Adult children often find themselves providing technology support services for their aging parents. Now there’s a new, research-based resource to help. The Connect Safely organization has recently published The Senior’s Guide to Online Safety. The publication contains important information, it’s free, and it’s simple to download as a PDF file. Adult children may want to print the booklet and share this … Continue reading
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Facetime: A Simple, Intuitive & Easy Way to Include Great Grandparents
My grandson is lucky enough to have two great grandparents — my mom and dad — and we use FaceTime so they can visit with the baby despite the 500 miles that separates them. He is too young to understand the importance of communicating with FaceTime. Oh, he’s interested the iPad or iPhone, and he is quite curious about … Continue reading
Cyber Seniors Documentary: Well Done!
This afternoon at the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) conference in Washington, DC, I saw clips from a documentary, Cyber-Seniors, about teenage volunteers in Toronto who work with elders — people in their mid to late 80s and older — and the rich clarity of their interactions. Many of these people retired before computers appeared … Continue reading
Will Robots Take Care of Us When We’re Old?
Take a few minutes to read a May 2014 Chicago Tribune article, An Army of Robots May Soon be Deployed to Care for the Elderly. This piece, written by Reuters columnist Mark Miller, explores how robots may be able to perform certain tasks to support elders who can’t aways do those tasks for themselves. Innovating with robots … Continue reading
Is There a Digital Divide Among Seniors?
Adult children who want to help their aging parents learn to use more technology may want to read the April 2014 Pew Internet organization report, Older Adults and Technology Use. This fascinating document, freely available online, describes various groups of technology-using seniors and explains how they use or do not use computers and devices. It also offers … Continue reading
iPads for Seniors? My Dad Knows How Cool It Is!
iPads for seniors as a way to decrease isolation and stimulate intellectual curiosity? You bet! After writing over 20 iPad for Dad columns about my dad and his iPad, I could have told them so and my dad can, too. I know that Steve Jobs was not thinking about seniors in the elder years of their lives … Continue reading
Google Calendar: Collaborating With My Mom!
Every adult child has some type of calendar issue when it comes to scheduling certain activities with senior parents. Even when parents keep track of their own affairs, adult children often need to be aware of some of the events. It’s not that I need or want to know what my parents are doing every moment … Continue reading
Technology Changes Quickly for Digital Immigrants
I like this post, Technology Moving Too Fast for a Girl Born in 1950, over at the Life in My Sixties blog. The author aptly captures many of the feelings and expectations about the fast-paced, always-changing world of technology. Our feelings magnify when our adult children casually take digital life for granted and our elder parents … Continue reading
Whose Eyes Are Checking Out That Digital Content?
In his recent post over at the Changing Aging blog, Kavan Peterson describes a short video, Forwarders. Intended as a parody of people who continuously forward e-mail, the video reinforces stereotypes about elders and aging. It’s sad that this short film focuses solely on one older adult, especially since so many people of all ages … Continue reading
Removing Racist and Hateful Comments: A Simple Relevancy Test
After the jury announced its verdict in New Jersey I watched Associated Press video statement read by Tyler Clementi’s father. Sad and clearly with a heavy heart, he nevertheless looked to the future in a way that most of us could not have done had we lost a child the way he lost Tyler. Then I … Continue reading
As Our Parents Age So Do We 