You can add a description, sometimes called alt-text, to your photos so they’re accessible to even more people, including people who are blind or have low vision. Good descriptions are concise, but present what’s in your photos accurately enough to understand their context. For anyone using a screen reader this will read the Tweet text and the alternative text you provided for your image. The same concept applies to adding images to other social media, blog posts and websites.
On your phone when you add an image you will see a paint brush icon. Click this and it takes you to the ‘Edit photo‘ page. Here you can select the ALT option. This stands for alternative text. You have up to 1000 characters to describe your image. Then tap Done and then Save. This will take you back to your tweet which you can then finalise and send.
From twitter.com, once you add an image you will see ‘Add description‘ underneath it. Click this and add your description. Then click Save. This will take you back to your tweet which you can then finalise and send.
Description tips
You don't necessarily need to say "image of" in your alt text for users to know it's an image. Screen readers will announce that it's an image. But it can help readers to specify if it's a hand-drawn image, Polaroid, infographic, screenshot, chart, map, diagram, or so on.
— Accessibility Awareness (@A11yAwareness) July 28, 2022
It should not come as a big surprise that employers and recruiters will look at your LinkedIn profile. They are just as keen to fill open posts as you are securing a job. One way they can do this is by using LinkedIn to search for keywords that relate to the job(s) they have open. If this brings up your profile, then they could choose to contact you if they felt your profile matched what they were looking for.
A second way is when they have received your application, CV and cover letter, they search for your profile using your name. Taking a look at your LinkedIn profile can provide them with a check that what is on your CV matches what is on your public profile.
Should you have an incomplete profile, and worse one that has not been proofread and is littered with typos; then this could be the very reason you are not getting a reply from the organisations you are applying to. Below you will find a list of tips on how to make some simple changes to improve your profile.
Headline
This appears under your name. Use this to say what you do (name of your course) and what you want to do (get a placement/graduate role in…). Your headline is likely to be the first thing a recruiter or employer will see.
Photo
Make sure you have a professional looking ‘head and shoulders’ photo. This can be easily taken by a friend against a white or light coloured wall. Make sure you are dressed smartly and you smile. Don’t be tempted to use a cropped version of your favourite holiday photo!
Summary
This section is your opportunity to share your experience (at university, part-time work or volunteering), the skills you have developed and what your career aspirations are. Tell your story! What projects have you worked on, are you a member of a club, society or do you engage in other extracurricular activities? What skills have you gained through working on university projects?
When writing this you may identify there is a gap in your experience. Take the opportunity to fix this by looking for volunteering or paid part-time roles. This could be becoming a Course Rep, Student Ambassador, joining a Society or taking a part-time job.
Imagine this is your elevator pitch with your future employer – you have literally a few minutes to tell them about yourself. Write your summary in first person. Use the STAR technique (Situation, Task, Action, Result) to share real examples to demonstrate your skills and attributes. In short say what the situation was, explain the task and what the goal was, what action did you take to achieve this, and what was the result of the action.
State here that you are open for placement or graduate opportunities, and that you are happy to be contacted.
Skills
Adding specific skills to your LinkedIn profile allows you to showcase your abilities to other LinkedIn members, such as peers, colleagues, managers and prospective employers. Use this section to add both the technical and soft skills you feel you can demonstrate. Be strategic and add the ones you know are relevant to the industry you wish to work in. Over time you will need to revisit this section and add new skills.
Enable the #OpenToWork feature from your LinkedIn profile
This tells recruiters and employers that you are actively looking for work.
To enable the #OpenToWork feature:
Click the Me icon at the top of your LinkedIn homepage.
Click View profile.
Click the Open to button.
Click Finding a new job.
Provide the requested information in the pop-up window that appears. You can choose whether all LinkedIn members or only recruiters can see that you’re open to job opportunities. If you choose to share with all LinkedIn members, LinkedIn will add an #OpenToWork photo frame to your profile photo.
Click Add to profile.
LinkedIn Open to Work feature
Recomendations
If you have work experience, reach out to your colleagues and ask them if they would be happy to give you a recommendation. This is a valuable way to endorse your experience.
Make Connections
This may seem obvious, but over time you should aim to develop your connections beyond those you imediately know and work with. For example you may have attended a Careers Fair at university and talked to an employee representing a company you are interested in working for. You could follow this up by sending a peronalised connection request saying for example “It was good to meet you at the recent Careers event… Thank you for the advice.”
You can also follow Companies on LinkedIn. This will give you updates on information shared by those organisations.
Further information
Visit your university’s Careers and Employability Centre and web page. Sheffield Hallam University is a good example to demonstrate the vast support on offer https://www.shu.ac.uk/careers
Taking the time to keep your LinkedIn profile up to date is without doubt a good investment of time! Ask a friend or family member to read your profile. They can help to pick up any typos you’ve missed and point out anything that perhaps needs to be made clearer.
There may be times when you see content coming up in your feed that you are just not interested in and given the choice you’d prefer not to see! It could be that your timeline is suddenly full of tweets because there is a football cup final going on, it’s Eurovision time or because a new Wordle game gets popular and people like to share their daily results. We all have different interests and that’s fine, but it doesn’t mean you have to see these tweets! If this is happening to you then muting could be the answer!
You can choose to mute Tweets that contain specific words, phrases or hashtags. This is a good solution to remove the tweets twittering about a topic you have no interest in from your feed. Alternatively if it’s a particular person you are following you can opt to mute just their acount. Muting an account is an alternative to unfollowing an acccount or blocking someone. There are good reasons for making these choices, but should you then decide to refollow the account, then they will receive a notification, revealing you had unfollowed them. By muting, the account won’t get a notification. Muting can be done permanantly, until you choose to unmute, or for selected durations of 24 hours, 7 days or 30 days.
A further option is to mute notifications from a conversation you are tagged in. If you are being bombarded with notifications and you have moved on from the original start of the conversation, then it can be helpful to mute the thread.
So in short muting is a useful option to remove tweets from your timeline without unfollowing or blocking anyone. Below you will find how to do this for the different options available.
Mute words and hashtags
Click More from the side navigation menu, then click Settings and privacy.
Click the Privacy and safety tab, then click Mute and block.
Click Muted words.
Click the plus icon.
Enter the word or hashtag you’d like to mute. Entries can only be added one a time.
Select Home timeline if you wish to mute the word or phrase from your Home timeline.
Select Notifications if you wish to mute the word or phrase from your Notifications.
Specify From anyone or From people you don’t follow.
Under Mute timing choose between Forever, 24 hours from now, 7 days from now, or 30 days from now.
Click Save.
Note: Muting words and hashtags only applies to your notifications and Home timeline. You will still see these Tweets via search. Notifications for muted words and hashtags are applied to replies and mentions, including all interactions on those replies and mentions: likes, Retweets, additional replies, and Quote Tweet.
Mute accounts
Mute is a feature that allows you to remove an account’s Tweets from your timeline without unfollowing or blocking that account. Muted accounts will not know that you’ve muted them and you can unmute them at any time. To access a list of accounts you have muted, visit your muted accounts settings on twitter.com or your app settings on Twitter for iOS or Android.
To mute an account from a profile:
Click on a username to open their profile.
Click the more iconnext to the follow button.
Select Mute @account from the dropdown.
To mute an account from a Tweet:
Click the more iconfrom any Tweet.
Select Mute @account from the dropdown menu.
Muting notifications for a conversation
If you would like to stop receiving notifications for a particular conversation, you can choose to mute it. When you mute a conversation, you won’t get any new notifications about that conversation. You will, however, still see Tweets from the conversation in your timeline and when you click into the original Tweet.
To mute a conversation via twitter.com, or from your Twitter for iOS or Android app:
Go to the Tweet detail of any Tweet or a reply in the conversation you wish to mute.
Click the more icon.
Click Mute this conversation.
Click to confirm.
Image credit: Pixabay – Free to use, no attribution required
In order for a group project to succeed you need to be organised. It’s important to know what stages make up the workflow that will ensure you complete the project, and who is responsible for what. One approach which has been used by many over the years is KanBan boards. Typically a white board or wall space is used along with some coloured tape to divide the space into columns (progress) and rows or ‘swim lanes’ to seperate individual or teams sharing the same board. Post-its were then used to write individual tasks. These could be moved along as the task progresses.
Kanban board (Pixabay)
A Kanban system is a means of balancing the demand for work to be done with the available capacity to start new work. (Anderson, 2010; Anderson and Carmichael, 2016). A key benefit of this approach is that it can be used with all members of your group project and everyone can see all of the tasks and the progress being made.
“Kanban (かんばん): Visual cards that list details about an item, organized into lists on a board to manage workflow stages.” (Shreiber, 2016)
The example above (Shreiber, 2016) shows the typical kanban headings, creating a To-do list, a Doing list and a Done list. You might choose to head the lists as Today, Tomorrow and This Week or taking writing a blogpost as an example you could have the headings as To Write, Writing, Editing, Publishing, and Promoting.
Ways to use kanban boards
Kanban boards can be used for individual or group projects. These might be one off activities or ongoing work. For example:
Plan personal tasks
Follow progression of meeting actions
Gather ideas for future blog posts
Monitoring the writing, publishing and promoting of blog posts
Track job applications (or applicants if you’re hiring)
Organise a conference
Reading list for a dissertation or paper literature review
Keep on top of assignments
Digital Kanban Boards
Trello is a useful digital project management tool https://trello.com. The obvious advantage of a digital project management tool is that it can be accessed online, so wherever you are it is possible to work on this. The free version allows unlimited cards and upto 10 boards per workspace. There are iOS and Android mobile apps, and two-step authentication. Added features allow users to:
Assign names to tasks
Leave comments/questions
Add due dates and set reminders
Drag and drop documents onto a card
Trello Board
You may want to explore other options and decide on a space you feel will be most useful for your project.
It has been a long challenging year for all of us and I for one am looking forward to the holidays to spend time with family and friends. What better way to countdown than this selection of bite sized activities created by colleagues to share tips about learning and teaching.
Trent Institute of Learning and Teaching
Using an advent calendar template, each a new door reveals information and tips on ways to help you on your HEA Fellowship journey. Kate Cuthbert and Laura Stinson are reknowned for sharing excellent resources and this festive calendar is no expection!
Follow @NtuTilt and the hashtag #NTUFestiveFellowship for updates.
This group are posting a daily question to talk aboout and share active learning tips. I loved that the questions were croudsourced from the active learning network. Participants are invited to join colleagues in a mini tweetchat at 13:00 GMT to engage in a 15-minute discussion on the benefits of active learning.
Follow @ActiveLearningNTW and the hashtag #ActiveAdvent2021 for updates.
Pedagogy and Pancakes is a practice-sharing seminar series created by Dr Chris Headeland. His idea is that you get your breakfast, sit down, relax, and enjoy some lightning talks run by colleagues. In each talk, the speakers will share their teaching and learning experience and provide some concrete examples that you could adopt or adapt for your own practice.
To date the series runs every two weeks with three speakers sharing their practice. Chris uses Microsoft Teams and a form for expressing interest in the series. Once signed up you then receive subsequent meeting invites. This is really helpful as it makes sure the event is in your diary and it contains the link to join it! If you cannot make a session, then you can follow up afterwards by watching the recording.
What I really like about the series is the fact that there is an opportunity for participants to learn about a variety of different approaches that can be used in their practice. It’s a also a great place to share with others what you are doing so do consider submitting an idea and then you can give a short (approx. 15 min) presentation and engage in a discussion with those participating.
The National Teaching Repository (NTR) has been created by Dr Dawne Irving-Bell to enable educators to share their practice in a central space using Figshare.
The repository is an open access resource where you can browse and download resources. The aim of the NTR is to bring together groupings of resources relating to pedagogic approaches as opposed to subject disciplines. Examples of practice go way beyond academic papers and book chapters accepting all of the following formats:
Papers
Reports
Data
Keynote Lectures
Power Point Presentations
Video
Posters
Infographics
Templates
Teaching Resources
Curriculum Materials
What is unique and so valuable about the National Teaching Repository is that you can make your work publicly available and citable as you develop it. Each submission gets a unique DOI (Digital Object Identifier). This is especially valuable where prior to publication you present ideas at a conference. Visitors can search within the repository so tagging posts will help highlight the focus of your work.
Currently this repository has the following sub-groups to help organise your pedagogical practice:
Visit your Twitter profile to find the date you joined Twitter.
Use Twitter’s advanced search to add your Twitter account @username (Account – from these accounts) and a date range to find your first tweets (Join date + a few months). https://twitter.com/search-advanced
Scroll down to the bottom of the search results to get your first tweet.
LTHEchat – A short acrostic poem by Sue Beckingham
On the 17th March 2021 the weekly Learning and Teaching in Higher Education tweetchat reached a special milestone – the 200th #LTHEchat. For anyone who is not familiar with the chat, this is an hour long Q&A focussed on a topic relating to learning and teaching introduced by a guest. The conversation is stimulated by 6 or so questions to prompt thoughts and reflections, and an opportunity to share ideas and practice relating to the topic.
The focus of the 200th chat was to provide an opportunity for the community to reflect on the tweetchat. In the blog post promoting this, there was a task to prepare in advance and then share at the start of the chat. This asked participants to:
Please consider preparing a picture of an object, model, drawing, collage etc. with a caption that shows what the #LTHEchat means to you.
My response is the image above which includes a mini acrostic. In this post I have expanded this into a poem
For anyone unfamiliar with what a tweetchat is, take a look at the slidedeck below.
A podcast is an audio programme that can be listened to on your computer, smartphone and other mobile devices. Podcast is a portmanteau, a combination of ‘iPod’ and ‘broadcast’. POD is also described as ‘portable on demand’ (Wikipedia). Typically a podcast features one or more hosts who engage in a discussion with each other or guests on their show.
How to listen to a podcast
You can listen to a podcast via your computer via the site they have been created on. To ensure you get reminded about new episodes you can subscribe to podcasts on your computer using Feedly or iTunes.
However the added value of listening to audio is being able to listen wherever you are, be that commuting to work, talking a run, or walking the dog. Both Apple and Android have built in podcast apps, which means you can listen to the podcasts on your smartphone. There are also other apps such as Player FM, Podbean, Spotify which you can use.
I have an iPhone so went for the iTunes option. The quickest way I’ve found to add podcasts was to google the podcast show (on my phone or laptop) and select the link for podcasts.apple.com. Then simply click subscribe. The podcasts can then be accessed via the Apple podcast app on my phone or iTunes on my laptop.
My collection of podcasts relating to higher education, edtech and coaching
One of my earliest experiences of listening in to a podcast led by educators was Break Drink, led by Laura Pasquini and Jeff Jackson. They describe BreakDrink as “An occasional chat with Jeff Jackson and Laura Pasquini about life, work, and random stuff. There’s a good chance you’ll hear these co-hosts talk about their thoughts on current events, ukuleles, the NBA, podcasts, higher ed, rescue dogs, research, books, technology, and tacos… not in any particular order.” I really enjoyed the banter chat that goes on. Laura has gone on to host other podcasts as you will see below.
These are a selection of the podcasts I can recommend
The first edition of the Journal of Social Media for Learning – Conference Special Edition has now been published. The #SocMedHE19 conference took place at Edge Hill University in December 2019 led by Dawne Bell and Sarah Wright. Presenters were invited to contribute papers to the inaugural edition of this new journal. The Chief Editor is Dawne Bell and she has done a terrific job bringing this together.
Submissions were accepted in all formats (papers, posters, presentations, opinion pieces, technical reports), including reflection pieces outlining changes in individual’s practice following the conference. This has meant that there has been a wonderful range of contributions. Having this opportunity to learn from others’ practice through the different papers is going to be of value to many educators and students.
The foreword states the journal’s ethos is centered around the creation of a supportive space where all colleagues, but particularly those new to publishing, can contribute to the scholarly discourse about their academic practice, and if they so wish, secure opportunities to gain experience of peer-review and journal editing.
JSML provides a space to capture the many approaches of using social media for learning. The journal seeks to be inclusive and encourages those new to research or publishing to share their work and ideas in a format that suits them best. The review process is supportive and aims to help contributors to gain confidence. This is an exciting publication that can only go from strength to strength.
Social Media for Learning: Advancing Theoretical Frameworks to Understand Complex Learning Environments. Alison Hartley, Valerie Farnsworth and Helen Bradbury
Flipped Classroom and Case Studies Facilitated Using Social Media to Enhance Learning In Higher Education. Christie Siettou
Can Social Media Use Predict Intercultural Knowledge, Attitude and Skills Among Generation Z? A snapshot from a Pre-Covid19 Era. Sebah Al-Ali
Self-Regulation Strategies of Smartphone use During University Self-Study. Rebecca L Barron and Linda K. Kaye
Curation, Connections and Creativity: Reflections on Using Twitter to Teach Digital Activism. Paul J Reilly
Co-creating Learning Experiences with Students as Partners Sue Beckingham
Escaping the Inactive Classroom: Escape Rooms for Teaching Technology. Rachelle Emily O’Brien and Scott Farrow
An Interactive Social Media Workshop Using Lego® Serious Play®. Kiu Sum, Sue Beckingham, Suzanne Faulkner and Deborah Baff
A Student Approach to Using Educational Memes as an Outlet to Enhance Learning. Jennifer Louise Worswick Irving-Bell
Crossing Boundaries: Twitter and Online Communities of Practice for Nursing Students. Emma Grady and Michael Brian Haslam
How Virtual Communities of Practice via Social Media Might Enhance Nurse Education. Michael Brian Haslam
Online Legal Resources and Their Potential for Visual Learning Inclusivity. Conor Courtney
Problematising the use of Snapchat in Higher Education Teaching and Learning. Paul Fenn and Paul J Reilly
Dog Filters and Flower Crowns: Using Snapchat as a Pedagogical Tool in Higher Education. Gary W Kerr and Suzanne Faulkner
Collaborative Conference Reflections: A Visual Journey. Dawne Irving-Bell and Sarah Wright
The journal is currently accepting abstracts from the community, including those from delegates and presenters from The Social Media for Learning in Higher Education Conference 2020.
The deadline for submission is 31st May 2021 and publication will be in the late summer 2021.
The aim of this blog is to help you explore the different ways you can interact online using social media and the tools to help you do this.
Introducing Social Media
Social Media is an umbrella term for web based and mobile technology that allows the user to produce and share information with others using text and/or media (video, audio, images), who in turn are then able to engage in a interactive dialogue about the content.
Sue is a National Teaching Fellow and Associate Professor at Sheffield Hallam University. She is Certified Management and Business Educator, Senior Fellow of the HEA, a Fellow of the Staff and Educational Development Association and a Member of the Association of Learning Technology. Sue is also a Visiting Fellow at Edge Hill University.
Tweets as @suebecks and can be found on LinkedIn here https://www.linkedin.com/in/suebeckingham/ and Bluesky here https://bsky.app/profile/suebecks.bsky.social
next to the follow button.
Kanban board (Pixabay)
Trello Board
Sue Beckingham
Social Media for Learning 