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Tag Archives: Online

When to Publish a blog

Most obviously, or maybe not, the best time to add posts would seem: before your readers tend to go to your blog.

This may mean you are adding blogs at 6:00am to catch the morning crowd.

However, there may be other considerations as well. For example, where is your readership from? Are they mostly from North America? If so, you might need to reconsider timing.

What about the best day to blog? If this is a concern, you might need to watch traffic trends to your blog. You might try Woopra or Google Analytics.

If you get lots of traffic, and a steady readership then you need to maintain consistency. People will keep coming back if you have something to say and if they know what to expect. However, if you are doing things in big bursts (for example, 5-20 blogs at a time) and then none for a while, people might forget about you and let you dwindle in the dust.

Another thing to consider is how to get your blog out there. If you haven’t already, add a “Follow this”, “Tweet this”, “Like” or some other social network button to allow people to share with others. You want people talking about your blog and hopefully even commenting on the posts.

Keep it up. Keep it steady. Make it interesting and relevant.

 

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Search beyond Google. Wonderwheel and more

I do it.

My students do it.

We all do it.

We GOOGLE IT!

The easiest thing these days is to find an answer.

But is the answer always the best answer?

How many of you have gone beyond the first, second or third page in search results in Google?

How many have used tools like:

  • Google Scholar (for articles, legal opinions and journals)
  • Google Books (find whole books, partial excerpts, etc)
  • Google Finance (find stock quotes)
  • XE.com (for exchange rates of currencies and precious metals)
  • Survey Monkey | Survey Gizmo (for creating your own surveys)
  • ERIC (digital library of education literature)
  • OEDB.org (free online classes)
  • TeacherTube.com
  • IMDB.com (International Movie Database)
  • Youtube.com (many free online tutorials | courses these days)
  • the library
  • an expert
  • Google WonderWheel (as seen above) Wonder wheel How-to.pdf [Presently, Google Wonder Wheel seems to no longer exist.  I hope the people at Google bring this option back.  For now, check out Google Image Swirl, another similar product, only for images]

This is not an exhaustive list of tools-beyond-Google, but it is a list I presently use as part of criterion for my students to gather information in preparation for a project.  I recommend you, as an educator, employ these techniques and others as well.  Google is great, but it doesn’t always have the best answer.

For a great interactive graphic that demonstrates: Google Tools to support Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy

 

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Aesthetic vs content vs usability of websites

I’ve been designing websites for quite a while now and have gone through the same process I find many of my students go through.

The first consideration always seems to be about aesthetic.

  • What does it look like?
  • Is it pretty?

But this is not enough, beyond this content becomes a factor.

  • What is in the site?
  • Are there gadgets?
  • Are there games or things to keep people occupied and possibly even coming back? Included in content and leading to the next point is image size.
  • Are the images made small enough so that they will download without problem?
  • Are videos and music files resized properly to stream and download on slow connections?

The final consideration and one the I look at mostly now is usability.

  • Is there a search function built in to the site or am I using an archaic sitemap?
  • Does the site load well?
  • Does it have an unnecessary Flash page?
  • Does it have unnecessary Flash, animations, sound, hard to read fonts or bad use of colors?
  • Are the buttons available in the same place on every page?
  • Are they buttons logical or could they be grouped better?
  • Is the content linked to itself and easy to find?
  • Do the pages have continuity beyond the buttons?
  • Is the site filled up? (for example, the site has been launched but you find placeholder text, “This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information…”
  • Is the site updated or stagnant? Will I come back to it?
  • Is the site useful or interesting?

As a design I need to consider other things like:

  • Is there good support from the site administrators?
  • Is the site upgradable/adaptable to my needs?
  • How easy is content addition/updating?
  • Is it going to search rank well without outside factors?
 
 

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Online collaboration tools

I am always looking for online collaboration tools. I found this excellent consolidation of sites out there. Check out this awesome post by Robin Goods:

www.mindmeister.com

 

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