EDUC 628-Spring-08

I found an interesting article here called From the Ice Age to High Tech about how they used their intergeneration program.

In this situation, the meeting between the two polaric groups – the young ones, the speakers of “High- Tech” and the much older ones for whom the world of computer and the Internet is an unknown land and the language of this land is foreign and difficult – is most appropriate. In this meeting, between the young and the old, it is the young ones who teach the language of the new country – the land of technology – to the old ones.

For the last 5 years, I have been implementing a program I initiated and started called The Intergeneration Program and the New Technologies. In this program, young students, grades 5-9, tutor seniors at computer and Internet skills and learn from their older students a chapter in the latter’s personal history. Together they write a digital version of the story; they scan pictures, albums, documents; they search for information on the net as well as in other sources and soon will upload these stories to a designated site, on the Internet.

It is an old article but I think the idea is a good one where the younger generation talks to the older generations and the tech savvy younger ones can take the stories from the elderly and put in a digital format.   It is a simple concept, yet very doable and I think perhaps that a classrrom could perhaps go visit a retirment home and talk to the elderly, take thier stories, and post them to blog for all to see to preserve these stories and beliefs of the culture of the elderly.