By Madison Butkus
Hometown Weekly Reporter
Seniors at the Westwood Council on Aging (COA) are in luck this year as they are hosting Social Media 101 classes throughout January and February. The first class was held on Monday, January 22nd and focused on explaining what exactly social media is as well as the different apps that can be used for it.
Running this class was Jen Barsamian who is a former Social Media Marketing professional and public school teacher. She is currently the mother of three teenagers at Westwood High School, a realtor, and a lover of connecting people together.
There will be three class sessions in total focused around this topic. Week one was all about learning the various social media apps as well as downloading one or two of them. They then created some profiles and started to follow their families and friends. Week two will focus on how to stay safe and protect their privacy on social media. Additionally, seniors will learn how to comment and react to different posts on these apps. In week three, they will be able to find groups that might interest them, including some businesses they might like to follow. Lastly, seniors will learn how to manage their social media presence and time, as well as receive answers on any further questions they might have.
The seniors attending this class were all extremely grateful for the guidance and knowledge towards navigating the world of social media. While some of them already have some sort of social media presence, they were eager to learn more about the other apps they could interact with family and friends on.
To help with this, Jen went through the top social media apps before they started to download any of them. Throughout her presentation, she talked about Facebook, Instagram, X, Threads, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and TikTok. Many of the seniors took a real interest in Snapchat and TikTok and went on to download those to their phones. Jen even joked that by the end of these classes, they may create a dancing TikTok video together.
To help out with the downloading process, three Westwood High School students, one of which was Jen’s daughter, stopped by during the class. Marissa, Alexa, and Nev lent a helping hand out to those seniors who needed it, whether that be for downloading apps, logging into apps, creating a social media post, or any generic question seniors had about their phones.
These classes are an amazing resource for seniors who want to continually be more in touch with their family and friends.
