Five tips to help you create a personal brand and a positive digital reputation
1. What will they find when they Google you?
2. What is branding?
Your brand is what you represent, the content that you share, your audience, your Personal Learning Network (PLN), and your teaching philosophy. You want your brand to demonstrate that you are trustworthy, and offer quality content, insightful comments, and experience. Your brand tells your audience that what you offer is of value. Together, the elements that create your brand should communicate a distinct, cohesive story. For instance, when you visit any of my social media profiles, you will see a consistent message. The avatar and logo for my website Shake Up Learning are more recognizable than my face, and that’s intentional. That isn’t to say that every brand needs an avatar. But do find a creative way to tell your personal story.
3. Choose the right platforms
There is no right or wrong platform. Choosing where you want to build your online presence depends on the audience that you want to engage. If you want to reach parents and school community stakeholders, Facebook is a strong bet. If you want to reach other educators, Twitter and Pinterest are big winners. The bottom line is that you don’t have to use them all. Find and connect with your audience where your audience resides.
4. Claim your social media real estate
Before you settle on a username, check that it’s available on all of the social media platforms that you want to use—and then keep it consistent. You will lose your audience if you make it hard to find you. Also keep your handle simple and short, and try to avoid special characters. When a new platform arrives, claim your username early even if you aren’t sure that you will maintain a presence there.
5. Optimize your social media profiles
Guy Kawasaki, co-author of The Art of Social Media, khas nearly 1.5 million followers on Twitter alone, and he offers effective social media tips in his book. Here are the basics:
Add a picture of your face or logo. Your picture validates who you are. No more eggheads! Using the default egg avatar on Twitter says you don’t have a brand, and doesn’t tell your audience that you are trustworthy.
Use your real name. Sure, you can lie, but that isn’t going to help you build a brand and online presence. Many platforms allow you to show your name as well as your handle.
Link to your website, blog or About.me page. Don’t have one? Get one! You may not be ready to start a blog, but anyone can easily set up an About.me page—which is like an online resume.
Compose a meaningful bio, which will help others find and follow you. It should describe your experience in the field of education and highlight topics that you follow like Maker Ed, Google Apps, or edtech.
Add a cover image. Choose an image that tells your story. Who are you? What do you do that sets you apart? Canva is a graphic design tool that makes creating a cover image easy. It offers ready-made templates in the right size for all of the major social media platforms.
Be consistent across all mediums. You want your followers to see the same brand on all of your social media profiles. This also means you shouldn’t change your profile picture every five minutes. Be recognizable.
Tools to build your brand and online presence
About.me: A quick and easy personal homepage that shows your audience who you are and how to connect with you.
Canva: An easy-to-use design tool for creating images, with templates for social media.
Fiverr: A marketplace for services that you can use to commission a logo, avatar, or web design.
breakdown of IoT functionality, from Deloitte. They give 5 general types of services that IoT “things” can do:
Internal state: Heartbeat- and ping-like broadcasts of health, potentially including diagnostics and additional status reporting (for example, battery level, CPU/memory utilization, strength of network signal, up-time or software/platform version).
Location: Communication of physical location via GPS, GSM, triangulation or proximity techniques
Physical attributes: Monitoring the world surrounding the device, including altitude, orientation, temperature, humidity, radiation, air quality, noise and vibration
Functional attributes: Higher-level intelligence rooted in the device’s purpose for describing business process or workload attributes
Actuation services: Ability to remotely trigger, change or stop physical properties or actions on the device.
Examples of IoT in action
There are some pretty well-known IoT products that some of you already use, including:
Nest Thermostat (and others). These allow you to control your AC from your phone, anywhere that you can connect to the Internet.
Smart lights: Same concept, but for lights. You can turn lights on/off from your phone. Phillips Hue is an example of this
Bluetooth Trackers – Tile (https://www.thetileapp.com/) is an example of a Bluetooth Tracker. Put one on that thing you always lose (i.e., car keys). The next time you lose those keys, you can find them again via an app on your phone.
Smart Home appliances – things like Google Home, Amazon Echo, and Apple HomeKit.
Smart power switches – Belkin’s Wemo Insight Wi-Fi Smart Plug is an example. They let you turn the plug (and therefore anything connected to it) on and off, set schedules for the plug, monitor energy consumption and use, etc. You can also connect it to Amazon Alexa and Google Home for hands-free voice control
Health and exercise trackers – Fitbits “fit” into this category, too.
How does IoT affect libraries?
Here are some ways libraries are already incorporating IoT technology into their libraries:
Smart Building Technology: As libraries retrofit their buildings with newer technology (or build new buildings/branches), they are starting to see more IoT-based technology. For example, some libraries can can adjust heating, cooling and lights from a smartphone app. Some newer building monitoring and security systems can be monitored via mobile apps.
RFID: RFID technology (sensors in books) is a type of IoT technology, and has been around for awhile.
Beacon Technology: There are at least two library-focused companies experimenting with Beacon technology (Capira Technologies and Bluubeam).
People counters: Check out Jason Griffey’s Measure the Future project. Here’s what he says about Measure the Future: “Imagine having a Google-Analytics-style dashboard for your library building: number of visits, what patrons browsed, what parts of the library were busy during which parts of the day, and more. Measure the Future is working to make that happen by using open-hardware based sensors that can collect data about building usage that is now invisible. Making these invisible occurrences explicit will allow librarians to make strategic decisions that create more efficient and effective experiences for their patrons.”
Library classes! Libraries are also teaching classes about the Internet of Things. These include classes focused on introducing patrons to IoT technology, and classes that focus on an aspect of IoT, like a class on making things with Arduinos or how to use your new Fitbit.
eXtended Reality (XR): The New World of Human/Machine Interaction
Wednesday, October 31 | 9:45am – 10:30am MT |
Session Type: Breakout Session
Delivery Format: Interactive Presentation
eXtended reality (XR) technologies present opportunities to advance the higher education mission and prepare students for a new world of human/machine interaction. In this interactive session, we will explore what is being done today and what is possible in four key areas of XR: use, technology, content development, and gamification.
Outcomes:
*Identify best-of-class tools and methods available for the design and support of XR in higher ed
* Explain to campus stakeholders the potential of XR to support pedagogy, research, and student success
* Understand the areas of focus of our growing XR community of practice and how you can participate
According to San Jose State University researcher Ziming Lu, this is typical “screen-based reading behavior,” with more time spent browsing, scanning and skimming than in-depth reading. As reading experiences move online, experts have been exploring how reading from a screen may be changing our brains. Reading expert Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid, has voiced concerns that digital reading will negatively affect the brain’s ability to read deeply for sophisticated understanding, something that Nicholas Carr also explored in his book, The Shallows. Teachers are trying to steer students toward digital reading strategies that practice deep reading, and nine out of ten parents say that having their children read paper books is important to them.
Cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham said that digital devices aren’t changing the way kids read in terms of actual cognitive processes—putting together letters to make words, and words to make sentences. In fact, Willingham is quick to point out that in terms of “raw words,” kids are reading more now than they were a decade ago (thanks mostly to text messaging). But he does believe, as he writes in his book, The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads, that kids’ reading habits are changing. And it’s reasonable to guess that digital technology, in all its three-second-video and Snapchat glory, is changing those habits.
For many parents and teachers worried that spending so much time with video games and Snapchats will shred kids’ attention spans—the average 8-12-year-old spends about six hours a day in front of a screen, and teenagers spend more than nine — Willingham thinks they may be concerned about the wrong thing. He isn’t convinced that spending so many hours playing Super Smash Bros will shorten kids’ attention spans, making them unable to sustain the attention to read a book. He’s more concerned that Super Smash Bros has trained kids’ brains to crave experiences that are more like fast-paced video games.
instead to help kids distinguish between the easy pleasures of some digital media, and the more complex payoff that comes when reaching the end of the Harry Potter series. He recommends telling kids that you want them to experience both, part of a larger strategy to make reading a family value.
“It’s watermelon or chocolate for dessert.
According to Julie Coiro, a reading researcher at the University of Rhode Island, moving from digital to paper and back again is only a piece of the attention puzzle: the larger and more pressing issue is how reading online is taxing kids’ attention.
Each time a student reads online content, Coiro said, they are faced with almost limitless input and decisions, including images, video and multiple hyperlinks that lead to even more information.
Anna Egalite, assistant professor of leadership and policy at NC State. Previously, Anna taught elementary school and did a postdoc at Harvard. She’ll be writing about education-leadership research—what we know, where we have good intuitions, and where we’re still very much in the dark.
It’s back-to-school time and education reporters are highlighting stories about how school leaders are “leaning on data” to promote student learning, making administrative decisions that are “supported by a data-driven process,” and drawing on their experience in “data-driven instruction.”
In dynamic markets, a high percentage of users are engaging voice functions daily to complete a variety of tasks, particularly in India (51 per cent) and China (42 per cent). These users were engaging in voice to complete tasks like playing music, finding directions, setting timers, scribing messages, making calls, even ordering pizza. For these markets, the initial trial has proven so useful that people are testing voice applications across many different functions and devices.
Alternately, in conservative growth markets like Singapore, Japan and Australia it seems the journey to daily adoption is taking longer, with the majority of current users activating voice two to four times per week.
In recent years, school reformers, philanthropists, and venture capital investors have placed big bets on blended learning, and edtech professionals have responded with vigor. But as education historian Larry Cuban has noted, the innovative instruction envisioned by edtech advocates remains the exception to the rule—in large part because of the lack of time for teachers to “learn, experiment, and overhaul their practices in collaboration with each other.”
Operating within archaic organizational structures, very few of our nation’s teachers have opportunities to incubate and execute ideas prompted by their deep knowledge of students, families, and communities. This includes ideas about how best to integrate technology.
First real photos of the Red Hydrogen smartphone. The Red Hydrogen is one of the most ambitious phones in years, with a holographic screen, modular upgrades, scalloped edges and the promise of a cinema-grade camera in the future.
Many museums now offer makerspaces and after-school programs, and universities have developed low-cost materials to spark students’ imagination and interest, such as the Carnegie Mellon CREATE Lab
Art museums throughout the world offer virtual tours sorted by collection, artist or decade.
After one of these rich experiences, students can use free resources, such as Skype in the Classroom, to connect with experts to engage in scholarly dialogue to make their experience more meaningful and academically relevant or to interact with learners in other parts of the world.
