The Digital Unite Blog

Some good news for those living in, working with and supporting older people in sheltered housing. Following the government’s commitment in Building a Society for All Ages (Dept Work and Pensions, 2009) to promote and support digital inclusion for older residents in sheltered housing, Digital Unite and NIACE are delighted to announce a new, far reaching digital inclusion programme, ‘Get Digital’.

Get Digital will work with residents, scheme staff, RSLs and the wider community to promote, deliver and sustain digital literacy skills for older residents in sheltered housing.

Get Digital will also engage with a range of stakeholders from the wider housing, digital inclusion and older people’s fields to raise awareness of the opportunities to promote and support older people’s digital literacy in housing and other social and community environments.

You can read more about this exciting new project here

There’s an exciting opportunity to join the DU Team in January working on our annual Silver Surfers’ Day Campaign. We’re looking for someone to join as Events Manager. This will be a part time post on an initial 6 month contract, and is an excellent opportunity for a creative individual with experience of partnership and/or community building work. You’ll be inspiring, cajoling and supporting the many diverse organisations who take part in SSD every year and you will use your flair to identify new ones. Click here for more information.

Well, the secret’s been out a while  but now it’s official. DU is  part of an exciting new project to build a website for grandparents. I’m Sophie,  I was a project manager for DU, but now, along with the lovely Gill Adams, who many of you know, I’ve been seconded to work for BeGrand.net….

BeGrand.net will launch in January and it’s a site focused on Grandparents.  It’s going to be a place where people can ….. Read the rest of this entry »

We are starting work on the resources to support Event Holders for Silver Surfers’ Day 2010. We’d like our readers help to make sure that what we do will provide materials that are useful for Event Holders and Visitors.

We have drawn up a short questionnaire, which you can complete online – click here.

We’ve sent the link to last year’s Silver Surfers’ Day Event Holders, but we’d like to hear from as many people as possible.

The questionnaire covers the Event Holders’ Resources, the Learning Guides and some ideas that we have for the website. We can’t promise that we’ll be able to develop everything that is suggested, but we hope it will help inform our decisions on spending the funds that we have available.

It will only take a few minutes to complete. If you did not hold an Event, you may not be able to answer all questions – that does not matter if you have ideas for 2010. It’s your chance to make Silver Surfers’ Day 2010 better than ever before, so please follow the link and fill it in.

If you’d like to refresh your memory about the SSD 2009 resources, you can find them here.

The Learners’ Resources are on the Learning Zone here.

It’s Sophie again.  I posted down below about BeGrand.net – our new venture setting up a website for grandparents. 

We’re looking for a grandfather to join the Advisory Board of the site. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello.  Sophie here.  I’m a DU project manager. I’ve been seconded to a great new venture we’re involved in setting up a website.  We’re looking for  a good communicator who likes using social media to work part time and help us spread our message online…..

What’s the business?

We’re involved in a government funded project to create a website for grandparents.  We can’t be totally public about all the details as we have to wait for formal announcement,  but it’s called BeGrand.net, it launches in 2010 and it’s focused on providing resources and a community for grandparents…. Read the rest of this entry »

Hi, I’m Alan Pollard, DU Tutor in Salisbury. I cover an area of Wiltshire south of the Salisbury Plain and into East Dorset and West Hampshire.

For the past year, I’ve been President of the British Computer Society (BCS). During my year I adopted a theme called BCS In the Community in which I encouraged all our members and Branches to do something in their local area by way of voluntary service using their IT skills.

I set a President’s Challenge with a prize for the best entry. The winner was Isle of Man BCS, where members have created a computer drop in centre primarily for people with disabilities at the Leonard Cheshire Disability Centre in Onchan, I.o.M., so that they can offer the access to the IT facilities we take for granted. Read the rest of this entry »

Emma's photo

Digital Unite’s MD, Emma here! Yes, we chalked up an amazing 1031 events this year – well done absolutely everyone, activists, learners, champions, tutors-for a-day, organisations with the heart and soul to get stuck in! There’s lots to say about the numbers, and the full report will be published for everyone to see in a few weeks: for example we had a record number of UK online centres participating this year (500 plus events) as part of their It’s Never Too Late campaign; we had a record number of schools participating (66). Sadly, we saw a drop in participating Read the rest of this entry »

Morning! Happy Silver Surfers’ Day – Digital Unite Team (Gill version) here: Hope the day goes well for all of you. The video below (another triumph for Flip Mino in spite of my slightly shaky hand in the paparazzi hubbub!) was edited in Windows Moviemaker (standard on a Windows machine; I’d never used it before so it must be highly intuitive), then uploaded to YouTube after yesterday’s celebration of Silver Surfers’ Day at Greenlawns sheltered housing in Woolwich which is also home to a vibrant UK online centre. Greenlawns invited Minister of State, DWP (special responsibility for ‘Positive Attitudes to Ageing’), Rosie Winterton who had a little lesson from Daniel…watch the results, below. (For other fine silver surfers’ films, including Joan Bakewell, Angela Rippon, Martyn Lewis and Patricia Routledge, see here.)
 

Message from The SSD Team!

SSD 09 is all about participating and standing up (or, indeed, sitting down comfortably at your computer!) to be counted! The great thing about computers is you can be entertained and be counted all the same time! Click on any of the short YouTube videos scrolling below and find out why you should be a Silver Surfer and what computers can do for you…

Silver Surfers TV is a brand-new You Tube channel full of inspiring bits of film made for us by Form Media about Silver Surfers, famous, outspoken, quiet and retiring: llama trainers, cake-bakers and happiness-makers as well Joan, Angela, etc, ‘having their say’: Read the rest of this entry »