Karen Frebergs Social Media Reading list for the Holiday break

The reading list

Social Media has changed the world

One person can make a significant difference in awareness. Personal life struggles bring out empathy and compassion in others and If you tell your story with conviction, you can touch millions of people.

Social Media can make things go viral.  How did the Ice bucket challenge get started ?

An APP for everything

I am testing the Blogger app.  I am not impressed.

Teaching different age groups

I have joined many communities and groups and followed many Social Media Professors in an attempt to gain knowledge from those that are already teaching a Social Media course.  I have found that some are teaching the course based on assumptions that all their students are already using social media.  These professors skip the introduction of the social media applications and jump into complicated and lengthy campaigns.  I am making the assumption that the course they are teaching is not an introductory course and there may have been a pre-requisite to their course.

Since my course will have both those that know and use Social Media on a daily basis and those have may have only dabbled in Facebook a little,  it is a challenge to develop content. The adult learners in the class may struggle a bit and need to put in mo8re time than the traditional aged students.

Since it is a brand new class, there will be tweaking done for next semester after I gauge the success and failures of the assignments.  Since this is a community college course, I expect the traditional students to try to skip through assignments and take the quizzes without prepping. I also expect the adult learners to do every assignment and maybe struggle with some of them.  Since the adult learner may not be proficient with the technology they are using; cell phone, tablet or PC, I wonder how everything will play out by the end of the semester.  If I get one adult learner a with a brand new smart phone😳, the first they have ever owned, I may have to recommend they withdraw, as this is not a course to learn technology but rather to use new applications or to better use the applications you have used before.

Animoto Video Evaluation

I signed up for the 14 day free trial of Animoto and create a quick video.

I thought the tool was a little pricey, but I still included an assignment using this tool and the SnapChat story feature for students to compare the two video creation tools.

Blackboard Learn

Today, I spent the better part of 4 hours developing the graded Assignments in Blackboard Learn, our course management system.  Most of the assignments will just hold the grade for the blog posts, account creations, etc.  However, I did create a few quizzes and assignments where a worksheet will be uploaded.  With the worksheet and blog post assignments, I had to create rubrics so that students could see where they had points taken off in their assignment submissions.

I have worked in a few course management systems over the past few years, including MyITLab and Blackboard Learn.  I am striving to have the entire course be smart phone or tablet compatible, however, I am not sure if Blackboard will allow this for all the assignments.  I will be testing this in the near future and post an update here.  Most days, I have my IPAD and laptop open at the same time to make sure everything is smart phone compatible.

Developing this course has been a huge amount of work!

Ingenious Google Graphic

This is the graphic displayed on Google today. I thought it was a very ingenious way to recognize Sir Frederick Grant Banting's Birthday, a Nobel laureate noted as the first person to use insulin on humans.

Videos as Social Media

Creating a video that generates a lot of views can take some time, but once in a while, one falls into your lap.

During a visit to NY City, riding on the subway........

Review of my CIS-141 social media course by a recent college student

I asked my 24 year old daughter, who graduated college a few years ago, what she thought about my Social Media Online course. She attempted to get to the Wordpress private website and of course had to create a wordpress account and request access. She thought this was a little confusing because once she signed into Wordpress, she was not taken to my website and had to click again.   I will be emailing instructions for accessing my website and they will also get an invitation from Wordpress with a link to click. 

A half hour later, here were her thoughts on the course:
Doesn't seem like too much work! Did you watch the videos or read the text assigned?
I guess I never watched the videos when they were assigned so I didn't count that as time.
I think it has a good mix between reading and online stuff, I guess your not going to do actual tests right?   I have to design 3 quizzes in Blackboard learn and a final campaign assignment.
I guess a lot of people may already have LinkedIn and Twitter accounts. They may, but they have to grow the accounts in the course to help promote their personal brands.
I like it...I'd take it!

Monitoring student blogs made easy

Feedly is going to help me monitor student blogs.  Since it will be helpful to me, I decided to include it as an assignment so students can monitor the other students blog posts.  This could be a good thing or a bad thing, mainly, I worry about plagiarism. I will be looking intensely for those students that copy another blog post and do small edits and then submit as their own assignment. I hope none of my students get 0's.

Created with Adobe Spark

Social Advertising

I developed an assignment on Social Advertising without having students spend money on an Ad.  I decided on an analysis of one of @BestOfAds, using a blog post.

Here is my analysis of this Ad I re-tweeted. https://twitter.com/bestofads/status/626205759945220096

This Ad was a tweet engagement with an objective of starting a conversation.  The objective was to get a message out about not to drive while under the influence of alcohol. At first it was hard to distinguish a specific audience. I did a little research on the ages of those with DUI's.  It appears that 34% are between the age of 21 and 24, 34% between the ages of 25 and 34 and 25% between the ages of 35 to 44. If I had to select a target audience, I would use a keyword target, using the keywords "party" and "drink".

Social Media everyday

I have been using all the social media networks/apps/programs everyday, from Facebook to Yik yak.  In order to teach social media, I felt I must immerse myself in it. There are so many to keep track of and new ones seem to appear all the time.  I try to connect with my social media professor groups regularly,  as they give new insights into what's going in.  Thanks goes out Dr. Karen Freberg, @kfreberg, for her twitter chats and so many useful posts.  @Tedtalks, offered some insightful presentations, along with @Hootsuite.

Of course, with the presidential elections in a few weeks, it is hard not to see all the @Wikileaks twitter posts everyday.

I created an incentive Post to try to lure students into the course.

I posted on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

I'm all Linked In

I spent about 4 hours developing a LinkedIn Assignment.  Phew!  This assignment uses a worksheet students will have to fill out and submit. Most of the worksheet involves researching LinkedIn business and personal profiles to find out what works and what doesn't work for their personal brand. I spent an hour of that time doing the worksheet myself and updating my LinkedIn profile.  My profile went from 'Needs  serious Work' to Expert.

I have to admit that I never used my profile before except to view other people's profiles. I had no reason to post and update to my account.   Now I will use it to promote my class.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/judi-myers-36305747

It's all about Google Plus tonight

I created a Google Plus Community tonight.
https://plus.google.com/113999944154583575842/posts/UyjUUmE4GJ4

While I was joining some communities and following some people, I noticed a picture I had to post.  It is Friday night.

Created an Ad using Adobe Spark

What a relief

After purchasing 2 books on my own that are helping me development the course, I have settled on the book for students.  The publisher is sending me 2 FREE books this time.  I cannot wait to integrate this book into my website and assignments. Most might settle on a book before developing the assignments. Well, not me! I chose to use the web and social media platforms to develop most of the assignments and will use the book as an additional learning tool. Students will then have multiple ways to learn the content.

Good info to use in the course but not as the book for students

Reviewing a book for the class

Ordered a book to review for the course. I will be reviewing this book this coming week. A quick scan tells me it has a lot of useful information in it.

Up to week 7

So I have 7 weeks of assignments. 8 more weeks to go. I have been putting in about 3-4 hours each week. I have yet to find a book I want to use. Once I do, I will go back and update the assignments with some book reading. I really do not see the need for a book, but the Dept. say I have to have one.
Oh... new Brand...Last time

Hmmmm, now I am wondering

I asked my husband to take a look at the website I am developing which will host all the assignments. Although he is a 3 out of 10 as far as social media knowledge, he was a little confused and said it was a lot of work. Well, it is a 3 credit course I told him. 🙄

I decided to change this Blogs background graphic to something with more substance.

Twitter Updates..... Created a Class Hastag, #LCCC141 and updated my twitter account with the class brand graphic. @jmyers42

After looking at this brand graphic for a few days, it did not project who I was and what I wanted students to get out of this course.  I developed a new brand and applied it to my wordpress website.
This allows a black area for the drop down menus and adds a little something of myself to it.

After a few hours of researching what other faculty have done and Purchasing a Book to help,
"A Roadmap for Teaching Social Media", by Karen Freberg, Ph.D., I think I am ready to start.

1. step  - Design my brand.  Although I wanted to be very creative on this, the object was to have the same brand on everything I do, so here it is, a ticket to CIS-141.  Not too creative but will accomplish what it was meant to do.

Register for https://t.co/UAu7JlPYMz New Social Media Class, CIS-141, starting in the Spring 2017 semester. #LCCC141

— Judi Myers (@jmyers42) October 2, 2016