How to Teach a Parent to Use a Computer

Once you get your parents comfortable with a web browser, you should turn your attention to teaching them how to use email.

Email can be a great tool for your parents to stay in touch with family and friends. I know many grandchildren who love to email their grandparents with pictures and updates. Not only can your parents stay up to date with the local family and friends, but also if they have family or friends in other states, or even countries, they can save quite a bit of cash on long distance phone bills.

Depending on who your parents chose as their service provider you may or may not have to set them up with a POP3 e-mail or internet e-mail account. If you do need to set them up with a POP3 e-mail account, then you may want to use something like Hotmail or Yahoo, which are both free services.

Generally, the easiest way to teach your parents to use email is to set them up with Outlook. However, many free e-mail services no longer allow users to set them up with Outlook.

So you may have to settle for a POP3 e-mail service that needs to be checked on the web. If this is the case then, the first thing you need to do, is to set up a short cut on your parent's desktop that will take them directly to the log in page for their e-mail account.

Make sure that they pick something that they can remember as their e-mail address. E-mail is not that effective if you have to keep changing the address. Write down their email address and their password and store it some place safe.

As far as teaching them to use the email account, that is the easy part. You can write out a short list of what each button does, and show them a couple of times. Attachments will take a little time and patience, but once they see how it works it will be second nature.

The most important thing you can teach your parent is about SPAM. You need to make sure that they are fully aware of the dangers of unsolicited emails. You should help them to collect the email address of their friends and family and keep a list of them on paper.

Also, make sure that you set up their address book and show them how to use it. Most email programs have a system that shows whether or not an email is from someone in your address book or an unknown address.

Tell them that if they are not sure about a certain e-mail, then don't open it. They may even want to tell their friends and family to only send them emails with a certain subject. This way they will know at a glance whether the email is safe or not.

Make sure that they know to never open an attachment from a stranger and never give out personal information.