Use Images Effectively in Social Media. Some things bear repeating, and this is one of them. I’m sure you’ve been told before how important images are to success in social media. If you haven’t, you should question your choice of friends and/or business associates. My two cents. Anyway, even if you have been using images a lot more you still may not be using them well -- for maximum impact, in other words.
Social media dashboards have also started incorporating image tools right alongside posting and scheduling. So even though we’ve been waiting like two years for something to come along and replace images as the next big thing in social media, it’s still in the spotlight because it’s not going away, and it works. Release Your Inner Creative Or hire somebody, whatever’s more efficient. Check out this image I made with Canva. Enticing, no? I even inserted a link in the bottom text, which may surprise the site managers when they see a sudden uptick in traffic from this.
There Are Plenty of Quotes to Use And people love them. Why Social Media Behavior Matters To Teens. How to Start a Blog Site using WordPress: Basic 5 Steps for New Bloggers | DailyTekk #edtechbc. APA Citation Machine - Referencing Format Tool - Privatewriting. This week's #FF goes to @twinkelmans and EdTechBC. 13 Easy-to-Use Tools for Creating Killer Visual Content | VerticalResponse Blog #edtechbc. You’re familiar with BuzzFeed, right? The wildly popular media site is known for its array of eclectic content including videos, listicles, infographics, celebrity gossip, surveys, and (so many) cats.
The site was founded in 2006, but skyrocketed to Internet fame over the last few of years, tripling its website traffic. In August of 2014, BuzzFeed raised more than $50 million in venture capital and is now valued at $850 million. Why are we talking about BuzzFeed? Well, they produce an insane amount of viral content, something most businesses wish they had the time or energy to do. However, producing a large quantity of content isn’t entirely what makes BuzzFeed successful. As Jonathan Perelman, VP of Agency Strategy and Industry Development at BuzzFeed pointed out during the PRSA Digital Impact Conference, “Content is king but distribution is queen, and she wears the pants.”
How exactly does content spread across the web? 1. 2. Both Piktochart and Infogr.am offer free themes. 4. 5. 7. 35 Genius Google Tips And Tricks That Most People Don't Know About | Distractify #edtechbc. 20+ Tools For Content Creation That Bloggers Can't Live Without | Digital Information World #edtechbc. This is a guest post by Jessica Millis. Why do you blog? Why does anyone blog? Why has blogging become a parallel to modern journalism, and a platform for people of all walks of life to be heard and represented?
It may be a simple as availability. We write because we can and now, we publish better and faster than ever. Writing tools It all comes down to the written word. HemingwayApp This service analyzes your text for readability. Essaymama.com The site provides a comprehensive service not just for the student essay, but for needs of quality content material too. Focus We all struggle with tasks from time to time, and some of us need concrete help to keep at our work. StayFocusd.com This tool is a productivity extension for Google Chrome (also available on other devices) that assists with restricting the time you could be spending on the distractibility of email, media, Twitter alerts and more. OmmWriter It is my favorite. Plagiarism and Grammar checking Email tools Design Tools Canva. Text 2 Mind Map: Simple mind mapping online | E...
Half of K-12 Students to Have Access to 1-to-1 Computing by 2015-16 - Marketplace K-12. 8 Diagramming Apps for Better Brainstorming on the Go | MakeUseOf #edtechbc. When you’ve got projects to manage, events to plan and the never-ending demands of life hovering over your head, it’s helpful to get your thoughts onto paper. Do you carry around a pen and pad? Maybe not; but if you’re like most people, your mobile device is always within arm’s reach. Plan and organize your thoughts anywhere you are with these eight brainstorming apps.
SimpleMind (iOS, Android, Free) SimpleMind offers a basic, free app for both Apple and Android devices powerful enough for the casual mind mapper. Create thought nodes with connecting ideas, apply custom visuals and save your mind map for later review. The full version of SimpleMind ($4.99 Android, $5.99 iOS) unlocks more than 25 premium features, including the ability to link thoughts to web links, share mind maps with friends, and manage saved maps. Download: SimpleMind for iOS (Free)| Android (Free) Grapholite Diagrams (Web, Android, iOS, Free demo) Download: Grapholite for iOS (Free Demo)| Android (Free Demo) Sign of the times? Seattle PD now has a YouTube channel for its body camera footage Via @engadget #edtechbc. What is Snapchat? A Parent (Teacher?) Guide (Video) | Safe Smart Social #edtechbc. We created this Snapchat Parents Guide to help people understand this new and popular app that kids are using.
What is Snapchat? From: wikiHow Definition: Snapchat is a messaging service that allows people to send photos and short videos to each other, called Snaps. Distinguishing feature: the photos you send disappear. Seconds after opening snaps, users can no longer access them and the images are deleted from the company’s servers. Snapchat Age limitations From Snapchat Terms People under the age of 13 are prohibited from creating Snapchat accounts.
Interesting Snapchat statistics: From MediaBistro and DMR Snapchat has 60+ million total users, 30 million active monthly users, and 70% of all users are female. 400 million Snapchats are sending per day. 32% of all teens in US at the age 13 to 17 years old use Snapchat.Co-founder and CEO of the Snapchat Evan Spiegel just turned 24.Snapchat’s most popular feature is Stories. How to create a Snapchat account? From wikiHow 1. From Snapchat Support 1. Layout Cheat Sheet for Making Great Infographics #edtechbc. This is part of our series on infographic design. Check out the other posts here! Good visual arrangement for infographics is putting together graphic and visual elements in a manner that draws your reader’s attention.
The key to achieving simple, elegant and attractive content are ample whitespace and a well arranged layout. White space is as its name suggests – space that is unmarked in a piece of infographic or visual representation. Whitespace matters in creating visually engaging content A page crammed full of text and images will appear busy. It is always crucial to remember visually engaging content is usually clean and simple. Understanding common infographics layouts to help ease visual arrangement An infographic layout refers to the arrangement of your visual elements and your content.
We have put together a cheat sheet of layouts for your reference. Useful Bait: Works well with most types of data. There are many types of layouts that you can use for your infographic. 16-Point Content Publishing Checklist (Great For Blog Posts) #edtechbc. Listen to this blog post as a podcast: I love checklists. They break down very detailed processes into actionable, step-by-step items. I try to create them for every recurring project I do so I don’t miss a beat when the task comes around again.
The same goes for publishing content. With so many moving parts that take place even before you press “Publish,” a checklist can seriously come in handy. Here are my top 16 items to check before you push your content live for all the world to see. Content Is my title effective? Does your title have the power to entice a reader to click through? Does my content have a main takeaway? Have you ever read an article, and by the end you asked yourself, “What was that all about?” Why am I writing this? What is my call-to-action? Taking the last checklist item a step further, now you must ask, “What do I want my readers to do?”
Is my content useful? Is my content error-free? Formatting Is my content visually interesting, or is it a wall of text? Optimization. The 15 Steps to Make a Great Podcast #edtechbc. I few weeks ago I wrote a post about how we produce our podcasts at Convince & Convert (we have three currently: Social Pros, Content Pros, and Jay Today). Feedback and reaction were so strong, I decided to expand and enhance the piece, and turn it into a downloadable Slideshare presentation: How to produce a podcast in 15 steps from Convince and Convert Podcast Listening Continues to Increase Even since we put this presentation together, Edison Research released new data that shows monthly podcast listening in the United States has gone from 39 million persons to 46 million persons in one year. This means that fully 17% of Americans 12 years old or older are listening to at least one podcast monthly.
New podcasts are coming online quickly, which is why I built the free website MarketingPodcasts.com to be the search engine and reviews site for marketing podcasts. We’re planning on launching several other new podcasts this year at Convince & Convert Media. It’s All Here. The Ultimate Guide to Hashtags [INFOGRAPHIC] | SocialTimes #edtechbc. Did you know that tweets with hashtags generate twice as much engagement – which includes clicks, retweets, favorites and replies – as tweets without? But don’t go crazy – use no more than one to two hashtags in your missives, as anything more than that actually has a negative impact on engagement. On Instagram, the rules are a little different. Studies have shown that the more hashtags you use, the greater the impact – interactions are highest on Instagram when posts have eleven or more hashtags. Facebook, meanwhile, is closer to Twitter – aim for just a couple of hashtags in your updates, as anything beyond this has a detrimental effect on results.
Check the visual below for more insights, which comes courtesy of Quick Sprout. (Source: Quick Sprout.) 9 Best Online Resources that Will Make You a Code Whiz - Board. Not a fancy engineer-in-making but still have a love for code? Don’t worry, because what you’re seeking lies in code itself: online resources. Not everyone can afford a college education that teaches them programming languages. But wait, weren’t some of the world’s best tech-savvy geniuses are college dropouts? Yes, they were! Many other students might be looking forward to refresh their memory a bit with courses that teach the latest coding techniques. Or, you could be someone who just wants to try something new. Whatever you are looking for, you’re certainly looking for some great online resources that will teach you how to code. Udacity Udacity offers a large range of courses such as data sciences, web development, Android or iOS app development, etc. Coursera is one of the world’s largest online platform and MOOC.
The article is written by: Martin Berk. ZAPATION: Free Service Combining Still Images And Online Video To Create Interactive Learning Experiences #edtechbc. Zaption is a fantastic web app that gives teachers the power to create their own video lessons using a variety of multimedia. Combining still images, YouTube clips, and more, teachers can design the perfect video to share with their students.
They can also add interactive elements like quizzes and drawings. With Zaption content comes alive for students giving them the opportunity to benefit from hand-picked multimedia to help them learn about a particular topic. Before diving in to create your own, you can check out what’s available on Zaption’s website. They have a Gallery full of ready-to-use content created by teachers from around the country, and content partners like Facing History and Ourselves.
Most of their current content is focused on U.S. History and Government, but they are working to expand to other subjects in the coming months. Zaption is completely free for Basic users, $79/yr for Pro users, and offers volume pricing for Campus licenses. Like this: Like Loading... The Ideal ELearning Course Duration. One of the critical decisions you have to make when developing an elearning module is the length of the course. In many cases the content of the course is what dictates the duration, but sometimes instructional designers are guilty of cramming too much content into a course. So what is the ideal length of an online course? First, consider how long you would want to spend taking an online course (without breaks). As a rule of thumb, the general theory is that people can only give about 20 minutes of attention before there is a need to take a “mental break”. This doesn’t mean that your elearning courses should only be 20 minutes in length, but it does give you an idea of how you may wish to break-up the content.
For example, lessons could be split into various topics so that the total length a learner is engaged with the content is no more than this amount of time. In the end, your courses need to be as long as it takes for the content to be adequately delivered. TCEA 2015: 7 Twitter Tips to Help Teachers Become Tweeting Pros | EdTech Magazine #edtechbc. Using Twitter, former educator Steven W. Anderson has crafted a powerful platform for himself in the online education world. A former math and science teacher turned technology director turned freelance learning evangelist, Anderson left a large school district in North Carolina in 2014 to make speaking at education conferences a mostly full-time job.
Anderson led a session at TCEA 2015 on Wednesday, orienting educators new to Twitter on how the social media channel can be a powerful learning tool. Along the way, session attendees were treated to an inside look at the tricks and tools that help Anderson entertain and enlighten his 110,000 followers on Twitter. Here are seven key takeaways from Anderson's bag of Twitter tricks: 1. Hashtags help people carry on a topics-based conversation. 2. Anderson also provided a list of scheduled Twitter chats, where educators can join in or watch hashtag-powered discussions on a variety of topics. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 10 Ways Principals Can Use Twitter | Mr. Carter's Office @EdTechEmpowers #edtechbc #bcpvpa.
Before I joined the Twitterverse, I was critical of its use and, quite frankly, was turned off by the concept all together. I often read and watched what seemed like ridiculous stories of what celebrities shared about their lives from the foods they ate, who they had lunch with, or whom they were dating. I saw no purpose for it all. However, all that changed about four years ago when my former district embarked on a digital journey. I had the opportunity to participate in an intense, three-day social media boot camp facilitated by Debra Jasper and Betsy Hubbard, founders of Mindset Digital. They showed the participants a number of ways to harness the power of Web 2.0 tools to share stories, improve communication strategies, engage students, and improve instruction to meet the needs of today’s learners. What was even more significant is that they showed us how other educators were using these tools on a daily basis to make their teaching and learning visible to the world. 1.
Be Great, NUTSHELL: Free iApp that lets users convert pictures into shareable cinematic stories #edtechbc. 8 Best Practices for Moving Courses Online -- Campus Technology. Online Learning 8 Best Practices for Moving Courses Online While a lot of schools are teaming up with third-party companies to launch online versions of long-standing degree programs, USC's business school is doing the work in-house. Here's why. By Dian Schaffhauser02/11/15 A faculty video session at USC Marshall School of Business The first time Patricia Mills was invited to serve as a "guinea pig" instructor for a new program to turn one of her face-to-face tax classes into an online course, she was open-minded but highly skeptical. "I had no clue how to envision it differently than the way we had always been doing it, which is getting up in front of the classroom, teaching from a textbook and Internal Revenue code and regulations, going through numbers and calculations and writing things on the board," she recalled.
On top of that, she had always assumed the students needed her presence and her lectures in order to learn the material. 1) Start Small 2) Invest In-House. Beyond the LMS: What Next-Gen Learning Platforms Should Do | Getting Smart #edtechbc. Make free animated videos, online. #edtechbc. How Hashtags Work on Twitter, Instagram, Google Plus, Pinterest, Facebook, Tumblr, and Flickr - Moz #edtechbc.
Integrating Technology is Like Asking Everyone to Join a Football Team! Seriously. Here’s How. Is hand written correspondence dead? Not with the help of "Bond", a hand writing robot #edtechbc. 5 Features Every Modern LMS Needs | LearnDash #edtechbc #elearning. It's never too early to learn to code - here's proof :-) HTML for Babies Book | ThinkGeek #edtechbc #cuebc. HERENOW: Free iApp to leave messages/warnings for the next person to arrive at your location #edtechbc. Is Twitter Video Education's Coolest New Tool? | Brilliant or Insane #edtechbc. The essential teacher's guide to social media | Daily Genius #edtechbc. 4 eLearning Trends Every Educator Must Know | Brilliant or Insane #edtechbc. Free Professional Development for TLs (an infographic) #edtechbc. 5 Free Tools To Make Alternative School Presentations | eLearning Industry #edtechbc.
How to plan a School Edcamp using Google Docs | Laura Gilchrist #edtechbc. The Public Domain Project: 10,000 Film Clips, 64,000 Images, 100s of Audio Files Free to Use | Open Culture #edtechbc. Free Online Tools And Resources For Musicians From a Guitar Tuner To a Drumbot #edtechbc. NARRABLE: Free/Pay Online Service For Combining Voice And Visual Content - Digital Storytelling #edtechbc. EDTECHOPEN: Free, online weeklong edtech workshops on a variety of topics. #edtechbc #edtechopen. 5 Things To Do When You Run Out of Blog Topics | SEJ #edtechbc. Own Your Space – Keep Yourself and Your Stuff Safe Online – Free eBook | The Learning Renaissance. 12 Google Search Hacks That Will Make You Love Google Even More | Diply #edtechbc #bctla. 50+ Tools for Differentiating Instruction Through Social Media | Edutopia #edtechbc.
Understanding the Building Blocks of Online Learning by @drtonybates @wiredinstructor #edtechbc #elearning. No Photoshop? No Problem: 10 Visual Content Tools for Beginners #edtechbc. What Do You Do When You See Inappropriate Social Media Posts By High School Students? What Teens Shouldn’t Put in Their Social Media Profiles | ThirdParent. 5 Unusual Ways To Use Google Presentations | Edudemic via #edtechbc. 5 Fantastic, Fast Formative Assessment Tools | Edutopia #edtechbc. BYOD for Students | Lisa Nielsen: The Innovative Educator #edtechbc. The Innovative Educator #edtechbc. Top 15 apps for Educators in 2014, This Time According To Mr Kemp #edtechbc. Beware of Loophole In New Copyright Law. The Drivers of a Successful BYOD Initiative | A Principal's Reflections #edtechbc. 10 Great Apps for Elementary | Graphite Blog #edtechbc. Turn on new learning initiatives with PowerPoint - Australian Teachers Blog.
Via @russell1955: FREE journal on Teaching English with Technology. Looks good #edtechbc. Video For All | EU project that brings together current digital video ideas and innovative practices ... #edtechbc. Five Tips for Online Learning Success | Ed4Online #edtechbc #elearning. 10 Reasons To Keep Blogging In 2015.