Valley Parents: Hartford tech students assist older adults with technology questions

HARTFORD — As Lindy Bean was about to close her laptop at the Bugbee Senior Center, she proclaimed her help session with students Zachary Kenney and Noah Peabody a resounding success.

“These guys really came through,” a smiling Bean, 83, said about the assistance she received to resolve a few things on her laptop that were confusing her.

Peabody and Kenney, juniors at the Hartford Area Career and Technical Center, have been at the Bugbee Center each week for about two hours since early February, to help older adults troubleshoot problems they are having with their devices, including computers and phones.

With Bean seated next to him, Peabody, 16, of Windsor, showed her how to increase the volume on her phone, install a free music platform, add songs by Leonard Cohen to her playlist and place an icon on her homepage for her private Dartmouth Health portal.

“He was very helpful,” Bean, of Hanover, said.

Teen Tech Help was started by Jeremy Ouellette, an information technology instructor at the tech center. Last fall, he received an inquiry from the Bugbee Center asking if students would be interested in drop-in tech help to assist clients, answer questions and solve problems they were having with their devices. Ouellette said he liked the idea because it would further his goal of having students learn beyond the classroom and can help prepare them for the field of IT support, if that is their interest.

“I like to get my students out in co-ops and internship experience so they can apply what they learn in the classroom,” Ouellette said. “This is a perfect opportunity to practice customer service and other skills. It is as good as any practice you will get in terms of how to communicate with clients and ask the right questions.”

For the drop-in help, the students provide technical support and most of the time the problems are easily resolved, Kenney and Peabody said. Often, the person seeking assistance has inadvertently hit the wrong key and suddenly they cannot find something, Kenney added. Usually it takes about five or 10 minutes to fix most problems, the students said.

“My clients are usually pretty happy when they leave,” Kenney said. “(Once) I helped someone resolve an issue with their WhatsApp (a messaging service) because they thought their contacts were deleted. I created an icon on the screen so they would have easy access to the contacts.”

Besides weekly sessions at the Bugbee Center, the Teen Tech Help program was also held weekly at the Kilton Library in West Lebanon into early May.

Recently, when the two students were finishing up a session in late April, an out-of-town visitor approached Jacob Gerard Elvira, 16, of Lebanon. Dan Kaidel and his wife, Diane, had come up from Virginia to visit their daughter at Dartmouth College. Kaidel first went to the library’s front desk to inquire about getting several documents scanned and converted to a digital format. He was referred to the students, and Elvira brought him over to the library’s printer. When the printer did not allow them to be scanned onto a flash drive, Elvira successfully showed Kaidel how to send them to his email account as a PDF.

“I couldn’t be happier,” Kaidel said.

Those types of encounters can be nothing but helpful for the students, said Ouellette, who watched Elvira help Kaidel.

“It is really empowering for these 16- and 17-year-olds to really see that they know stuff and can help people,” Ouellette said. “I’m very proud of them.”

Rhone Baker, 17, of Hartford, assisted Lee Hammond, 85, of Lebanon, at Kilton who expressed “frustration” trying to figure things out on his laptop.

“They have helped me because I am basically a Luddite,” Hammond said with a chuckle, referring to the 19th century English workers opposed to the mechanization in cotton and woolen mills. “This thing (laptop) has pushed me over the edge.”

When Baker and Elvira arrived on this day, they first went to work on another project for the library: Setting up and testing a recording system.

Kilton librarian Celeste Pfeiffer said the library used a grant to buy equipment for a recording studio, but the project had been shelved for a few years.

“They are setting up and learning how to work it so they can write an instruction manual,” Ouellette said as the students pieced the equipment together. “The primary thing is the drop-in for whatever tech help is needed, but they also help the library out with projects and this is one of them. It (recording system) is another service they can provide for patrons.”

The studio will allow patrons to record their own audio, such as a podcast, and then upload it, Elvira said. A keyboard, sound board, microphone, speakers and other equipment were spread out on the table ready to be assembled.

“We want to make sure it works and will write a manual on how to set it all up so people will know how to use it,” Elvira said.

The students assisted the library with another issue concerning a 3D printer that Pfeiffer said she wanted to have a manual written to train staff. But the students, Pfeiffer said, discovered the machine was “irreparably broken” and would not be worth repairing.

“They did research and spoke to experts,” Pfeiffer said. “I told them they saved me so much time.”

After his time with Bean at the Bugbee Center, Peabody said he has benefited from the drop-in tech help experience.

“I have definitely learned a lot and the biggest thing has been communication skills,” he said. “I used to have social anxiety, and this has helped me.”

Ouellette said he wants to bring the program back next year and hopes to start it earlier in the school year.

“This is amazing practice for their ability to work with a diverse audience,” he said. “It is great professional experience for someone who may want to step into an IT support role because you can cite this experience (with a potential employer).”

Patrick O’Grady can be reached at pogclmt@gmail.com.