KELA

At the moment, no one in our family uses Kela’s services, because me and my wife are both working full-time. We have both received student financial aid from Kela many years ago. I haven’t had a European Health Insurance Card yet, so I applied for it now.

OMAKANTA

I use the My Kanta service regularly once or twice a year when I need to submit a prescription renewal request for my medicines. In my work, I use the Kanta extranet service regularly. The extranet service is intended for the use of expert personnel in the social and health care sector, and it is used to maintain, for example, organizational information. I log in to both services either with a mobile certificate or with a certificate card (professional card).

KEVA

I logged in to the service with a mobile certificate. My lowest retirement age is 66 years 8 months and 1 day at the time of writing.

Online Shops

I use some different foreign stores like Amazon, Zalando, and eBay. Occasionally, I might also buy some smaller stuff from AliExpress, for example. Naturally, the prices are more affordable than in domestic stores, and the supply is also significantly better. All the services I use are reliable, especially when I use PayPal as a payment method, which also brings with it purchase protection.

As a basic rule when you are making these purchases is, that the further you buy these items, the more skeptical you should be about what you might get. When you are aware of this and do not take shopping too seriously, there are no risks in this kind of shopping.

Microsoft Teams

I wondered for a very long time whether I could choose this program, and whether this choice is a little too familiar to everyone. But then I thought that yes I can, because this program is the most important software for my own work. Without this, doing my work would not be possible. Of course, there might be something else similar, but now we are toying with the idea that there are no others.

Teams is probably the most important tool in my own work when it comes to teamwork. I use Teams’ chats, meeting features, calls, and teams on a daily basis. 

Teams is therefore suitable for chats between two, or more people, such as a video / voice call or written text for conversations, or for their e.g. Combination. Teams is suitable for organizing and managing meetings, sharing and managing files (OneDrive/SharePoint integrations), and much more through integrated apps.

Until now, I have been very pleased with the functionality offered by Teams and the functionality of the software. The software is constantly being developed and, especially during the pandemic, there has been a huge amount of development work.

Digitalization and digital gap

All kinds of digital services and functions in our society are constantly increasing and are being developed at an ever-accelerating pace. Development and expansion have been going steadily for a longer decade, but the Covid pandemic in particular accelerated digitalization considerably, and the last two years have seen, for example rapid development of digital services in healthcare around the world.

These developments present their own challenges for elderly citizens. There are many generations who are still unfamiliar with the use of digital services and devices or have little skills. There are also people who, not because of their age, but of their own volition, do not want to deal with such services and/or devices.

Not all elderly people have the opportunity to resort to the help of relatives, for example, in the face of such problems. When developing services, their ease of use and accessibility must be taken into account for all possible user groups. Those who are unfamiliar with digitalization and do not want to use such functions or services should also be considered. Because without taking these types of people into account, the digital gap will widen and society’s problems will grow at the same rate.

Other students thoughts and my comments for them.

DIGI CITIZEN
DIGI CITIZEN
DIGI CITIZEN

Digital competence test

I consider myself to be moderately capable in the throes of digitalization, so the result of the test was not surprising in itself. When you have always been interested in development and new things in terms of digital services, devices and functions, the result is also in line with it.

Self-reflection

It is interesting to recall experiences of digitalization as a whole, because nowadays digitalization and digital services are so commonplace for a large number of people that they don’t even think about them anymore. Services, especially those that work on mobile devices, are so integrated into society and people that it is hard to imagine that without them, not many things would even be possible anymore.

As in the previous section Digi society, I didn’t really encounter anything new in this section either. But as I would mention earlier, a recap is always good!