Courage to Connect: Celebrating our Seniors
- White Byte
- Mar 20
- 2 min read
Updated: Mar 24
White Byte was founded on the passion to equip the Elderly with practical online safety habits and scam prevention tips. We look back at our first outreach session.
The Elderly deserves a round of applause for their willingness to flow with the changing times and embrace technology. Not to be deterred by their limited digital knowledge, they continue to seek learning opportunities to be better in managing their devices. Together with youth volunteers from SHINE Children and Youth Services, we set off to Toa Payoh to deliver our first digital literacy session.
Fresh out of the pandemic lockdown, we all had to keep our masks on during class and participants were capped to about 20 persons. This didn't dampen the Seniors' learning spirit. With assistance from the youth volunteers, the Seniors learnt how to sort and organise their apps for a cleaner and more user-friendly interface. We also downloaded and installed the ScamShield app into their device.
Through games, participants learnt to spot fake logos, a common red flag of phishing scams. The session ended with an action-based ditty to help embed the learning and the pause and ponder steps that are important in preventing scams.
Passion has its way of pushing us outside of our comfort zones. Our White Byte founder, Frances, is tri-lingual conversationally (English, Mandarin and Bahasa Melayu), but is illiterate to Mandarin. This session was delivered primarily in Mandarin so she took much effort to learn and memorise the Mandarin terminologies phonetically. Some mispronunciation made the Seniors laugh, and the session became more relaxed, and well, entertaining.
Till this day, Frances regards this modest session as one of her biggest speaking achievements even though she has spoken widely on stage in forums and conferences to hundreds in the audience.
Good Bytes
Here are 3 tips to help your elderly loved ones in their digital journey
Declutter: Sort and organise the apps in their device. Delete what is not needed to minimise confusion, and unwanted notifications
Vigilance: Constantly remind them exercise caution when answering calls from unknown numbers. It is best to avoid picking up.
Money Lock: Find out about money lock feature from their banks. Should the unfortunate happens, the scam losses are miminised.
Caring as a Community
Do you have an elderly loved one at home? What tips can you share that has worked for you in helping your elderly loved one be a digital citizen?
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