so does anybody have questions so far on the Facebook side of things before I move on? Yeah actually I think we did have one question come in Laura it's kind of a simple question they're asking if they could get a copy of your Facebook handouts oh yeah that'd be fine like I said they're pretty simple well you know hey it feels good see yeah simple is fine and so I think what we'll do is we'll try to get those from Doris and we'll include them with her recording in her presentation after yeah that's it for now okay thanks okay the next class we offered was a bring your own device class and we use that class to learn how to check out e-books and audio books through overdrive and the center of the picture here is Fran she's one of my large print readers and she checked out one of our tablets we have here at the library because when she's reading the large print in our library she's often reading stuff she's really not interested in but you know we only have a limited amount of the budget that we can put towards large print books so she was a little hesitant to check out our tablet but I encouraged her to do it and told her I'd help her through it and get her used to it so she checked out the tablet and she really enjoyed it and we let her keep it for six weeks two three week periods and then she had to check it back in but she said she ended up being spoiled because she liked being able to make that font really big and she liked that the tablet was lightweight compared to the large print books and she mentioned that one time the next time she came in she told me that she needed me to help her find a tablet and buy it that she'd hinted to her kids but they just weren't responding fast enough and she wanted to be able to read on a tablet so we, we're a small library so we do things like this sometimes but we just went to Woot.com which often has good deals on tablets and laptops and things like that if you ever need to buy a prize for a drawing or something I'd recommend looking there and watching for the deals but we found her an Android tablet at Woot.com she doesn't have a credit card of course so I used my credit card and bought the tablet and a good cover for her and she just right away wrote me the check for the amount and when it arrived we set it up with the Overdrive app and loaded some books for her and she came to our Bring Your Own Device class so she could get more comfortable with checking out her own books she still has to come to the library or go to her daughter Janet who's in the picture with her she has to go to one of those places to do the Overdrive because she doesn't have Wi-Fi at home but she was able to understand the checkout process I went through it with her before and then she came to the class and you know after a little bit of repetition she's getting comfortable with it and she's enjoying it and I feel really glad that we were able to improve Fran's life and now she can read any book that's in our Overdrive catalog instead of being limited to what's in our meager large print collection here at the library so some suggestions I have for this Bring Your Own Device class is that when you promote it as well as when they call and ask for information about it and everything you need to stress the need to bring their passwords because you know if they've got a Kindle Fire and they can't remember their Amazon password then you're stuck and if someone set up their tablet for them and they can't remember their Google password or their iTunes or Apple Store passwords then you're stuck so stress the need for passwords. If you have a Bring Your Own Device class narrow the focus of the class for example this class was on Overdrive you could have one about Facebook you know or whatever is the latest thing that everyone's wanted to use but we just in ours it was narrowed in to working on getting comfortable with Overdrive. You should group similar devices so pretty much if it's iPad, iPod, iPhone group those together because those will work similarly your Kindle devices you should group together and Android tablets like if it's ASUS, Samsung different brands like that they're usually the Android type of device and I have never ever had anyone that was a Windows phone or a Windows Surface Tablet user come to me for help with anything. I think that my theory is that if they bought a Windows device that they're pretty up on their technology already because for some reason I've never had to help anyone with one of those. The next suggestion is provide some library tablets for test drives so people can see if they actually like using one and might want to consider getting one themselves and they're not very expensive you know if you buy one of these Samsung Galaxy well I forgot the name but ASUS is what we bought but you can get deals on them like I said at thewoot.com and you can just keep your eye out for deals buy one get it set up with a good cover and I like to have a stylus with it because they seem to do well with the stylus and provide some take home handouts for those who need them. The overdrive is a little simpler to get around in I think probably then finding everything on Facebook but I have handouts that I've made for our tablets that we check out and I just give them if they had an Android version I give them a copy of this handout to take home with them so that they can remember the steps. This is a sample of part of the handout. It just walks you through the steps of tapping borrow, tap download, check Adobe EPUB book. I think they took the Adobe part off now and then that seems like the seniors don't, they think they've done all the steps but for some reason overdrive made this confirm and downloads so small that they don't really notice that pop up there and don't remember to finish it by clicking on that so this reminds them to do that. I don't know why that part has to be so small but that's just me. The other Facebook where I use the snipping tool to take pictures of my Facebook page on this one I just actually took the camera or the iPad or something and made pictures and then I just inserted them into the Microsoft Word file and added the arrows and instructions and stuff. This also once again helps them relax if you tell them they can take something home that helps them through the steps. I'm not showing you all the pages from my handouts but I think this is also an important page to include. They want to learn, they want to know how to change the font size so if you'll show them, when they're reading a book those menus are not there and they can't remember how to get the menus back there so by having a handout that reminds them to tap the middle of the page and that the menus will come up and then which one is the settings icon and how to change the font size that helps them to get that process done. They also are always concerned about how to return the book when they're done. They want to return it as soon as they're done and this way you can show them all they have to do is press and hold the book and then tap return and say yes so that is pretty simple and this way they have the instructions with them to take home. That's what I have on the bring your own device. Does anyone have any questions on this section? Questions from the audience? I think you were saying one or two came in that you managed to answer while you were talking. They were interested in what kind of tablets you have and how do you check them out? I have ASUS, I don't know if that's the way you even pronounce it, ASUS. I have that kind because that's kind of what I'm familiar with. I bought one for my husband for Christmas last year and it was a good deal and it's a basic Android device and I outfitted it with a nice cover and a stylus and then I bought a bag to put it in. I can't remember what kind of bag it is but it has a area where you can put the charger and stuff so they can take it home and I fold up the instructions and put in there and we just add it to our catalogue. I forgot what the category is. There's a category in our, we use Follitt's Destiny and there's a category we put that into and we just check it out. They have an agreement they sign before they take it home and it tells them how much everything costs and that they're responsible for it if they lose it and stuff like that. Is that everything they wanted to know or something else? I think that covers it. Thank you. The third class we offered was Tablets 101. The class was focused on learning to use a tablet or a smartphone. I let them use smartphones as well just for various purposes. It wasn't focused on using overdrive but if enough of them wanted to know how to do that, that's what we covered. These are some thoughts that come to mind when I think about seniors and tablets. Many of them were received as gifts for Christmas. Sorry, I had to get some water. They're not sure they want it. A lot of times their kids set it up for them. Passwords, sometimes the kid or whoever gave them the gift and set it up but they don't know where the passwords are and we get stuck if they just drop in and don't have the passwords. We can't make any progress because you can't download an app without the passwords. It's good to have a stylus handy because they're like me and I don't know. I have fingers that don't work very well on tablets. I see other people just make stuff bigger and smaller and have no trouble and I just feel more comfortable with a stylus to tap on things and do things and they seem to like that as well. Some of them need really basic skills like just how to swipe and how to make the screen larger or smaller and all that stuff. Some will know that already when they come in but some don't so you have to start at the basics sometimes. Some suggestions I have for the tablets 101 class. One is to limit the class size. I would suggest probably 5 students per one helper. If you have someone else helping you or something then you can have a bigger class. If it's just you probably 5 or 6 would probably be a good size. Survey the desires of the folks who come in there and focus on the top 3. These kind of classes are a little scary because it's not like you can prepare a PowerPoint and just go through it because you don't really know what they want to use their tablet or smartphone for. You don't know that until they show up. I just ask them what they want to learn out of the class and then we focus on the top 3. If we get time to go on to anything else then we do. I remind them that if we don't cover what they wanted to learn that I can cover that in an individual session later that this is not their only chance to learn. I found that some of the common requests when we want to know what they want to do is that they want to be able to do their email on the tablet or smartphone. They'd like to learn to use Facebook. They want to learn how to share photos. Sometimes they come with a tablet and they've been taking photos like crazy with it but they don't know how to do anything with them so they want to know how to do that. Sometimes they want to learn overdrive and some of them are interested in using it as a GPS and not having to have a separate GPS in the car. Some like the idea that they can talk with family through FaceTime or Skype and some just they like games and music like the younger folks do. I have more suggestions and I already talked about this one all for individual help with the topics you don't get around to in the class. Group similar devices just like in the other class you know have your Android folks sitting together and then Android when I'm using that is just a generic term for the ones that don't use a Windows platform and it's not an iPad, iPod, iPhone kind of device. Group similar skill levels if you have a larger class and you have some helpers then you might want to break them up into ones that need help learning how to just swipe the pages and all that stuff and ones who've already been playing with theirs and gotten comfortable with it but want to learn how to do some specific things. Now like I said you could expand your class to smartphones but just make sure it's a real smartphone. I had someone had a phone it was like a touch screen, it was a touch screen version of a phone but it wasn't really a smartphone. It had a browser that allowed you to do limited things like just check your email and the weather and that was very frustrating. I almost felt like buying her a different device so I never had to see that one again I hated it so much. Also this is a suggestion I think they like to know there's that voice command option because some of them the typing texting is very tedious process and they spend as much time erasing stuff that they type as they do typing stuff so if you show them that they can say it some of them really like that, some of them don't but at least show them there's that option and how to use it and once again provide handouts of the basics. I guess I made a mistake in this class. I was so worried about keeping the class size manageable because I put it out there we were going to have this class and I was afraid I'd be overwhelmed with the number of people and they'd all have different devices and different questions and that I just wouldn't be up to it so if I did it again I'd ask people to register and limit the class size and I was so terrified I'd be overwhelmed that when folks called expressing the interest I tried to steer them to the book of librarian and in the same article I talked about this class I talked about the book of librarian but when they called about it I tried to get them to do the book of librarian so I had 12 book of librarian sessions that month which was great but only had three show up for the actual class which actually turned out to be a good thing because of that phone that wasn't a smart phone after I helped the other ladies with their tablets and smart phones we tried to work with that and she just got it out of the box and it was the most frustrating device I've ever dealt with so anyways and here's a handout suggestion I have. I believe in borrowing stuff as long as you give people credit and if you go to this website at the bottom of the screen they have this tech savvy seniors section on that website and they have training guides, introductions to tablets, laptops, different things so I borrowed their introduction to tablets handout printed out several and the handout went over the things you see here talked about tablets what they are and how they're different than a PC and what the difference was between iPad, Android and Windows and about using the touch screen and understanding how to swipe the page and make things larger and smaller and how to connect to the wifi, how to use the browser and how to use the keyboard. Sometimes that's confusing for them they say you use an acute keyboard and then they can't remember how you got that keyboard to come up there and they just need a little repetition that if you tap in the area you're wanting to type that that keyboard will just come up there and so it covers a lot of things and they get to take that home and I think it's kind of a helpful handout to provide them so and once again show them how to use voice command some like it some don't. Does anybody have any questions on this section? We just had one question from the preview we had kind of a clarification on the checking out question and maybe you could speak to this very briefly. I think their concern was kind of the fact that if you're checking out a library device to somebody that needs their own account say for Overdrive and then they return it how are you handling the multiple accounts on individual devices situation? I set up a dummy account. I made up a number and I put it in the Overdrive and I told it to memorize it. I think it was like 999 is a bunch of 999 but anyways I set up a dummy number that goes just with that device and they use that number instead of their own number when they check out that device. Now if they buy their own I show them how to put their number in it and tell the device to remember it and they use their own number but for those I have a dummy number. I wasn't expecting that answer but that works. Thank you. Do we have others from this section of recent questions? Yeah, somebody says how do you define senior? Would you allow someone younger? I think she's angling to be invited. I do younger people in the book of librarians but not when I market the class to seniors because I want them to not feel intimidated and they like to know that they're in a group with people that are not raised in the tech generation and stuff like that but I'll offer the book of librarians to any age. I don't have teenagers calling me because they don't need my help but middle age folks do take advantage of the book of librarians. When you say senior do you have a cutoff? Do you have a... I don't know what's considered a senior. Whoever gets that senior newsletter that it's promoted in and if they consider themselves a senior then they're welcome. They self-select basically. Some people wouldn't want to be considered a senior so they wouldn't show up. Fair enough. And someone says do you charge for the class? No, it's just a service we offer the community. What was that website mentioned for buying inexpensive tablets? Woot. W-O-O-T.com. They have different things every day though. They don't always have the same thing. Although that's where I got one of my recent tablets actually so I will back that up. It's certainly refurbished stuff but completely reliable. I buy a lot of refurbished things for my family and we've never had problems with them so... Me too. Alright, on to the Book of Librarians. Book of Librarians, just individual one-on-one sessions. They... I think that they are better than drop-ins because you can schedule them at a convenient time and you get to emphasize the need for bringing passwords. I mean if you've done this stuff on a drop-in basis you understand what I'm talking about that you can't get anywhere without the passwords because even if you ask Amazon to change the password and send you an email then when we try to log into their email they can't remember the password for that either because their home computer is set up to remember it and they haven't probably typed it in in a long time so emphasize that they're going to need their passwords. In the past, before this last year, I offered one-on-one help but it was just when they dropped in if I could fit it in and then I didn't know how long it would last sometimes and it just wasn't the most efficient way for me to help people. So, you know, and then we spent a lot of time just working on trying to remember passwords and stuff so doing the Book of Librarians has been a lot more efficient for me. And then I try to focus on the top three desires, what they want to learn to do with whatever they brought, the tablet, the smart phone, whatever they're needing help with, even if it's something on the computer how to use Ancestry or whatever, just focus on what they find out what they want to learn to do. Sometimes they have a new tablet someone gave them and they don't know what they want to do with it because they didn't really want it to be somebody else thought they should have it and you can tell them, you know, get them excited about it by telling them all the things that they can do with it and then asking them, you know, what would you like to do? Sometimes I get out my phone and show them some things I have on there that I find useful and then they'll decide what they want to learn to do with it. Sometimes they bring a device that's set up and sometimes it's just turned on and if they have all the account information with them then it's okay if they haven't set up already and at least if they just got it out of the box they're able to be there with them when they're setting up their Gmail account or whatever and you're writing down the passwords and you know you're not going to be stuck at not being able to get a password. If it's been set up it's usually been done by a friend or a family member and hopefully if you're doing this book a library and you've asked them to get those passwords for you before they come. So sometimes it is set up but the patron themselves have not actually been using it or playing around on it. They're a little bit, I find the seniors in the beginning to be a little bit afraid to just play around you know you give it to a kid that'll play around and figure out how to use it and the seniors are afraid they'll mess something up so sometimes they haven't played with it at all. Alright some suggestions for things to go over is to add a free app from the app store and show them how to move apps around. I have some grandparents that come in after their grandchildren have come to visit and they want to know how to get rid of some of the games their kids have added. Sometimes they want the game to still be there for when the next time the kid comes but they don't want it on their home screen because you know they don't want some war game on their home screen when somebody looks at their tablet so I just show them how to get rid of ones, how to uninstall apps and how to move them around and how to make sure the apps that they most want is on their home screen and how there are several of those home screens and if they don't see what they're used to seeing to navigate to the left or swipe left or right until they find the one they're used to seeing because sometimes that scares them when they find they're on a different screen than they're used to. Show them how to access their settings. We usually have to do that right away because they all have tablets that are timing out so fast it just gets aggravating so we go right in there and adjust their time out so it doesn't go to sleep so fast and we adjust the screen brightness to show them how to adjust the sound effects because some of them make a noise every time you tap on the keyboard there's a noise and that's annoying to some of them so we adjust some of that stuff right off the bat and I put the settings icon in a really visible place on their home screen or even down at the bottom where it'll be on any screen that they're on they'll still be able to access their settings. I show them how to navigate and find menus and that if there's three bars or three dots it's usually means there's a menu there and how all the devices are different but sometimes you tap screen sometimes you swipe from the top or the bottom or different things like that and we just search for how you find the menus on their particular device and just what a menu would look like and I encourage them to play that they're probably not going to break it and I always remind them before they leave that if it starts acting strange and doing things different than what they expect just to restart it you know to press the button and hold it and restart it because just like a computer sometimes it needs rebooted when it's acting goofy so that you know because sometimes I get phone calls and people's tablets acting up and that's the first thing we try is just restarting it and it usually starts behaving. I just had some stories to share I don't know if I have a lot of times to do this but I was just going to talk about Joyce she's a nursing home resident here in our town and she's a voracious reader I mean that's pretty much all she gets to do anymore and she gets around town in an electric wheelchair and she when I first got here she had one of those first generation kindles and her son gave me access to his Amazon account and I would help her check out books and return the books to overdrive and she was occupied during the long winters when she couldn't you know get her wheelchair over here and then later her son bought her a Kindle fire and a small laptop when he was in town they set up an appointment with me and I showed her how to check out the books by herself and we reviewed the process but I kind of had doubts whether she could do it on her own but she called me later and came back for a review of the process and now I don't hear from Joyce anymore she figured out how to do it how to return her books how to check them out how to do everything on her own you know it took her longer maybe more reviewing than it would maybe someone my age but she learned how to do it and she keeps herself occupied with access to books all year long from tablet borrower to tablet owner that is I told you Fran's story I have someone who has one of my tablets right now that I'm pretty sure is going to be a tablet owner in the near future I don't think she's going to like giving up the tablet she borrowed and she's getting used to how to get the books and she was in here today and she told me she just has access to so many books now and she's happy with it so I'm pretty sure she'll be picking out her own tablet in the near future sometimes I get really simple requests people call and want to come in here and they just want to like their kids put eight versions of Angry Birds on their on their tablet when they were in and they just want to get rid of them and one of the guys who needs help with this he's very intelligent a lot of our senior citizens you know they're very intelligent they just didn't grow up in this technology world but he used to be a college math professor he's written math textbooks but he just needs a little help with his iPad sometimes because it's just not intuitive to them what to do and usually what he needs help with only takes a few minutes and sometimes the last time is just that iCloud his son set up the iPad for him and his son changes passwords on him without telling him what the new password is because his son's like a security he's really into security and changes the password all the time he's frustrated with him but the iCloud sign in pops up and he didn't realize he could just hit cancel instead of hitting sign in and just could go on and play his game so sometimes it's just really simple stuff to show them sometimes they're stuck at a step and they don't realize that there's an option to skip that they don't actually have to put a credit card number in there they can just say skip so sometimes it doesn't take but a minute or two and they leave happy no one how to handle that the next time it comes up and I have only had one appointment where I helped someone that wasn't pleasant I had this older lady that came in with her son and you know I'm trying to help them and she's spent a lot of the time correcting me on everything she couldn't stand it that I was saying and adding the app and that you go to the app store and stuff like that she's like it's an application people these days don't even know what the words they use stand for it's an application so that wasn't very fun and if a lot of them were like that where I was corrected everything I said I probably wouldn't do it but you know everything except that has been so so such a good experience you know I like helping people that's one of the reasons I like being in a library so it makes you feel really good to help people and you know enhance their life and they have any questions on book of librarians they're pretty straight forward top service now it looks like we're good at this point no new questions have come in alright the last class we had was on using the genealogy resources ancestry and heritage quest that's available be the state library's website here's some suggestions I have when you host those the ancestry library they can't use that at home so we host that you know since we're small library with limited number of computers we host that outside business hours so we can have access to all the computers provide handouts from the charts and forms section on ancestry I have some of those available you know when they come in so that if they do start researching their family they have a place they can fill in information at the beginning of the class I just give a brief introduction of both of the resources and tell them the difference you know and I emphasize that the ancestry library can only be used in library but that they can access heritage quest from home with a state library card we allow most of the time is just for play and exploration of the resources that's what we spend most of the time doing sometimes we hit dead ends and that's frustrating but that's just the way it is sometimes when you're researching your family so expect a little of that and you know if you've hit a dead end and you just can't get anywhere encourage them to explore some other avenues and I found that they like to be able to look at passenger lists citizenship records things like that so show them that you know there's more than just the census information give some tips for improving their results sometimes they need to broaden their search terms and sometimes they need to narrow them because they're getting so many answers so you know show them how to do that I've already talked about that and this is just not for the class but for in general I like to have a dedicated computer that's for electronic resources so they don't have to worry you know assure them that you have that that if they want to come in and do research on ancestry library they don't have to worry about the timers like they would on our normal computers I have a laptop they can check out if you don't have a laptop you can just dedicate a computer that or if your computers are timed just make sure they know that you can extend the time to whatever they need when they're doing ancestry because you can't get a lot done in a couple of 30 minute sessions on ancestry so usually takes a little time. I like to provide handouts and this is a handout that was made by the our state library and it shows them it's a ancestry has been updated since this was made but it still gives them ideas of where to go to reminds them where to go for charts and forums tells them the website to go to and just helps them to get around and they these are double-sided handouts I give one for ancestry library and one for heritage quest I think they're really handy with the bubbles pointing to the tabs and given you know a lot of information I think in two pages so I'm glad we have these so when you have the class you know I think it would have been smarter to besides just giving them time to play around if I had some ideas for some little activities we would do and see what they could find while they were there that probably wouldn't have been a good idea I didn't do that if I have a class in the future I probably will I mean if they're going and they're happy researching their family then that's fine but it'd be good to have a few in mind you know to say let's go look up this and have something for them to do to get them used to access in the different parts of ancestry library so I show them how to access charts and forums and I like to show them how to truncate and use wild card characters because if you've used ancestry library or done any research you realize that the main spellings change on practically every census on some people so they can use the asterisk or the question mark or the asterisk can you can truncate a name or put it in the middle and it'll take the place of you know several letters so I show them how to view the actual document we found sometimes that the spelling's wrong in the information that's pulled up on ancestry but if you go and look in the actual document where they signed in their handwriting that it looks like what the name did in the last census it's just someone's misread it you know it's hard to read that handwriting sometimes so I show them how to go to the bottom on the census and link to others that were in the household and get more information on the others in their ancestors household the feature of ancestry library now they don't have to print out everything at the library they can send the documents to their email and then they can get to them at home and save the files on their computer or print them off so that's really handy aspect that they've added show them how to print the documents and we go over how to access heritage quest from home and help them get a state library card if they need one so they can do that from home and show them how to take notes in heritage quest and I have to emphasize to them that when they take notes in heritage quest those notes are not saved so they need to print those off at the end like they come in here and use heritage quest to print the notes off before they leave because the next time they pull it up it won't be there so I think to me if they're just researching their family tree I think the ancestry library is what you steer them to now if it's someone that's researching a famous person in history or someone famous in their family or the history of a certain area then heritage quest has a lot of useful information and it's aggravating that the articles you just get to see the you know you don't get to see the full text articles but you can get six articles for 750 and you know if you're researching an area and found six good articles and only had this in 750 then that's a pretty good deal so it would be worth doing this picture, this is a few years old back can tell by our computer but it shows less he used to be one of my board members but he likes to research genealogy and once he learned how to get around an ancestry library he likes sharing his knowledge with other seniors and helping them learn how to research their family tree so if you help someone learn then they can share that information with others and they can probably do a really good job of it because they remember the parts that were difficult for them or not obvious to them and then they can express on their mind and they can show them how to get through that so sum it up just need to do it reach out to seniors it is possible to teach old dogs new tricks it's seniors can learn to use technology it's not intuitive to them it may not be as easy for them but if you have patience and you offer training in a non intimidating environment I guarantee you they can learn they're probably not going to learn it from their kids and grandkids because you know like I said they just take over and do it so fast that it's still a mystery but you can teach them it's rewarding to enrich lives it's okay to not know everything you can probably tell from my presentation I'm no techno genius if I waiting till I was as knowledgeable as I'd like to be I'd have never taught any classes I just figure if I can help them know a little more than they knew before the visit I provided a benefit and it's okay to search for answers I don't have all the answers and different devices work differently and I just you know I hope I don't insult any reference librarians but Google's my friend I just go on there and say my Samsung Galaxy 3 won't do this whatever Android forms pop up other people have always had the same problem I'm having someone has and you get to read the answers and see what worked for them so and if you show them how to search then if they have problems at home they'll think oh yeah she just Google the answer and search for it on the internet so it's okay to borrow from others just give them credit so if you find the handout that you like and as long as you're you know not pretending it's yours I think it's okay to make handouts for them to take home and I just want to end with this time to help seniors with technology we just got to do the right thing and answer our mission to sport lifelong learning in our communities and that's all that's my contact info if you need it well do you have any other questions or did we cover them as we went well thank you Doris very much yeah it does seem that we have covered all the questions I haven't seen any new ones come in but we do have a comment we want to share yes one of our librarians says Doris you are my hero what a great presentation this is exactly what we need to do here at our library so I think it's all good it makes it worth it I've been dreading this because I'm so scared of just talking to my computer you did absolutely wonderful and we want to thank you for your presentation and thank you for your time with us this afternoon we really appreciate it alright thank you for having me everybody have a great evening you too thanks