Community inTouch
One thing the COVID pandemic highlighted was digital poverty, especially when it came to basic digital skills and access to technology. To address this, Digital Voice worked with The Gateshead Housing Company, NHS England and Karbon Homes to issue isolated people with equipment and access to one on one training to develop people’s skills, boost their confidence and help them feel connected.
inTouch is an introductory digital skills course which teaches people the basics when it comes to technology. This time round, to comply with COVID regulations, Digital Voice needed to quickly adapt its process to deliver these courses in a new virtual way. Equipped with two iPads and a mifi device per participant, our project manager delivered 20 devices and conducted COVID secure handovers on the doorstep. Once safely inside the participants were greeted on the iPad by one of our specially trained instructors in a zoom meeting that was initiated prior to handover. Then our lessons could commence without the learner needing to know how to zoom!
‘The course has boosted my confidence and I feel like I can do it myself now as I am not as frightened of the technology, this course helped me to know how to set up my phone that I bought myself recently’.
Pauline, participant
The weekly sessions conducted over Zoom taught the participants everything from getting to know the devices and how to keep safe online, to online banking, using emails and internet shopping.
‘I enjoyed the internet shopping most as it opened up new avenues for me, I am using it to look for a phone on gumtree’
Alan, participant
Online safety concerns have been a recurring theme throughout our inTouch courses so we addressed individual concerns, re-iterated the key tools to keep safe online and even produced a paper reference guide on staying safe online and a list of the most common and current scams to watch out for.
During the course one participant was subject to an attempted telephone scam. Thankfully because of the training received he was able to spot the attempt before giving away any information.
‘ Scammers are advancing so we will always need more to recognise what is happening, but I know the basics on what to avoid and look out for’.
Bernie, participant
The NHS asked Digital Voice to deliver this project as part of its social prescribing drive which looks at a patient’s all-round health. Social prescribing involves helping patients to improve their health, wellbeing and social welfare by connecting them to community services which might be run by the council or a local charity. Realising that digital poverty effects people’s mental health by helping them connect to other people and learn new skills. It of course was a learning opportunity too for Digital Voice, we love to deliver in-person training but during the pandemic, this just wasn’t possible and we learnt a lot about adapting to the individual and how to keep some fluidity in our course structure.
Read more about inTouch here - https://www.digitalvoice.org.uk/intouch
