parramatta omputer pals for seniors inc. annual report ... · parramatta computer pals for seniors...

Parramatta Computer Pals for Seniors Inc.

Annual Report 2017 - 2018


PRESIDENT’S REPORT We can be very proud of our Club, which continues to grow and thrive. We

couldn’t achieve this without the commitment and generosity of our many

volunteers: management committee, trainers, assistant trainers, office

assistants, IT support, catering, and all the other people who contribute in

small but significant ways to help our Club run smoothly.

We are also grateful to the City of Parramatta, which continues to provide us

with our Training Room/Office, rent-free.

Here are the highlights from the past year.

October 2017

We had our tenth AGM and elected a new Management Committee

under the rules of our new Constitution. Michelle Goodman, Parramatta

City Council’s Archivist, explained how we could preserve our records.

Geoff Lee, the State Member for Parramatta, visited our Club to admire

the scanner we bought with a grant from NSW Government.

We decided to reduce the joining fee to $5.

Three of our members were interviewed by ABC TV about using smart

phones.

We had 211 members at the end of October.

1 Geoff Lee MP admiring Bev Pieremont's scanned photo


November 2017

Several of us attended the ASCCA conference 8th-9th November. Four

members won awards for Creative Writing or Digital Photography.

John Moxon and Margaret Tucker Moxon gave a talk on Genealogy and

DNA at our November meeting

Colleen Burns was appointed to a vacant position on the Committee.

We had 216 members at the end of November.

December 2017

We introduced a new policy to manage course credits.

Our Christmas Party at Rosehill Bowling Club was a great success, thanks

to Dawne Zotz’s organisational skills and her many helpers.

We had 217 members at the end of December.

January 2018

This was a quiet month because of school holidays.

We celebrated our 11th anniversary with a special cake organised by

Margaret Green.

Instead of a guest speaker, we enjoyed looking at the digital photos that

were submitted to the ASCCA competition

2 ASCCA Competition award winners


February 2018

The guest speaker at our February meeting was Jessica Grauds from

Apple.

Our Mug of the Month was Bing Kinsey.

We had 239 members at the end of February.

March 2018

Bing organised our first Trainers’ Forum with lots of useful ideas shared,

and we decided to run it quarterly.

Our March guest speaker was Kay McCormack from NSW Fair Trading.

We welcomed some new volunteers including Stephen Bari, Verna

Saunders and Francis Houpapa.

John Lee organised a film night at Riverside (Forty Thousand Horsemen)

followed by dinner at the pub. John Lee organised a group booking for

Senior Moments at Riverside Theatres

We decided to have a competition to design a new Club logo. We had

243 members at the end of March.

3 Jessica Grauds from Apple with Dawne and Deborah


April 2018

We ran a stall in Centenary Square for Seniors Week.

Deb Neyle and Hazel Labka also ran a stall at the Cumberland Council

Wellness Festival in Auburn Botanic Gardens.

Dawne organised another successful social lunch at Rosehill Bowling

Club.

Darrell Hoffman entertained us with a comedy skit at our monthly

meeting, and this became a regular event on the agenda.

Our guest speaker was Dianna Bernard from the Seniors Rights Service.

We had 251 members at the end of April.

4 Happy theatregoers at Senior Moments

5 Volunteers at our Centenary Square stall for Seniors Week


May 2018

Margaret Tucker Moxon announced her retirement from the job of

Website Administrator, which she had performed single-handed for 11

years.

We decided to pay a professional web developer to redesign our

website, on Margaret’s advice.

Our guest speaker for May was Riza Velosa from UNE on Music and

Dementia.

Tiffany from LEEP visited to talk to trainers about Digital Mentoring.

We had 257 members at the end of May.

June 2018

Five of our Club members (Hazel Labka and Deb Neyle, John Moxon and

Margaret Tucker Moxon, and Val Craig) left on a round the world cruise

on the Sea Princess on 5th June.

Mark Young from ASCCA visited to demonstrate a Tech Savvy Seniors

course to some of our trainers.

We had a field trip to the World Press Photo Exhibition at the State

Library.

The winner of our logo competition was Grazyna Kedzierska.

Our guest speaker was Robin Wilms talking about My Health Record.

At the end of June we had 258 members.

July 2018

Dawne organised another social lunch at Rosehill Bowling Club.

Instead of a guest speaker at our July meeting, we met in small groups to

discuss some questions about our Club, and the ideas that emerged

were very useful for the trainers and the.

We had 153 members at the end of July.

August 2018

We selected Brugel Creative to build our new website

Following suggestions from the July meeting, the Committee

recommended we simplify the course booking system to open bookings

to all members as soon as the timetable is published.

Our guest speaker was Mark Young from ASCCA about purchasing a new

computer.


We sadly said goodbye to John Wilkinson who is moving away from

Sydney with his wife Grace to be closer to family

September 2018

Dawne has organised a very popular trip to Lancer Barracks followed by

lunch

We are having a stall at the Parramatta Over 50s Volunteering,

Employment and Small Business Expo

Our Sea Princess travellers will be very welcome when they arrive home.

Thank you to our Management Committee for 2017-2018, and in particular to

John Lee who has managed our finances very efficiently several years and is

retiring from the role of Treasurer this year.

Deborah Martin, President

6 John Wilkonson cutting cake


7 Treasurer John Lee with wife Josie

SECRETARY’S REPORT This is my fifth year as Secretary of Parramatta Computer Pals for Seniors. It

has been one of the best privileges of my life, something I cannot live without.

During the financial year 2017 - 2018, 258 members either renewed their

membership (197) or joined the club for the first time (61).

Our Management Committee met every month during 2018 enabling our

administrative functions to be run professionally and smoothly.

Here are the committee members who held office over the period and their

attendance details:

Deborah Martin 12/12 Deb Neyle 7/11 Hazel Labka 7/11 Dawne Zotz 8/12 Colleen Burns 10/12 John Lee 9/12 Jon Bayley 11/12 John Hain 10/12 Silvia Vega 10/12

We continued to receive a variety of interesting suggestions in the suggestion

box, most of which have been implemented.


Our members’ meetings, held on the UNE Lecture Theatre every month,

attract about 50 members on average.

The social lunches have continued to be a success because of the great job that

our committee member Dawne Zotz does in organising them.

Our Club continues to be an active member of the Australian Seniors Computer

Clubs Association. A number of members participate also in their annual

Conference.

Once again, my gratitude to the Club members, Trainers, Assistant Trainers,

Office assistants and Committee members and especially to our President

Deborah Martin for helping me to make my job easy and enjoyable.

Silvia Vega, Secretary

Training Coordinator’s Report 2018 Parramatta Computer Pals for Seniors has yet again had a successful and

productive year providing training for our members. Over the four terms from

October 2017 to September 2018 we have presented 530 hours of training,

consisting of

● 19 ‘standard’ 6 or 8-hour courses,

● 75 ‘short’ 2, or 4-hour courses, (up from 35 last year)

● 19 x 2 hour ‘Practice Sessions’


We have had 576 enrolments, (up from 440 last year) filling around 85% of

available places. This has all been achieved by our 17 trainers and around 15

assistant trainers and 10 office assistants.

This year has seen a strong change in

preferences of members to undertake

shorter courses, so we have tended to

break learning topics into shorter

modules; hence the increase in the

number of short courses offered. We

have also continued to offer ‘Practice

Sessions’ - unstructured learning sessions

to provide support and develop skills on

topics in which students have completed

courses, but feel they need further help

with particular functions and aspects. We

try to run these sessions with a higher

trainer to student ratio so individual needs can be better met.

Course fees remain at $45 for our standard 10-hour-over-5-week courses, with

short courses and Practice Sessions priced at $10 per 2-hour session. For

Scanning practice sessions only, a charge of $5/hour applies and students have

individual and sole supervised use on the scanner for their session.

In addition to training courses, we

have run 75 Special Interest Group

sessions which meet monthly or bi-

monthly mainly on Thursdays or

Fridays to help members develop

and share skills in 10 particular

areas of computing technology and

application in a less formal

environment. The times of these

appear on our term course

program, and the fees to attend

these are only $2 per session.

8 Jon Bayley showing Amy Chan the scanner

9 Craft and Cards Special Interest Group


Trainer and assistant numbers have remained substantially unchanged in 2018,

but with the greatly increased number of short courses and practice sessions

we are now running, we have an increased need for more trainers. There is no

expectation on trainers to present particular courses or any quantity of

training: the program is simply organised on a voluntary basis. We must thank

all of our trainers for their time and effort in authoring course manuals,

enrolling students, and preparing and presenting lessons. Thanks also to the

now expanded office assistants team who have picked up the job of handling

enquiries, booking in students to courses or waiting lists, and printing, and

assembling course manuals before the start of each term. We are

endeavouring to run a training session for our office assistants and potential

office assistants once each term.

Thanks must be expressed to Bing Kinsey who has done a sterling job in

maintaining our training room computers, despite numerous bugs that seem to

arise with each update of Windows 10 which makes it difficult to maintain the

standard of operation of our computers that is desirable for training room use.

We continue to perform appropriate updates and maintenance and address

identified problems with minimal interruption to training. A plan is being

devised to replace all our training room computers, which are now 6 years old,

over the Christmas break. Action is also in hand to improve internet access

from our training room.

10 Lawrence Lam and Bing Kinsey who keep our computers running


An additional program has been put in place to support trainers in their various

tasks: each term we will conduct a Trainers’ Forum prior to the term program

planning meeting. This will facilitate the sharing of ideas and skills, develop

teaching strategies, as well as the chance to analyse and discuss the need for

new or changed courses and topics. Trainers will continue to meet in the

second half of each term to plan the program for the following term. In

planning, we rely on our waiting list to gauge demand for courses, however

this has to be balanced against the availability of trainers and the training

room. Looking ahead, we have planned a program for term 4 with continued

focus across the full range of topics in which members show interest, practice

sessions and special interest groups.

From Term 4 2018 there is to be a change in procedure for students to enrol

in courses. We will still be encouraging members to express their interest in

training topics by registering on our ‘Waiting List’ (which we may soon rename

‘Interest List’).

However, once the term program is compiled it will be circulated to all

financial members who may then contact our office to enrol in any course

listed. There will no longer be enrolment priority given to those listed on the

Waiting List, as this had become too cumbersome for trainers and office

assistants to manage. Trainers may still make contact to enrol students from

the waiting list, (particularly if there are few enrolments) but members should

not rely on this happening. The message is:

if you wish to undertake one of our courses, watch for the timetable to be

emailed to you, then contact the club to enrol.

Thanks to members, trainers, assistants and office staff for your help and

cooperation in running our training program this year.

Jon Bayley, Training Coordinator


Financial Report

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