A technology club that started six years ago at Canterbury High School has grown into a national and international effort to teach senior citizens how to use their phones, computers, and apps, according to a report from WISN. The program, known as CLEO (Computer Literacy Education Outreach), began as a handful of students helping older neighbors with basic device questions. It now sits alongside a wider, loosely connected movement of teen-led tech literacy groups spreading across US high schools, from Minnesota to Texas to Illinois, each one trying to close the same gap: the one between people who grew up with smartphones and people who did not.
The timing matters. Online banking, telehealth portals, government services, and even grocery loyalty programs have moved behind logins and apps over the past decade, and seniors who never got comfortable with a keyboard are increasingly locked out of daily life unless someone sits down and walks them through it. That is the opening these student-run programs have filled, one 40-minute lesson at a time.
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What Is CLEO, the Program Behind Today’s Headlines
CLEO stands for Computer Literacy Education Outreach, a club started by students at Canterbury High School, according to WISN’s reporting. The outreach began about six years before the report aired and has since expanded from serving seniors in a single city to reaching people nationally and internationally, WISN reported. Specific details about how many seniors the club has taught, or how large its current roster of student volunteers has grown, were not included in the available reporting, so those figures remain unconfirmed for now.
What is confirmed, through separate coverage of CLEO-style clubs operating under similar names elsewhere, is the format: student volunteers visit senior living communities or host sessions where older adults bring their own devices and ask whatever is confusing them that week. One CLEO volunteer, identified as Aaron, a Canterbury School student and co-founder of the club, explained the motivation behind starting it, saying “We really wanted to make an impact on seniors in our community after experiencing the struggles our own grandparents were having with technology,” according to iHeart’s coverage of a similarly named club.
That grandparent-to-grandchild framing shows up across nearly every version of this idea nationwide, suggesting the underlying motivation is less about a single school’s initiative and more about a shared generational frustration that teenagers kept noticing inside their own families. It is the same gap researchers have flagged from the opposite direction too, pointing to how differently young people and older adults experience the same devices.
From One City to a Global Mission in Six Years
According to WISN, CLEO’s jump from a local club to something with national and international reach happened over roughly six years. That growth curve mirrors what other student-founded tech literacy programs have reported once they moved lessons online. Jordan Mittler, a junior at Ramaz High School in New York, started what became Mittler Senior Tech in 2017 with a single student, a 94-year-old named Bonnie. After the organization shifted its in-person nursing home classes to Zoom during the pandemic, enrollment in its weekly online sessions grew to between 50 and 60 students per class, drawn from across the country rather than a single neighborhood, according to Westside Spirit’s reporting on the program.
That same online-delivery shift appears to be what let CLEO, or programs following its model, stretch past a single city’s senior centers. A video call does not care whether the student volunteer and the senior citizen are in the same ZIP code, which removes the geographic ceiling that limited earlier, purely in-person tutoring efforts.
Teens Teach Technology’s Nationwide Numbers
The clearest publicly available numbers for this kind of program come from Teens Teach Technology, a separate international volunteer organization that provides free technology lessons to senior citizens through libraries, nursing homes, and community centers. Teens Teach Technology was founded in May 2020, originally operating out of Long Island, New York. The organization now reports 120 volunteers worldwide, all between the ages of 13 and 18, according to its own published figures. It says it has members across 18 US states and in seven countries, including India, Dubai, Egypt, Taiwan, and China.
Teens Teach Technology’s lessons are free and run 40 minutes each, covering social media, internet safety, Google applications, and family-communication apps, among other everyday technology topics. The organization is structured around four internal committees: Public Relations, Content Creators, Presenters, and Social Media, which divide the work of building lesson plans, running sessions, and recruiting new volunteers.
One Teens Teach Tech volunteer, Kristen Moor, described the generational gap that drives the group’s work, saying “My generation has grown up surrounded by technology. It’s been ingrained in us since a young age, but for older adults, especially senior citizens, that’s not the case,” according to Connected Nation’s profile of her volunteer work. Moor also said the sessions tend to go over well with the seniors she teaches, noting “For many of the seniors we work with, it’s exciting to have younger people come in and teach them. They’re eager to learn from us, and it creates a really positive environment.”
Inside a 40-Minute Lesson: What Teens Actually Teach
The curriculum across these programs leans heavily practical rather than theoretical. CLEO volunteers, based on reporting about similarly structured clubs, walk seniors through the exact screen taps needed to complete a task rather than explaining how an operating system works underneath. CLEO volunteer Noah Smith demonstrated this approach directly while showing a senior how to find photo albums on an Apple device, instructing simply, “You go to Library, then you go to Albums again,” according to WSVN’s coverage of a student-led tech tutoring initiative.
Fellow volunteer Jack Rostock described the kinds of questions that come up most often in these sessions: “How do I delete this photo? How do I delete this email? And it’s stuff we do every day. So, you know, we can teach them like shortcuts to really help them,” he told WSVN. That gap between “stuff we do every day” and genuinely unfamiliar territory for an older adult is the entire premise these clubs are built around.
Teens Teach Technology’s published lesson list adds smart home technology and a dedicated AI series to the basics, reflecting how quickly the baseline of “everyday technology” has shifted even in the past few years. A senior who finally gets comfortable with text messages now has to contend with voice assistants, smart locks, and chatbots layered on top. Readers getting a smart speaker or video doorbell and smart lock for an aging parent will recognize exactly the kind of setup questions these teen volunteers field every week.
The Digital Divide Driving the Demand
Teens Teach Technology’s own materials cite a widely repeated figure: about one-third of adults above the age of 65 report they have never used the internet. Whatever the precise current number is nationally, the programs profiled here are not treating it as an abstraction. Each one exists because a specific set of teenagers decided that a specific group of older adults nearby needed hands-on help, not a pamphlet.
That divide is not just about comfort with gadgets. It increasingly determines whether someone can book a doctor’s appointment, apply for a benefit, or simply stay in touch with family that has moved away. Basic account security is part of that picture too. A senior who has just learned to use email for the first time is also, by definition, a target for phishing and scam messages, which is one reason internet safety shows up in nearly every curriculum these clubs teach, right alongside tools like passwordless login methods that are slowly replacing the easy-to-guess passwords many older users still rely on.
Case Study: SavvySeniors Brings Cybersecurity Lessons to Minnesota
In Woodbury, Minnesota, three 2025 graduates of East Ridge High School, Emily Zhou, Mirella Janssen, and Eliza Kubicek, built a program called SavvySeniors. The trio designed their curriculum in December 2023 and began running community sessions in fall 2024, according to Woodbury Magazine. SavvySeniors runs sessions at three senior communities, Stonecrest, Norris Square, and Arbor Glen, plus a recurring booth at the local Woodbury Days event.
Their curriculum goes further into security than most: two-factor authentication, general cybersecurity habits, and password handling sit alongside lighter topics like texting, emojis, mobile games, and basic AI discussions. The group also covers practical accessibility issues, including hearing aid connectivity and printer troubleshooting, two problems that rarely show up in generic “how to use a smartphone” guides but come up constantly with an older audience, alongside everyday storage headaches like the kind flagged in reporting on apps that quietly drain phone storage. A Stonecrest resident, Robert Wiese, summed up what makes the sessions work for him: “We never feel like they are talking down to us,” he told the magazine.
Case Study: Gen2Gen Tech’s Girl Scout Gold Award Project in Houston
In Houston, Alief Taylor High School senior Mykah Edison built her community program, Gen2Gen Tech, as a Girl Scouts Gold Award project, according to Defender Network. Her sessions focus on video calls, smartphone keyboard navigation, voice assistants like Siri and Google Assistant, basic online searches, and messaging.
One participant, Sheila Darling, described the effect the lessons had on her confidence: “I feel much more comfortable and willing to try new things without hesitation,” she said. Edison’s volleyball coach, Toni Smith, framed the project as evidence the student’s leadership extends beyond the court, telling the outlet that “Gen2Gen Tech shows that her leadership extends far beyond athletics.”
Case Study: Mittler Senior Tech Scales to Dozens of Students a Week
Mittler Senior Tech, founded by Ramaz High School student Jordan Mittler in 2017, is one of the longer-running examples of this model and shows how far it can scale once lessons move online. The program started with in-person classes at a single nursing home before pivoting entirely to Zoom sessions during the pandemic, according to Westside Spirit. It now runs a free “basic” class alongside a paid “advanced computer” track priced at $75 for ten classes, with 50 to 60 students typically enrolled per online session.
The curriculum covers email, typing, internet browsing, online shopping, and looking up everyday information like recipes, sports scores, and stock prices. Mittler has described the program’s underlying goal as addressing social isolation among older adults, not just teaching software skills, a framing that shows up again and again across these programs even when the lesson plans look purely technical on paper.
Case Study: Oakland Tech Week’s Senior Technology Day
Not every version of this idea is a standing weekly club. Northeastern University’s Oakland campus ran a one-day Senior Technology Day as part of Oakland Tech Week, pairing Oakland Unified School District high schoolers and university students with members of the District 6 Senior Advisory Council, according to Northeastern University’s reporting published October 7, 2026.
Students including Gabriella Nsubuga, Lati Martinez, and Ayushi Puri walked seniors through mobile payment apps like Clipper card, email account management across devices, cloud storage, and password and phone security, plus general AI literacy and safety. One attendee, Sylvia Chaney-Williamson, called the experience “Marvelous, magnificent, extraordinary.” Norman Weekes, 68, who founded his own outreach efforts under the names AI4SavvySeniors and AI4BrothersandSisters, also took part, pointing to a trend this story keeps surfacing: some of the seniors being taught are now building their own follow-on programs.
Case Study: Conant High School Students in Schaumburg, Illinois
In the Chicago suburbs, Conant High School students Kareem Hamidof and Anvith Kotha set up a table in the lobby of a senior home in Schaumburg for open device questions, with plans for the visits to become recurring, according to ABC7 Chicago. The sessions focus on smartphones, social media, and FaceTime.
Hamidof framed the effort in generational terms, saying “It’s a duty of our generation. We’re always helping our parents.” Resident Craig Foster, 82, described how fast the gap moves: “Smart phones have so much going on. The kids have kept up with it.” Conant’s technology chair, Paul Kim, pointed to the real motivation behind the visits for most residents: staying connected to family. Fellow student volunteer Anvith Kotha added that the residents they met had, in his words, been excluded from technology, and that the goal was changing that.
A Decade-Plus Trend, Not a New Idea
Teen-led tech tutoring for seniors is not a 2026 invention. NPR covered tutors teaching seniors new high-tech tricks as far back as January 2012, and MIT awarded OMEGA scholarships to high school students who fostered multigenerational tech connections years before most of the programs above existed. What has changed is scale and visibility: smartphones replaced desktop computers as the primary device seniors struggle with, video calling turned a geography-limited favor into something that can serve students and seniors anywhere, and local news outlets from Milwaukee to Miami to Chicago have increasingly picked these stories up as feel-good, service-oriented local segments.
It is also worth noting how often these programs form around a single student’s personal project requirement, whether that is a Girl Scouts Gold Award, a school club looking for a cause, or a personal connection to a grandparent. That bottom-up, student-initiated structure is part of why there is no single national organization running all of this. CLEO, Teens Teach Technology, SavvySeniors, Gen2Gen Tech, and Mittler Senior Tech all developed independently, in different states, built by different teenagers who each arrived at nearly the same idea.
Comparing the Major Teen-Led Tech Literacy Programs
| Program | School or Founder(s) | Started | Reported Scale |
|---|---|---|---|
| CLEO | Canterbury High School students | ~6 years ago (per WISN) | Local to national and international, per WISN |
| Teens Teach Technology | Founded on Long Island, NY | May 2020 | 190 volunteers, 18 US states, 7 countries |
| SavvySeniors | Emily Zhou, Mirella Janssen, Eliza Kubicek (East Ridge High School) | Designed Dec. 2023, launched Fall 2024 | 3 senior communities in Woodbury, MN |
| Gen2Gen Tech | Mykah Edison (Alief Taylor High School) | Girl Scouts Gold Award project | Community program in Houston, TX |
| Mittler Senior Tech | Jordan Mittler (Ramaz High School) | 2017 | 50-60 students per online class |
| Oakland Senior Technology Day | Northeastern University, Oakland campus students | One-day event, Oct. 2026 | District 6 Senior Advisory Council members |
| Conant High School program | Kareem Hamidof, Anvith Kotha | Recurring visits since 2024 | Single senior home in Schaumburg, IL |
What Each Program Teaches Seniors
| Program | Core Curriculum |
|---|---|
| Teens Teach Technology | Social media, internet safety, Google apps, family-communication apps, smart home tech, AI series |
| SavvySeniors | Two-factor authentication, cybersecurity, texting, hearing aid connectivity, printer troubleshooting, mobile games, AI discussions |
| Gen2Gen Tech | Video calls, keyboard navigation, voice assistants, online search, messaging |
| Mittler Senior Tech | Email, typing, browsing, online shopping, news and sports/stock lookups |
| Oakland Senior Technology Day | Mobile payment apps, email and cloud sync, password and phone security, AI literacy |
| Conant High School program | Smartphones, social media, FaceTime, general device navigation |
Why This Trend Is Accelerating Now
Three forces are pushing this model forward at the same time. First, high schools increasingly require or reward community service hours, and a weekly tech-help session is an easy fit for that requirement compared with more logistically complex volunteer work. Second, youth organizations like Girl Scouts explicitly reward independent, self-directed community projects through awards like the Gold Award, which gives ambitious students a structured path to formalize what might otherwise stay an informal favor for a grandparent. Third, the shift to Zoom-based delivery that several of these programs made during the pandemic turned out to be permanent in some cases, which is the main reason a program can start in one city and end up, as CLEO reportedly did, reaching people nationally and internationally within a few years.
None of the programs profiled here appear to be commercial ventures competing for market share. They are closer to a loosely coordinated grassroots movement, each one solving the same local problem independently. That makes direct competitive comparison less meaningful than tracking which curriculum choices keep repeating across unrelated programs, since those repeats point to the problems seniors run into most consistently: basic smartphone navigation, scam and password safety, and, increasingly, how to make sense of AI tools like chatbots that are showing up everywhere whether a senior asked for them or not.
Predictions: Where Teen-Led Digital Literacy Efforts Go Next
- More high schools are likely to formalize informal tutoring efforts into official clubs or Gold Award-style projects, since the service-hour and leadership-credit incentives already exist and cost schools nothing to recognize.
- Expect more one-day “tech day” events modeled on Northeastern Oakland’s Senior Technology Day, since a single-day event requires far less ongoing commitment than a weekly club while still generating positive local press.
- Zoom-based delivery will likely keep pulling more of these programs toward national or international reach, following the path CLEO and Mittler Senior Tech have already shown is possible once a program stops depending on students physically visiting a building.
- AI literacy will likely become a standard curriculum item rather than an occasional add-on, since Teens Teach Technology, SavvySeniors, and Oakland’s event all already teach some version of it independently of one another.
- Paid tiers, similar to Mittler Senior Tech’s $75 advanced class, may become more common as founding students graduate and programs look for ways to keep running without their original volunteer base.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does CLEO stand for?
CLEO stands for Computer Literacy Education Outreach, a club started by students at Canterbury High School that teaches senior citizens how to use technology, according to WISN.
How long has CLEO existed?
WISN reported that CLEO began about six years before its report aired, and that it has since grown from serving seniors locally to reaching people nationally and internationally.
Is CLEO the same organization as Teens Teach Technology?
No. They are separate programs. CLEO is the club reported on by WISN and started at Canterbury High School. Teens Teach Technology is a distinct international volunteer organization founded in May 2020 on Long Island, New York, with 190 volunteers across 18 US states and seven countries.
How can a senior find a free tech tutoring program nearby?
Based on the programs covered here, local libraries, senior living communities, and nursing homes are the most common hosts. Teens Teach Technology, SavvySeniors, and Mittler Senior Tech all run sessions through those kinds of venues or online.
What topics do these programs typically teach?
Across the programs profiled, the most common topics are smartphone basics, social media, video calling, internet and password safety, and increasingly, basic AI literacy.
Are any of these programs paid?
Most are free. One exception is Mittler Senior Tech, which offers a free basic class alongside a paid advanced computer track priced at $75 for ten classes.
Why are so many of these programs started by Girl Scouts or school clubs specifically?
Youth organizations like Girl Scouts reward self-directed community projects through recognitions such as the Gold Award, and many high schools count this kind of volunteering toward service-hour requirements, which creates a built-in incentive structure for students to formalize what might otherwise remain an informal favor for family members.
Is this a new trend?
Not entirely. NPR reported on tutors teaching seniors new high-tech tricks as early as 2012. What is newer is the scale some programs have reached by moving lessons online, and the growing emphasis on AI literacy alongside traditional smartphone and computer basics.
