Carers with Midlands Mencap in Birmingham join the DISCOVER project

Carers interested in computers and what the internet can do for them met with members of DISCOVER to hear about the project and become familiar with the DISCOVER website and Learning Zone. 

To the accompaniment of tea, coffee and biscuits we watched a short video about how to make sure you are sitting comfortably when using your  computer and then together we had a go at coming up with a good 'password'  to protect our online shopping. This caused much laughter as we tried to enhance our first attempt so that the online checker moved from ‘moderately good’ to ‘best’. After adding capital letters, numbers, and symbols we finally had a good password, but not surprisingly no one could remember it! We then decided it might be easier to write a sentence and use the initial letter of each word to make the password, with a few numbers and symbols thrown in.

Everyone was pleased to know that becoming safe on the Internet featured large in the Learning Zone, helping to overcome problems that are always mentioned in the media.  With DISCOVER, you can also find out about Facebook and Twitter or join a group of carers to chat with when you can't go out and are feeling lonely but it is up to each person to decide whether they want to do this or not.

The lively session ran out of time and some people would have liked to stay longer, so everyone agreed that they would look at the website at home and met up in a couple to months time to discuss how they got on. New ideas for improvements were already coming up such as understanding teenage mental health issues and cancer care so - Watch this space!