We are Hackney Silver Surfers and The Lawns is our main centre. We provide free computer training and free Internet access to everybody over 50 in Hackney. We are open Tuesday to Friday, 10 am to 4.30 pm (and also on Mondays for special projects). Everything we do is free, informal and very friendly. All you have to do is come along and ring the door bell. Our address is 52 The Lawns, Matthias Road, London, N16 8QD. Our phone number is 020 7254 2183.
More information.
Please look at the About us page. Our contact details (with links to maps) are on the Contact us page. Information about what we do is on the Program page.
How to use this website.
It’s all explained in our post entitled How to use this website. But if you are not 100% sure — please ask a helper!
By the way.
Most of this page is underneath this post. Please scroll down to read everything. If you are not sure how to do that — please ask a helper!
We add new posts to the home page every week — sometimes every day. Keep scrolling down to make sure you have not missed anything!
If you see a link saying « Older posts at the bottom of the page, click on it — it will take you to a second page of posts that are older but possibly still relevant.
Bookbite is a new project from Booktrust for people over 60. The website encourages people over 60 to discover new authors and genres, to try a range of creative writing activities and to interact with others online to share stories and book reviews.
Bookbite mags.
Amongst the many online and printed resources produced by Bookbite is a free glossy magazine packed with useful information about reading and writing activities — and details of short story competitions, which any 60+ Hackney Silver Surfer could enter and win.
At Hackney Silver Surfers, we have a huge pile of the Bookbite mags to give away. Come and get yours as soon as you can.
HelpAge International, Age Concern and Help The Aged are supporting the Disasters Emergency Committee appeal to help older people affected by the earthquake in Haiti.
Cover of the 'Which' publication: Make the most of the internet.
Free ‘Which’ download.
Race Online 2012 have provided a free download of the Which publication ‘Make the most of the Internet’ in PDF format. The document file size is not small (nearly 2 Mb) — so the download may be slow, but is worth waiting for.
Screen shot of an email noticeboard displayed in Opera Mail.
Did you realise that you can get all the information here by email?
People who get our Email Noticeboard know everything that happens here almost as soon as we know ourselves. It’s by far the best and easiest way to keep in touch with all our activities and future plans. All you need is an email address! If you haven’t got an email address yet, just ask a helper at The Lawns (or anywhere else).
When you have an email account, send an email to hss@lawns.org.uk, saying you would like to be on the Email Noticeboard list. We send out the Email Noticeboard about 3 times each month. Each noticeboard contains two versions of the same message: a colourful version with images and a simpler plain text version for people with poor eyesight.
More than 600 people are on the Email Noticeboard list so far (December 2009), and they are the people who get first shot at everything we do. Please join us.
Just send us an email! That is all you have to do — so you might as well do it now!
Everybody forgets all their passwords all the time. Farzaneh, Michael or Rick can restore it for you, or create a new one. If you are in a different place, use another email system to send a message to hss@lawns.org.uk .
It’s not a good idea to make it too simple. Avoid dictionary words. Include numbers and other keyboard characters as well as letters. Minimum length is 6 characters.
What are the ‘settings’?
They help you do things with your email that you never imagined possible. Come to our next email workshop!
Where can I get help?
Next time you login, look for the link labelled ‘Help’ near the top right corner of the page. Click on it!
One of the best starting points for help with a Google Apps mail system is this video overview — but to hear it you should be using a computer with sound enabled.
This website is under active development — we have ideas galore waiting to be put into practice — when we have time. Here are some of them …
An ‘image gallery’ where we can put photographs of our events and the people at them.
A ‘message board’ — a place for you to talk about anything on your mind.
A Chat Room — live chat, usually chaotic but amusing (done!).
Home pages for any Lawns learner who wants one — a place which you log into, and put your own content — photos, news, a blog, the story of your life, anything that comes into your head.
Those are our ideas at the moment. But is there anything you would like to see here, anything we have not thought of? If you can think of something that would be useful to you or to other people, you might as well tell us — don’t keep it to yourself. We do respond to requests — for example, our social networking season evolved directly from discussions at the OPRG annual event a few weeks ago.
How to tell us? Easy - send an email to hss@lawns.org.uk - or just talk to Farzaneh, Michael, Rick or Sadia.
The purpose of this new website (lawns.org.uk) is to provide up-to-date information about what is going on at The Lawns. It replaces our previous information website (thelawns.org).
The home page.
The site home page is the front page for the whole website. On the home page you can see our most recent and most important posts (a ‘post’ is just an item of information like this).
The menu bar.
There are other pages - look at the horizontal menu bar just below the page title …
Home (this page).
About Us (information about Hackney Silver Surfers).
Contact Us (different ways to reach Hackney Silver Surfers).
Learning (links to online learning sites).
Program (everything we do, and when it happens).
Resources (information and links that we think will be useful to you).
Just click on the menu item to open up the page you want.
The sidebar.
The sidebar is the vertical area on the right side of each page.
Categories.
Each post has been filed in at least one category, sometimes several categories. The number of posts in each category is shown in brackets after the category name. For example ‘Workshops (4)’ would tell you that there are 4 posts in the Workshops category. Just click on the category name to open it.
Beginner links.
These are WWW links for people who are just starting out.
Search.
Each page has a search form. You can use it to search for words which appear on this web site (ie: it is not a link to a World-Wide Web search engine such as Google). To search this site, type the word or words you are looking for into the search form. Then hit the ‘enter’ key on your keyboard.
If you are not sure what any of that means, click around a bit - it will all fall into place very soon.
Farzaneh has gone off to do something else.
