Category: Tutorial

Are you looking for guidance on how to get started using a particular tool, software, or website? Here are the tutorials that the Social Media fellows have written.

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Tutorial

How to add a user to a site on the CUNY Academic Commons

Sometimes you are collaborating with someone and want them to have full access to the website you are working on. Perhaps you are a graduate student who has been asked, as part of a fellowship or a work study to create a website for your program, and you want to invite a fellow graduate student or your E.O. as an administrator on the website.

Or perhaps you are teaching an online class using a website on the Academic Commons and want to add your students as contributor to the website, without giving them full administrative access to all of the website.

Here is your step-by-step guide on how to do all of that!

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Tutorial

Avoiding Videos and Screenshots: How to Create Educational Gifs for Learning Tech

In this tutorial, we will not discuss—or settle—the ongoing discussions of how to pronounce the file format GIF. What you will learn, however, is to make instructional animated image files to use to teach technology in an easy way on a website, like this one:

Example gif that shows how to search Google for "now we are recording using Giphy Capture"
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Tutorial

Streamlining Image Posting on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter

Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all have different dimensional requirements or optimization guidelines for posting images on their various feeds, which can make for time-consuming work if one needs to create 3+ versions of the same photo or poster. This blog post will talk about a strategy for streamlining this process by creating one  “universally functional” image file.

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Tutorial

Creating a Program Blog Site using the CUNY Academic Commons

One of the ways in which Program Social Media Fellows help students, faculty, and alumni to share their recent scholarly accomplishments, is through the The CUNY Academic Commons (click here to read a recent post explaining what the CUNY Commons is and how to create your own website using the Commons). As fellows we are responsible for creating and maintaining our respective programs’ CUNY Academic Commons sites, which serve as platforms through which we can share recent student, faculty, and alumni scholarly accomplishments. The purpose of a program’s Commons site varies from program to program. Some programs feature a variety of information on their Commons site, from admissions guidelines, to programs of study and student profiles (see Political Science Commons site). Other programs create a Commons site to share information about student, faculty, and alumni accomplishments, program events, newsletters, and colloquiums (see the Commons Site for the Educational Psychology Program, which I have worked to curate over the past couple of semesters). The latter option provides an opportunity for fellows or other students to design a Program Blog.

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Tutorial

Using the PressForward plugin to create a new post on your WordPress website

Do you regularly collect content from the web to post on a WordPress-based website? If so, consider using the PressForward plugin to make the process simpler and more efficient. In this blog post, I will describe my experience of using the plugin to create a new post on the Sociology PhD Program’s CUNY Academic Commons site.  

For starters, PressForward is a free WordPress plugin that helps you centralize news or information that is of interest to you in one place. It is an extremely useful tool if you frequently gather information from various web sources and republish them. When gathering the sources, you can use the RSS reader function provided by the plugin or use the “Nominate This” bookmarklet while browsing the web. This blog post will focus on the “Nominate This” bookmarklet, which I find most helpful when creating new content for the website I manage. 

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