Hello Israel

Tonight we were fortunate in having a web conference with Itai in Israel who has designed software specifically for senior users to access their email. We were able to see a demonstration of the software and our very own eloquent senior student, Robin was able to add his viewpoint too. It was really useful to consider the design features that Itai had identified as we are in the process of building our own website so want to make sure like Itai that we have considered all the factors. We are going to trial the software and send our feedback to Itai at Red Stamp Mail. Also, as we are part of the Digital Inclusion Network we have sent him details of our contact at Age Concern so that other silver surfers here in the UK might take advantage of the software features.

It was such a positive experience and good to know that all sorts of individuals and companies are looking for ways to attract the older population to digital technologies.

Plans for 2011

We started the year with a planning meeting before launching into lessons again. We have split back room duties between marketing and the web team as there is a lot to do besides our regular teaching slots. Good job there are eight of us now!
On 11th we were glad to see our regular students return, as eager as ever to learn more about emerging technologies. Also, we had a visit from Alex who works for Bournemouth County Council - he spoke with us about our training and spoke to our students too. He was really impressed by our work and said he would "spread the word" as best he could to encourage more folk to come along. After that our business partners Redweb came by to catch up on progress for the BIMA challenge. Beccs came with Martin, as she is a project manager and wanted to show us how we could use Project Manager to schedule our work. It was really interesting but also quite a shock how quickly we arrived at the end of April. This is our deadline for the web build, so we now know just how important it is to do the planning. Ellie was elected project manager and Martin said she will have to shout and be bossy to keep us on track ;o)

Headline news

Our final day at school on Friday 17th December and what a year 2010 has been for our project. In our whole school assembly we received an award for the best mini-company and the head of enterprise explained what we had been doing this year to deserve the award. Always embarrassing to be stood in front of a 1,000 or so of your peers, but hopefully it will inspire others to believe in their ventures and not set limits on their expectations. There was an article in our local paper too - the Bournemouth Daily Echo, so we hope that will encourage more would be silver surfers to come along.

Documentary

Great that we are busy getting a FAB new image as we have been selected by the judges of the Community Champions Awards to be featured in a documentary to be screened in Spring 2011. The great think is that this could really help us to demonstrate how our model works and encourage others to adopt it in their community too.

Visit - www.community-champions.org - to find out more!

Heavenly Trip

Tuesday, 14th December was the date set for our trip to London to meet up with the kind folk of top branding agency - Heavenly. We were treated like any top, corporate clients and had the full branding process explained to us - plus coke, chocolate biscuits and cakes - who could want for more ;o). It was so impressive and we all started to think about brand identities in a different light. Of course it was particularly exciting to be thinking about the direction our project was heading and how this would impact on our new identity. Matt and Richard were so good at explaining all the stages we needed to work through and by the end we had a lot of concepts buzzing around in our heads. We plan to use the holidays now to consolidate all of this activity, then talk to our "students" to get their input too, before we go to the next step of sitting down with the designers and coming up with our brand toolkit! All too exciting for words really and how lucky do we feel to have the best in the business to work alongside. Heavenly indeed.

WOW We've been recognised by royalty

With only 7 days before the end of term, we were not yet expecting any surprise gifts but today Ms Loughnan told us that we had been recognised by the Princess Diana Awards. They highlight the work young people do to inspire others, so we were all really thrilled to be thought worthy of the award. It will be something special to share with our "older" students when we next meet because without them we would not be the project that we are.

Robin is our champion

We are really thrilled this week as we nominated one of our students to be Age UK Internet Champion 2011 - Robin is one our regular students and very enthusiastic - so when we heard he was on the short list, we couldn't have been more pleased. We hope Robin will become a leading light for his peers who might lack the knowledge or confidence to get online. The number of people over 65 using the Internet has increased from 18% in 2006 to 40% in 2010. Despite this there are still 6 million people aged 65+ who have never accessed the internet so if Robin gets the chance he will have a lot of people to convert!