Sharing Our Skills With The Community
Part of our learning programme is to go out into our Community and help and support older people that are in care homes on how to work an iPad. In doing this we as a team researched a number of different apps and web pages that we thought older people might find interesting, fun, helpful, useful, enjoyable. We downloaded and rated apps and the following are some of them: -
The top three: -
Word Search
Photobooth
Wikipedia
These ones would be useful for older people to find out things that they enjoy, play some games and have some fun.
Other ones we researched are: -
The top three: -
Skype
Facetime
These would be useful for older people for keeping in touch with their families and loved ones. We practiced with each other to see what an older person might ask us about iPads.
When it became time to go out into the community, we phoned all the Care Homes that we had researched but found a real problem. Hardly any of the Care Homes had access to wifi. We then widened our search and our client group to adults with disabilities in day services or sheltered housing complexes. Again we could not find anywhere that had wifi. Eventually we found one care home that had just been given a grant for two iPads for their residents to use. They had limited access to wifi but welcomed us along to show what we had learned.
We went to an Older People's home for 4 sessions. Each session lasted about an hour and a half. We met lots of residents and showed them how to work an iPad and the benefits of what an iPad can do for them. We showed some of the people how to Skype and they loved that they could talk and see their loved ones live. All of them loved listening to some kind of music especially classical and singing along to music. We showed them on utube clips of films, dances, songs from all eras. Some of the male residents loved sport and we showed them information about their favourite football teams or one gentleman loved boxing and we showed him clips of Muhammed Ali who sadly had just passed away.
We also set up the iPad's which the Care Home had received so that they could use them. Everyone was really grateful for us coming in to see them and they made us most welcome. To see everyone so happy when they were engaging with us, looking at things that are important to them was a great delight to us all and we thoroughly enjoyed our time with everyone. We enjoyed it so much that we are going back with the school on Tuesday afternoons for the rest of the school term.
