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.
Scheduling a post on Facebook used to be as easy as writing your post and choosing a drop-down option to specify date and time for the post to go public. Unfortunately, this easy path is no longer available.
Did Facebook cancel the option to schedule posts? No, they did not. But they certainly complicated the process.
In this post, we present an easy three-step step guide to scheduling posts on Facebook in their new way.
Across college campuses, various academic departments utilize newsletters to share information on upcoming events, faculty publications, and student spotlights. On the administrative side, these tend to take a long time to make. On the reader’s end, they can be informative but not exciting.
In addition, while constant communication with your reader is of great importance, in academia newsletters tend to be published at the end of each semester or school year— when we are most overwhelmed by our work and more prone to ignoring our emails. Also, while effective graphic design is fundamental to attracting the reader’s attention, it does not come naturally and easy to most people in and outside academia. As I sought solutions to these common problems, I came across email newsletters.
As the semester winds down for students and faculty alike, there’s no time like the present to take a moment to think about your online scholarly profile. Do you have an online portfolio that gathers your various academic achievements in one place? If you haven’t done so already, consider creating a profile on the CUNY Academic Commons!
If you are organizing an event for your department, working group, or various other occasions, you might be interested in using the video recording services provided by the IT department at the GC. This blog post illustrates how to request the livestreaming and recording services for events that take place at the GC. It also gives some useful tips when publicly sharing the recorded videos online.
Story Maps is a web application that combines multimedia content (photos, videos, audio) with narrative text, allowing the author to tell a variety of stories while providing the audience with an engaging experience. In a way, it is reminiscent of your typical PowerPoint presentation, yet it is far more visually appealing and it provides a better flow of content. Instead of slides, one controls two independent dimensions which interact with one another: the horizontal axis, which organizes data in rough order of priority, and the vertical axis, which presents insight into the data. Overall, as an academic, you can create easy-to-share presentations for the classroom or for conferences. Also, through Story Maps, you can create a resume, a work portfolio, a blog… the options go as far was your imagination allows.
Good question. The best way to explain this is by showing you some examples. The best user-friendly platform for Story Maps is ESRI. There you can find various samples, such as these:
Make your work stand-out! It can be difficult to make academic subject matter be attractive and captivating, engaging and intriguing, pleasant and easy to understand. With Story Maps you can provide your audience with a cohesive continuous stream of information that appeals to the senses. Furthermore, hosted by an internet platform, you are provided with a website address, making Story Maps easy to share and to access in the digital age. What is more, Story Maps work on a variety of screen sizes- from PCs to mobile phones- making them virtually accessible to anyone anywhere.
As mentioned above, the recommended platform for creating Story Maps is ESRI. It is free, self-explanatory, and provides tons of help and advice for creating your Story Maps. Your presentation will be edited, stored, and hosted by ESRI. There, you can choose from a series of templates that can help you start your Story Map:
As you begin to create your Story Map, the interface will direct you to its many options for browsing/adding/editing/placing text/images/videos/audio:
Would you like a detailed tutorial on creating Story Maps? Let us know in the comments below.
Indeed, while the end product (when done correctly) looks simple and effortless, it takes patience and creativity to create a successful and effective Story Map. Additionally, it goes without saying that you need visually-appealing content to produce the presentation. After all, you can resort to open-source content when needed.
I would like to thank the GCDI Digital Fellows, Olivia Ildefonso and Javier Otero Peña, for their “Introduction to ESRI Story Maps” workshop. It was there where I learned about Story Maps.
