October is Connected Educator Month

October is Connected Educator Month! This exciting initiative is driven by the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education and is focused on K-12, but has great applicability to Higher Education too. Interestingly, due to the government shutdown they’ve already had to postpone some of their scheduled events. The goal of the initiative is to connect educators across the United States via online communities and social networks. The hope is that educators will compare best practices, engage in conversation, become mentors, find mentors, and more. Here are my suggestions for getting started participating in the Connected Educator community. I encourage you to watch the video below to get inspired!

And finally, here are my suggestions for getting engaged in the Connected Educator community.

  1. Explore the Connected Educator site here.
  2. Sign up for emails here.
  3. For those of you that teach in K-12, take 15 minutes to sign up for a profile here.
  4. If you are on Twitter follow #ce13, or even better join in on the conversation.

Office 2013 Tips: Outlook Social Connector – LinkedIn

The Outlook Social Connector lets you see profiles and updates for people that send you email. The connector is available as a download for earlier versions of Outlook, but with Outlook 2013 it is included out of the box. I have found the using the Outlook Social Connector for LinkedIn to be very valuable, and it think it will be for you too. Even if you are not an avid user of LinkedIn and you don’t have many connections, this connector will pull information from anyone out there with a public profile (which is most folks). Let’s say that you get an email from a vendor or someone you met at a conference. You kind of remember talking to them, but you’re not totally sure. With the Outlook Social Connector connected to LinkedIn, now you can see their picture. And if you are like me you often forget names, but having a picture can help connect the dots. Ok, let’s take a look.

First things first. Getting the Outlook Social Connector connected.

  1. Open Outlook 2013 and click on the File menu in the top left corner.
  2. The Info tab will open by default and at the top you’ll see an Account Settings box. Click that.
  3. In the pop-up you’ll see an option for Social Network Accounts. Click that.
  4. Select LinkedIn and provide you username and password. And you’re all set!

Now that you have it connected let’s look at some of the features.

  1. The most obvious change will be the appearance of pictures for contacts that send you emails. If you open an email that the connector is able to find a LinkedIn profile for you’ll also see additional information in the bottom pane of the email message (known as the People Pane), including their recent activity on LinkedIn. If there are multiple recipients as a part of the email, you will be able to look at the other contacts also.
  2. While exploring the People Pane you’ll be able to expand it by clicking the arrow on the right hand side. This will expose addition tabs including What’s New, Mail, Attachments, and Meetings. These can all come in handy when you are trying to look back at your previous communication with the contact.
  3. There are several other places within the Outlook interface that you’ll notice the LinkedIn content (i.e. under Contacts), but the last one I will point out in the post is the users Contact Card. If you right-click the name of the contact you’ll get a set of basic information. On the lower right you’ll see a small arrow allowing you to open the Contact Card for the user. Once open you’ll notice the What’s New section that reflects the same information we saw in the What’s New section in step 2.

I hope you find this connector as valuable as I do!

For more information on what’s new in Outlook 2013 I found this site helpful: http://www.howto-outlook.com/faq/outlook2013newandchanged.htm

 

Creative Response to a Nexus of Forces?

Recently Gartner held their annual Gartner Symposium where they discussed what they see as the onset of a “nexus of forces” descending onto businesses and forcing IT departments to change their perspective.  PC Magazine has a great article here.  These forces: cloud, mobile, social, and information are not new forces, but the impact of their peak and convergence in a focused way is new, and presents a real challenge for IT and businesses as a whole.  While Gartner’s focus is often centered around the business world, it is easy to argue that education may be impact sooner given that their customer base is often comprised of a population that embraces new technology and trends.

St. Cloud State University like all other organizations will need to decide how to respond to this nexus of forces.  Responding to the challenge will take more than just finding ways to modify our existing services.  Instead, we’ll need to think outside of the box and develop new services.  Below is a TED talk where Catherine Courage suggests using creativity, experiments, and storytelling.

Innovative Tweeting

Twitter is a great tool for so many reasons, no matter what you are interested there is bound to be content out there for you – politics (@MPRpolitics), news (@WJON_News, @sctimes), sports (@StCloudRox, @Twins), etc. But one of the most innovative used I’ve come across is the “live” tweeting of events from World War II. @RealTimeWWII describes there work like this “Livetweeting the 2nd World War, as it happens on this date & time in 1940, & for 5 years to come.” It allows followers to step back in time and peer at the events of history in a really interesting way. If you have any interest in history I recommend you check them out.