E-mail for Seniors - Session 2

Welcome everyone to the second session of E-mail for Seniors. My name is Chloé Bishop, and I am one of the staff members at Pearl Cove Library and I will be running all three sessions of this course.

If you have any questions or want to get in touch with me about anything concerning this online session, you can leave a comment here on the blog post, which I will respond to as soon as I can. Alternatively you contact me by e-mail at bishopchloe999@gmail.com with the subject line ‘E-mail for seniors’.

WHS

As this is an online session you will be spending the entire 30-40 minutes sitting at a computer desk. You should:

• Sit upright or slightly reclined
• Have your feet flat on the floor
• Bend your knees at right angles
• Have your forearms parallel to the keyboard
• Bend your elbows at 90 degrees
• Relax your shoulders
• Have your eyes level with the top of the computer screen
• Make sure that any computer wires are not tangled near your feet or chair so you don't trip over them

If at any point you feel tired or uncomfortable you might want to take a break, get something to eat or go for a walk. As this is an online session you can complete it at any time.

 

 

Introduction

In this session we will be continuing on from where we left the first session, having created your own G-mail accounts and added your first contacts. Now we will be looking at how to send and receive e-mails and how to add attachments to your e-mails such as photos or documents. By the end of the session you will have sent, received and added attachments to e-mails. There will be a number of activities for you to complete as well as videos and handouts for you to look through. Remember, if you are having any trouble with any of these activities you can leave a comment below or send me an e-mail. 

How to send and receive e-mails

The first thing we will be looking at is how to send e-mails. This video created by GCFLearnFree.org demonstrates how you send e-mails in G-mail as well as some of the features you can use such as formatting:

Activity

Now I’m going to have you send your own e-mail, but because I also want you to see how an e-mail is received you are going to send the e-mail to yourself. Being able to send e-mails to yourself can come in handy, such as if you want to make sure you have copies of documents or information that you can access from anywhere.

The e-mail you send will need a recipient (your g-mail address), a subject (what the e-mail is about), and a message (body of the e-mail). The e-mail can be as brief as you like and about anything you want.

Sign in to your s-mail account and then follow the steps shown in the video provided above or if you prefer I have made a PowerPoint presentation with step-by-step instructions, which you can download here.

After sending your e-mail it should have appeared in your inbox. You can view a PowerPoint presentation on how to receive and view e-mails here.

And now you have sent you first e-mail, well done!

But say you want to send more in the e-mail than simply a message, maybe you would like to send a friend pictures that you took on holiday or a recipe that you have saved on your computer. These are known as ‘attachments’ and can be added to your e-mail easily.

How to add attachments

You can send many different document types as attachments through e-mail; these include word documents, pdfs, videos, songs, and images.

Here is a video created by IT Pipeline, on how to add attachments to e-mails:

Activity

Again I’m going to have you send an e-mail with attachments to yourself. I want you to send at least two attachments, one photo and one other documents such as a Word file or pdf. You can attach any image or documents that you have saved on your computer. I also have attachments here that you can download and send if you do not already have any pictures and documents saved to your computer that you are comfortable sending through e-mail. They are:

Beach 1

Beach 2

Pearl Cove Library’s selection policy

You can either follow the steps shown in the video above or again download a PowerPoint presentation with step-by-step instructions here.

Well done on adding your attachments!

Now you should be able to send, receive, and add attachments to e-mails. Well done!

Conclusion

And that’s it for the second session of E-mail for Seniors. Having watched all the videos and made use of all the instruction guides you should now be able to send, receive, and respond to e-mails. If you are still having any problems or have further questions you can leave a comment down below or contact me by e-mail.

It would be extremely helpful if you could please take the time to fill out a short online survey about this training session. The survey can be found here.

The third and final training session in E-mail for Seniors will be looking at how to organise your e-mails into different folders and dealing with spam e-mails.

Thank you for attending the second session of E-mail for Seniors, I hope that you have had a good time and learned something new.