EduTek n Social Media Advisor

Create ‘Lists’ for Facebook like ‘Circles’ for Google+

You can now create lists and organize your friends into various lists such as

• Close friends
• Family
• Place of stay (Chennai)
• Company
• School /College you studied etc easily.

Creating lists have been made easier because Facebook has recently announced three improvements:

• Smart lists - Lists that create themselves and stay up-to-date based on profile info your friends have in common with you--like your work, school, family and city.
• Close Friends and Acquaintances lists – Lists where you can see your best friends' photos and posts in one place, and see less from people you're not as close to.
• Better suggestions - You can add the right friends to your lists without a lot of effort.

In order to create your lists, just visit https://www.facebook.com/ and you can see lists on the L.H.S. of the webpage as shown below.

In order to create more lists, just hover your mouse around lists and you can see ‘More’ appearing as shown below.

Click ‘More’ and you can see various lists already created by Facebook based on your place of stay, where you studied etc  with options to create a new list according to your requirement as shown below.

You can click existing list and add members to it. Or you can click the tab ‘+Create a List’, add the ‘List Name’ and create list choosing people from your friend list.

This enables you to keep tab of your friend’s’ activities without much hassles.

 

 

Social Reader as NewsPaper for Facebook from Washington Post

Yes, you can get Social Reader, a newspaper for Facebook from Washington Post.

According to Mashable, ‘The Social Reader application, built on Facebook’s new Open Graph, offers users a personalized news reading experience, with front page stories pulled from The Post and its content partners’.

To get Social Reader on Facebook, click here.

You’ll visit a webpage, whose screenshot is as shown below:

Click the button ‘f Read Now’. You will be asked to login using your FB login details. That’s all there is to do. You get a WP Social Reader as shown below.

To access the newspaper at anytime, just type the URL https://apps.facebook.com/wpsocialreader  and login using FB details.

Or you can visit your FB newsfeed page and can click the application ‘Washington Post Social Reader’ as shown below.

You can send invitations to your friends too and see what they are reading to make your Facebook Newspaper more exciting.

 

Google Related is Cool!

‘Google Related is a Chrome Extension that shows you useful, interesting content while you browse the web.

When you're surfing with Related, you'll often see a thin bar along the bottom of your screen that offers videos, maps, reviews and other content that's relevant to that page. When you see an item you like, you can spread the word by using the built-in +1 button’

You can install the Google Related Chrome Extension by clicking here.

What you can find by installing Google Related can be realized by watching the following video.

 

The following screenshot (My Twitter a/c in Hoot Suite) shows the presence of Google Related as thin bar with the items such as video and webpages. 

Pointing the arrow near ‘web’, lists related websites that can be +1d as shown below.

In this case, Google Related suggests web pages related to HootSuite not even competitor’s applications. Of course I have not tried many web pages to generalize this.

 

 

 

Download Advisor2U's S n P with Raptivity

Interactive Content for Engaged Learning Using Raptivity Essential 6.5

Being an eLearning Consultant I always love to explore interacting tools that enable you to realize your goals easily. Hence on that voyage of my exploration, I thought I would try one of Harbinger’s latest products Raptivity Essential.

According to Harbinger ‘The Raptivity library of pre-built interactions is based on best practices in instructional design and allows complete customization of each interaction.

Raptivity outputs your interactivity to a single Flash file which fits right into hundreds of eLearning tools. Raptivity tracks completion status, score and responses and provides this information to authoring tools for SCORM/ AICC tracking with LMS. Anyone can use Raptivity with minimal learning and absolutely no programming’

A new feature of Raptivity Essential 6.5 is, it supports text web links for the text parameters in the interactivity. You can view it in the example I have provided at the end of this blog post.

It also supports collaborative work, as it enables you to export the data to another team that is working on the interactivity in the form of XML/XLS file and after the completion of the work, the file can be imported.

Using Raptivity you can create interactivities and save them as .int files and can publish them as .swf flash files. Options are also available for publishing on Mobile phone, browser supporting HTML 5 and with tracking. This can be realized by choosing the option of publishing with SCORM/ AICC compliance for deploying through a learning management system.

The various types of interactivities that can be created using Raptivity Essential can be viewed by clicking here.

Raptivity enables you to design the course based on

• Gagne’s Nine Events
• Keller’s ARCS Model
• Experiential Learning 

and frame questions based on Bloom’s Taxonomy. It also enables you to select the category / interaction model based on your requirement as shown below.

For example, clicking Gagne’s Nine Events, leads to 9 events that are essential to ensure that transfer of learning would take place.

Clicking on any of the events would lead to the type of interactions, that would elicit the expected behaviour of the event which can be used for developing the course content. The following screenshot shows the interactivities suggested for ‘Gaining Attention’.

35 interactions are suggested for gaining the attention of audience. Similarly for introducing each of the nine events relevant interactions are suggested. You can simply choose the model and just incorporate the activities that seem to fit your course content.

Hence developing a highly relevant interactive course content is just a breeze if you use Raptivity Essential 6.5

The main advantage of Raptivity Essential is that Raptivity output can be included in the following:

• Authoring tools
• Presentation tools
• Web design tools
• Course documentation tools
• Help documentation tools.

To know exactly how to include interactivities created by Raptivity output with other tools, click the hyperlink Raptivity output with other tools The interactions can be published on mobile platform too.

I didn’t test with all of them but a few like ppt and authoring tool, Articulate. I should mention that with Articulate, I could embed and publish but did experience a glitch when complete interactivity did not go with the slide.

The following file shows the interactivity I created without requiring me to say that I thoroughly enjoyed exploring it.

Download Services of A2U

The hyperlink given below shows that I’ve embedded the interactivity on ppt so that the presentations can be made interesting.

Download Advisor2U’s Services & Products

Do show the interactivities you’ve created using Raptivity Essential or any other tool and share with the readers.

 

 

 

 

Adding Vanity URL for Your Google+ Web Page

Today I got the Google+ invitation from one of my friends and just added a vanity URL for that. It is quite simple to get the vanity URL. Google provides your Google+ webpage identity in the form of string of numbers that is quite difficult to remember. Hence you can create a vanity URL that is easier to remember as follows.

gplus.to  enables you to achieve this easily. Just visit glpus.to webpage. The screenshot of the webpage is as shown below.

Decide a nickname for your Google+ web page.  It is better if you select a nick name related to your profession. Since I am a Consultant for eLearning and Social Media Marketing and my website is advisor2u.com, I chose my nick name as Advisor2U4eLnSMM.

Then add your Google+ Id, that is a string of numbers. Foe e.g. my URL for Google+ web page is

https://plus.google.com/106528453610174284802/posts  The highlighted portion of numbers is my Google+ ID.  Add the ID as shown above and click the button ‘add’. That’s all there is to do.

You get your vanity URL. Mine is as shown above, i.e. http://www.gplus.to/Advisor2U4eLnSMM

Do create your vanity URL for your Google+ webpage and Google+ this if you like the blog post.

 

New Pearls of Peartree Consultant - 2

New Pearls have been added to the pearltrees of root tree ‘Consultant’ during 2^nd week of July 2011. The pearltrees that received new pearls are:

• Events
• Management
• Resources 4 Digital Media / Digital Media Resources
• Social Media Marketing

Added a new pearltree ‘Digital Marketing’.

 

New Pearls of Pearltree ‘Consultant’

Between 26^th  June to 1^st July following pearl trees have grown:

1. Educational Technology
2. Education (Teaching & Learning)
3. Management
4. Publishing in iMarketing
5. Social Media Marketing

You can view the grown up pearl trees at http://www.pearltrees.com/consultant

Also new pearltrees ‘Publishing’ and ‘Computer Security’ have been added to the root of the pearltree ‘Consultant’.

 

Consultant: My first Pearl Tree

I recently explored ‘Pearl trees’ a tool that enables you to organize, discover and share the information you like.

Using Pearltrees, you can ‘easily organize what you've found on the web.The simple and intuitive interface makes sorting your interests, your passions and your ideas easy. Pearltrees allows you to give a precise meaning to the content you've archived making retrieval and reuse a pleasure’.

I have created my first Pearltree with the root of the Pearltree being ‘Consultant’ at http://bit.ly/lovg3t

Of the 12 pearls I have created, 6 (starting from YouTube video in counter-clockwise direction) are just pears. The rest of them are pearltrees that can be easily realized by moving your mouse over the pearls.

Do visit the URL for my pearltree, view the pearls, create some and collaborate with me.

I’ve just started and the Pearltree will grow. Do keep watch the pearltree growing as more links will be added as time advances.

 

 

TwitSprout 4 Getting Insight into Twitter Performance

I recently joined the beta of TwitSprout and liked the colourful metrics that delivered insight into the performance of my account.

You can access the Twitter performance of my account @ELnSMediaExpert by clicking here. ‘The dashboard is available in real-time, compatible with most web browsers, smartphones and looks great on the iPAD!’

Custom branding report for clients can be developed by visiting here.

They welcome user’s feedback and new ideas to improve TwitSprout.You can visit the user voice page to see the new features they would be adding to TwitSprout.

I liked the analytics provided by TwitSprout as apart from providing follower to friend ratio etc, importance is given to Twitter lists and how you influence your followers through that.

You can try their beta at http://twitsprout.com/