Monday, April 18, 2011

Spreading the word...one by one

Image Credit: Creative Commons by Vectorportal.com


One of the challenges sharing ideas via the web is the constant question of "is anyone listening?" or in the case of blog post, reading.    Creating quality blog posts are more important to me than simply driving traffic for the sake of driving traffic.   Yet spending time promoting blog views is well worth the effort to add to our professional and personal knowledge base.   A couple of methods I have tried recently to promote the Village EduLand site includes:
Recently I  added a couple of other activities to my marketing efforts.  
  • Adding the blog url to my email signature lines.   Like many in the academic and consulting worlds, email is my main source of interaction with educators and students as well as with current and future clients.   On the most busiest of days, I compose and reply to over 150 emails.  Each email can be forwarded multiple times to unknown recipients.   While adding a link to a email signature may be low impact in the overall grand scheme, the effort to do so is also low expense and takes only a couple of seconds, thus worthwhile
  • I started using my blog as a primary resource to answer student questions related to technology.  Instead of answering the technical question over and over for students, the blog is being used to provide answers to that current students, future students and the public at large.  Anytime the same question comes up during future semesters, the student can be referred to the direct blog page for assistance 
  • Posting the blog address on course syllabi is a easy way to set a standard of information at the beginning of the semester for students
While there are many more ways to increase traffic using traditional social media efforts, the above provides more of a personal and direct impact to people around me that I have intentional contact with.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Village EduLand Presentation via Prezi

I will be using the Prezi below to highlight postings made to Village EduLand this week for my Web 2.0 class at Radford University.



Prezi Notes may be downloaded here.

Saturday, March 26, 2011

First Prezi

While never being a big fan of PowerPoint slides, a Prezi is a great alternative.   Think of a animated topic map!  While a Prezi can include audio, video and images, a simple Prezi I created below only includes text.

Friday, March 25, 2011

Creating Wordies

A Wordie for one of my classes
Wordies are "word clouds" are a selection of individual words that are used to convey meaning or intent.  The example above is a Wordie that I created for my SAB: 130 Addictive Behaviors Course.   Each of the words included are directly related to the topics and intent of the specific course.  Therefore, not only is this wordie nice to look at and draws interest, it also provides a overview of the course content for the entire semester.

Wordle.net is a great free resource for easily creating word clouds.  The steps are to simply choose create on the home page and type or paste in your words into the textbox. 

www.Wordle.net     
The website can also scan website urls and create automatic Wordies (an example is below). 

URL Scan of Village EduLand

Thursday, March 24, 2011

SoftChalk

I am a big fan of SoftChalk, a wonderful lesson builder that operates similar to a word processor but is much, much more powerful.   SoftChalk can be used to create interactive lessons that can be posted via web, online inside of multiple Learning Management Systems (LMS) and even on a CD-ROM.     If you are looking for a unique way to provide online instruction that is interactive, engaging and web centric, try SoftChalk for free for 30 days.

Example Lesson Screen
View a sample SoftChalk Lesson here that I created.  This lesson is very simple and does not provide justice to the power of SoftChalk.   The actual lesson is posted within Moodle as a introduction to a course I am teaching.

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Educational-Origami

For users of Bloom's Taxonomy and 21st Century Skills I found this great wiki recently called educational-origami.  The website is full of information for the Instructional Technologist or other educator interested in building higher level thinking skills.   Make sure to take a look!

Thursday, March 17, 2011

A Online Screening Process

One of my faculty responsibilities is to supervise students completing their Human Services Internships with community agencies.  Screening large numbers of students for eligibility and interest is always a difficult responsibility.   A option developed for this year is a small webpage that includes program information as well a online survey process, and opportunity to view videos of past students.  

A few technical details:
See the FTCC Interns Page...