A TweetChat is a virtual meeting or gathering on Twitter to discuss a common topic. The chat usually lasts one hour and will include some questions to stimulate discussion. In order to be able to view tweets relating to the chat, a pre-agreed hashtag is shared. A hashtag is a word or series of letters and/or numbers preceded by #. For example: #BYOD4L. You can read more about this in a previous post Introducing Tweetchats Continue reading
Below are some useful tips on making the most of the landing page on blogs and websites. Thanks to Copyblogger who has given permission to reproduce the infographic
a landing page is any page on a website where traffic is sent specifically to prompt a certain action or result.
An action may result from you tweeting a link to your latest blog post will prompt the reader to visit that page, read your post and potentially others. Commercially a link in an email may direct you to a product and the aim would be to encourage the reader to go on to buy this and/or related items. Continue reading
In December 2014 I was invited by Professor Albert Sangrà to speak at the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain. Whilst there I also ran a workshop for the Edul@b research team to look at how social media could be used to share their research outputs. I gave an open lecture on social media and the importance of becoming a digital scholar. Below is a summary of the key points made during the lecture.
Social Media empowers us as individuals to become digital communicators, collaborators, conversationalists, critics, curators and creators using a variety of different mediums including text, audio, video and images. These open up dialogues online that may then continue face to face. Continue reading
Pinterest provides a space to save ideas that you want to come back to, by capturing an image or video file and the URL connected to this item as a Pin.
Pins are visual bookmarks for interesting things you find anywhere around the web or shared on the Pinterest site.
You can pin JPG, PNG and GIF image files, as well as YouTube, Vimeo and TED videos. There are three ways to pin:
Some excellent tips weaved into this humorous Dr Seuss inspired Guide to Twitter created by Hootsuite.
Hootsuite is a social media dashboard that can help you to manage and measure your social networks. It enables you to:
As a dashboard for managing Twitter I have found it incredibly useful. For anyone who uses lists to organise those you follow on Twitter, by using Hootsuite you can view these lists side by side. (Find out howto create Twitter lists here).
Infographic source: http://blog.hootsuite.com/a-seuss-guide-to-twitter/
PPDP is personal and professional development planning
Providing students opportunities to develop professional digital and social media skills can support meaningful engagement with personal and professional development (PPDP). Continue reading
Image source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Emoticon
An emoticon is short for ’emotion icon’ and is a visual representation of a facial expression or body posture to convey mood, attitude or emotion used initially in e-mail and text messages. The most well known is the smiley face. Emoticons can at their most simplest be expressed within text by using a series of punctuation marks (as above) and sometimes letters and special marks.
: – ) or 🙂
You may have noticed videos within Facebook posts, automatically playing in your news feed. Watching videos (and streaming music) tend to use quite a bit of data, so you may want to consider your options. You can adjust the Facebook app’s auto-play settings from On to Wi-Fi only or Off.
Did you know that you can easily monitor the web for content and be notified of the results by using Google Alerts?
Start by simply choosing a key word that is relevant to the topic you wish to research. If you wish to search for a term that contains more than one word, e.g. a person’s name, then add quote marks “Joe Bloggs”.
You can then choose from a number of options to refine your search and how you would like to receive the results found by Google. Continue reading
Image source: PixabayI recently attended a workshop led by Sue Featherstone (Journalist and Principal Lecturer, Sheffield Hallam University) on the secrets of blogging which was put on for the new student bloggers who are volunteer content managers. These students will capture news stories from across the courses within the Department of Media Arts and Communication and share them via the Department blog Capture | MAC set up by Lecturers Melvyn Ternan and Anne Doncaster. Continue reading
The Guardian: Social Media
Sue Beckingham
Social Media for Learning 