Social Media
Save us from Facebook oh Diaspora
I hate Facebook. I use it because everyone I know is on it but I hate it. I hate the way I don't own any of the data I put onto it - not my photos, my contacts, my phone numbers, my internet habits or my history. I hate the complicated, forever changing, privacy settings. I hate the targeted ads and growing corporate presence. I hate the mindless way my non-tech savvy friends open their privacy for all to see and exploit. I hate the way Facebook are profiting from abusing personal data and friendships.
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The myths around Facebook as a school communication tool
Facebook has long had a bad press in the education sector. In the past a lot of that has been justified in areas like comment moderation and blocking 'undesirables' from viewing your data.
Those problems are now no more and the planet's number one communication tool deserves a second look.
When a school creates a facebook account it doesn't use a normal facebook profile as the common user would see it. Instead, a facebook user creates a 'facebook page', much like a company page, and can manage that page separately from their own personal facebook page. You can even allocate other facebook users as admins for your school facebook page.
The problem of comment moderation has also been parked in the past. A facebook page can now be set up so that it doesn't allow any wall posts, pictures or comments added by anyone who 'likes' your page. In short, the school can use facebook as a free, commentless wall to communicate with the near 80% of parents that will be using it.
So with a school platform like ours you can now seamlessly post your website articles to facebook and be assured that your school facebook page is safe from mischievous hands. Leaving you to just check every week or so.
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Switching from twitterfeed to feedburner
Getting your blog postings out to as many people as possible depends on pushing them out into the social media world. There are a number of services that do this from explicit cms plugins to the much more friendly rss aggregator readers.
We've been using twitterfeed to push our rss feed into twitter but have found a recent trend toward soem items not being published without manual intervention. So in reponse we've moved to pushing our rss feed to feedburner. There are many benefits of feedburner over twitterfeed, the biggest being google click stats and integration into google analytics.
We'll see how it goes.
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Putting a drupal web form inside a collapsible div
Adding a form to a node in drupal is really easy but adding some customisation to the form can be a little tricky. I recently needed to add a return form in a collapsible div at the bottom of a node, here's how:
Add the form as normal to the your node being sure to add to spam control while you're at it. My experiences have put Mollom at the top of the heap where captchas are concerned.
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Boxee - Providing Media Content to the Classroom
Boxee is a seriously cool media delivery platform for any OS. Whether you use Boxee to catalogue and display your local content or use it drive your internet content to your plasmas, IWB's or just your school laptops. And with apps appearing for the platform all the time it's going to get a whole lot better.
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Bit.ly bundles are great for projects and collaboration
Bit.ly is the top URL shortener and has now added a service that is sure to appeal to the education sector, bundles. They allow you to bundle groups of links together in one bit.ly url and share that through twitter or add to your VLE page. The possibilities are very interesting from grouping your latest Victorian reading links into one bit.ly URL to creating an online collaborative link to all online iPad resources.
We've created our own mini iPad resource link http://bit.ly/i5fg3R to demonstrate the feature and if you have your own bit.ly account you can add to the bundle and pass it on. We're impressed!
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Facebook reaching saturation point
Facebook now has nearly 25 million active accounts in the UK. This offers the ultimate communication channel that should be explored by all organisations that serve the community. For the school community, or indeed any organisation, it's an absolute revelation in helping to get your message out there.
So how can you get involved in the social media revolution? Well that's the easy bit! At iMediastorm we use the drupal content management system to enable us to host websites that push your communications directly to your community. Our sites auto publish to facebook and twitter and as a by product of this enables your online community to receive SMS messages directly from their social media accounts.











