Teen/Senior Tech Meet Up Burlington Public Library

by Sylvia McNicoll | Feb 21, 2015 | Sylvia McNicoll

Okay, my first problem is admitting I’m a senior.  After that, I really don’t even know what to ask about my new iPhone 6. Maybe if I were an organized person I might have written down a bunch of questions.

No matter.  First off Heidi, my personal teen tech mate, showed me how to get to photos without inputting my password (or thumbprint in the case of my phone).  We quickly snapped this beautiful selfie. Our third try, because Heidi showed me where to look so I didn’t appear quite so goofy.

Then I told her about some of my random problems.  Correcting spelling errors in my texts for example.  Who knew that Apple only lets you go to the beginning or end of a word to correct, not the middle.  That fact explained why I couldn’t get to some of my typos.

(Late breaking news. iPhone and iPad users, turns out you can correct. You touch the screen until a magnifying glass appears and then you can delete and add letters in the middle. I was able to tell Heide, the Android girl about this one)

Heidi showed me that to select and copy text from a phone email  or text, I just had to press the screen for a second and the select/selectall/paste button would come up.

For fun, she showed me an app called App of the Day and I downloaded Sticktext which allowed me to paste (into emails and texts) hilarious animated stick people doing things like sinking a basket ball, walking a dog, or throwing up.  I immediately texted my teen grandson the puking picture.

Heidi coached me to use both thumbs typing.  We searched for a thumb typing lesson app but couldn’t find one. Practise should do that all on its own anyway.  We tried downloading magazine apps and found we did indeed need to pay for a subscription. Actually a relief to me.

Heidi is an Android phone girl but she proved again that once you develop a kind of let’s see-what-that-does attitude to technology, the attitude serves you no matter what the device is. Press buttons, try things, ask other people.

Asking other people helped me a lot in this case.  Terrific fun.  It was such a cool shift. Most often I’m on the teaching end, showing teens how to change paragraphs for emphasis or when to use italics or how to build drama and tension in a story.  Nice to switch places.

And, Heidi has agreed to test out my work in progress: Perspectives–a story in which a senior and teen switch bodies and bond over…technology.