Riding the Waves of Digital Transformation
The goal of setting up this project is to help some local elderly to familiarize themselves with some basic smartphone functions in today’s digital society. Due to the uneasy COVID-19 situation, remote communications and entertainment have been the new normal for almost everyone, thus the importance of learning digital stuff becomes more significant. After our discussion about how to conduct this workshop taking the objective situations into consideration, we chose to hold a series of physical and online events. Indeed, this kind of teaching style brings benefits and drawbacks, which I will elaborate on in detail in the subsequent paragraphs.
Luckily, our team has generally achieved our pre-goal with help from the Blossom World Society. We basically covered all our planned topics in a total of 4 sessions and did a review of all in the last session.
To reflect on the advantages of our conducting style, I think the onsite members have done the most crucial teaching part to the seniors since they can connect with the seniors in person, teaching and conveying the contents hands-to-hands. My partner Zong Han is really patient and genial when talking to our aunties (the [1, 2, and 4]th lessons and 3rd lessons’ aunties are different). The online members including me focused more on verbally explaining and auxiliary work, such as broadcasting the prepared slides.
However, what is important to be admitted is that the actual workloads for the two parties are different. In the early preparation phase, we thought the online members could provide live practices. Somehow in our little group, the reality is that our auntie sometimes did not need me to do so, because what Zong Han has taught is really sufficient and detailed. In addition, our auntie has some basic knowledge about smartphones before our lessons, so the contents we prepared are too simple for her. Facing this situation, my participation was not as much as Zong Han’s. The situation has been improved in the 3rd and 4th sessions since we knew how to better arrange the teaching contents.
But indeed, our group members and the senior participants, have learned a lot during this experience. We get to know how to prepare a lesson, how to communicate with seniors, … Also, our aunties explored various ways to enjoy digital stuff, and we believe this could really be practiced in real life. Last but not least, special thanks to the BWS staff, for your help to us in coming up with ideas, contacting the seniors, providing venues, and sharing with us so many helpful experiences.
The program is really interesting and meaningful to me, to our beneficiaries, and also to everyone who involved in this project. I will always be grateful for this happy time and memory!
Submitted by Lai Yi
Lai Yi engaging the senior virtually with Zong Han
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