BT Head Office

We are in touch now with the top folk in BT who were keen to find out more about our plans for next year - we are looking at planning a big event in London with their sponsorship - it would be most likely for 2012 as these things take a long time to plan for but just the possibility is really exciting.

bbc

Out of the blue we received an email from the bbc. They had seen reports about us on the Internet and wanted to speak with us about how our group of older students faced barriers to getting online. They spoke with our students too, to find out their perspective and it is possible they might want to do some filming for their own campaign to get people connected to the Net.

Funding and Support

Actually the school holidays but we had some great news so had to blog - UnLtd have agreed to help us with our project, both financially and offering us support in our planning. The next stage is to market and promote our model and try to get lots of students active in the same way, so that our transgenerational project can be accessed on the web by other schools and would be silver surfers.

This is a massive vote of confidence for us and we are really delighted.

Highly Commended

We had the most amazing opportunity to visit Channel 4 TV as one of the top 5 entries in the UK. It was such a great event, we had to prepare a show reel, one minute long to illustrate our project and give a 5 minute presentation too. There were so many people from the digital industries there, so it was a little nerve racking but thankfully being Avonboure School we went first as the finalists were arranged alphabetically.

We got some great feedback and were awarded a certificate for a Highly Commended project. We have already signed up for next year's challenge as the process was really inspirational. We also went to Tate Britain whilst we were in London and bought some gifts for our "students" as they were so pleased we had got to the finals.

Our last meeting for this year was great fun, after some practise on the laptops we all had tea and cakes, whilst watching the show reel and a slide show of photo's from our day in London. Then we gave out our gifts. Everybody is keen to come next year, so we are now working on plans for 2010-2011 - there is plenty to do!!!

BIMA

We are sending in our entry this week for the BIMA challenge - which is exciting but doesn't mean we are stopping - we have lots of final planning to do for the course which commences after half term. Still it is like a milestone, so we are pleased to have a chance to submit the details of our project and hope that this might get other schools involved too.

Full survey results

We had similar results and conclusions from our full survey but felt it was worthwhile taking a larger group, so that we knew what older users felt in general rather than just our small focus group. This process has helped us improve our course development.

The majority of the survey were positive about computer technology.
The net and communication by email were still the most popular choices, so they will definitely be a big part of our training course.
The majority were positive about training in a school setting.
The majority preferred to have one to one training.
The majority wanted further training on normal computers, those with no experience opted for the Simplicity option.
The majority of older people were positive about using computers.

focus group survey results

These are our conclusions:-

We had assumed older users might be more negative due to fear of the technology but the majority had a positive view and wanted to learn more.
The net and email were the most desired applications, which will help us to plan our course to fit with the wants of our customer base.
Only one person felt that they would not like to learn about computers in a school setting, so the majority were happy to be taught in the way we were demonstrating at the focus group.
All but one preferred individual teaching, so we need to be sure that we have one student for every older person who attends the training.
Those who had some computer experience already wanted to train on normal computers but the person with no experience preferred Simplicity, so we ought to have a choice available.
The majority were positive about computing, the net and email had been used but as Q2 showed they wanted to find out how to use more of the facilities than they already knew.