February 22, 2012Guest Post: Google+ In the Classroom
Modern teachers know how beneficial and important social networking can be. For older students, social networking, especially Facebook, is already a part of their daily lives. This very reason makes Facebook an incredibly useful tool for connecting with students and extending learning outside the traditional classroom. Teachers who take advantage of social networking find lots of interesting new academic opportunities and ways to get creative with learning. The new major social network Google+ is another tool for teachers that’s unlike any other.
Facebook vs. Google+
Google+ has a lot of similarities with Facebook, so in many ways teachers can use Google+ in the same way they already use Facebook. They can communicate with students and engage in virtual discussions. But Google+ offers more. As a teacher, after you ask your students to sign up, you’ll find Google+ allows for an even richer experience. There are two main things that contribute to the excellence of Google+: Circles and Hangouts.
Circles
With Google+, it’s very easy to manage different groups of people and friends. You must categorize everyone into a Circle. For teachers, you can use Circles in many different ways. You can have a different Circle for each class you teach. You can also create separate Circles for the parents of students, if applicable to your grade level, and Circles for fellow faculty. Finally, you can separate your friends and family from your professional contacts. Circles make it incredibly easy to share specific information with only the relevant parties. Conversely, you can view your friends’ posts in separate newsfeeds. The sheer organization alone can be very helpful to teachers, especially if you’re managing multiple classes at once.
Hangouts
Hangouts give you the ability to video chat with a total of 10 people at one time. In addition, there are web conferencing tools such as screen sharing, document collaboration with Google Docs, and a shared whiteboard. These tools, all free, have the best implications and uses for teaching. In a Hangout, you can connect with your students outside of the classroom for further instruction and review. You can hold discussions just for the heck of it, or even for extra credit. Hangouts can allow groups to work collaboratively on a project together with ease, unhindered by physical location. You can even use them to connect with other schools, students and teachers all over the country.
With Hangouts, you can also teach in an informal sense. If you have a particular expertise, you can offer to share it with other interested parties. You can start a Hangout, for example, and invite people to attend in order to see a demonstration, hear a lecture, or ask questions. You can even record your Hangouts to show to people who weren’t able to attend. And even though Hangouts are limited to 10 active participants, an unlimited number of people can listen in, which increases your potential reach.
The Bottom Line
As social networking is such an integral part of our society, it’s a good idea to incorporate it into teaching. Those who do so usually only have positive things to say about it. With Google+, your teaching capabilities are even greater as compared to social networks like Facebook or Twitter. Give it a try in your classroom today.
Lisa Sharp built a reputation as a classroom innovator. Now she puts her research and writing skills to the test with help from the #1 grammar checker on the web. Another tip she gives entrepreneurs is “Never stop networking!”
February 21, 2012My Continued Experience with Advanced Web Ranking
I get a lot of questions about what, if any seo software we use here at our SEO company, and while very little is automated when it comes to linkbuilding itself, we do use Advanced Web Ranking to generate our reports and track the keywords of both our keywords, and our clients keywords. Well as always they have launched a brand new version of their software which adds in some more features and a new layout. While the layout took a little getting used to and didn’t fit my screen initially (I contacted support and this was fixed by changing the font size option in settings which shrunk everything down so I could view it on my screen resolution). They have also added a new feature where you can link the software up with Google Analytics data and this allows you to see the traffic and conversions and it can then be put into customised reports. Its a really nice additional feature and its great to see them adding new features in each version and this addition works really nicely.
You can also get and check links through SEOmoz and then it allows you to compare your websites link profile with your competition’s websites getting you a better insight in to your link profile.
It also now allows you to make reports which include analytics, links and rankings.
This software is still great and works really well. It would be nice if it was a little cheaper but isn’t that the case with most things. It can still generate reports, both white label reports, custom tracking and stats, and branded reports. You can also set it to check for rankings automatically. A nice feature I’ve found is that you can set it to search for subdomains and variations of your domain, as well as other domains you might want to check for. I don’t know if that is a feature that existed before, but it is one I have found myself using more and more often.
I also plan to use the ftp function soon to allow monthly reports to be uploaded to our servers so that clients can check their own reports without needing to be sent them every month. As soon as I’ve got some experience in using this feature I’ll let you guys know how its working. The reports run really smoothly, my only gripe is that it can take a while on longer keyword lists, but this is necessary so that you don’t get banned from search engines, I guess proxies would fix this.
Anyway in answer to the question I get asked all the time “can you track your keyword positions in Google” yes you can, and you don’t have to do it by hand, which makes it one less end of month task and eliminates some of the risk of missing websites when glancing through pages of search engine results pages. It is a little expensive for tracking person projects, but on a mass scale or for business its a great solution.
February 17, 2012Timeline for Brands Coming Soon From Facebook
According to Mashable facebook are set to launch the timeline for brand pages later this month.
February 17, 2012Our brand new website is finally here!
We have a brand new website. Hopefully posts and pages are now easier to read and easier on the eye. You can submit your details to us a lot more easily as well as request a callback from us via a form in the corner. We are also aggregating some of the pages into each other to make it easier to find information. Let us know what you think, we can still tweak it here and there so we are more than open to feedback.
January 31, 2012Funny Social Media, SEO/Digital Comic in the Metro OMG
Click to see the full size image
January 30, 2012Keep Calm and Carry on Link Building
I made the image below so be nice and link back here if you use it or let me know on twitter, facebook etc.It is a take on the “keep calm and carry on meme” – In times of panic when rankings drop, algorithms change or the new Panda update goes live, and you know you’re not doing anything wrong – keep calm and carry on link building.
Embed This Image
January 24, 2012Don’t be Evil Bookmarklet from Facebook
Facebook were seemingly working on a project over the weekend to try and improve the new Google search plus your world search results, which unstubtly has a bias towards Google Plus profiles. We all know Google are trying to give the average user a push in to using their service but Facebook seem to have *Fixed* the bias issue with this new bookmarklet.
Interestingly enough it doesn’t just change profile links at random it actually used Google’s own natural ranking data to decide which profile is the most relevant. In a lot of natural searches the facebook or twitter link appears way before the Google plus link and as such this bookmarklet fixes results to adjust this back to the most relevant social profile (as decided by Google)
I’m pretty impressed that it doesn’t just switch out results for the sake of it, or take out the plus profiles completely. Its amazing, but unsurprising to think that Google are pushing Google plus so heavily even against what their own algorithm thinks is best for the user.
The campaign/project is called focus on the user and the bookmarklet is called don’t be evil
From the people at http://www.focusontheuser.org/:
How much better would social search be if Google surfaced results from all across the web? The results speak for themselves. We created a tool that uses Google’s own relevance measure-the ranking of their organic search results-to determine what social content should appear in the areas where Google+ results are currently hardcoded.
All of the information in this demo comes from Google itself, and all of the ranking decisions are made by Google’s own algorithms. No other services or APIs are accessed.
There is also a really nice video explaining how it works.
January 3, 2012How to make an iphone game without knowing code
The iPhone and Android market are well known for their ability to make millions for their developers from simple apps and games and I’m sure all of us have at some point thought “I could’ve made this…If i knew objective C or Java and whatever they use” but we don’t..and as with a lot of things we never sit down and learn it either.
However there are still some great ideas out there that aren’t seen on the market place. After some research I’ve found a few ways to make games without knowing any code and providing these work as well as expected I should be launching some simple games onto the market soon. I’ve already got some great basic engines working and tested on the actual iphone itself. Its really amazing to be able to get ideas out so quickly and I am quickly learnings how to make an iphone games and basic apps without knowing any code.
With the iPhone App store a lot of simple ideas fail or are made based on their graphics and uniqueness so that is the next step I need to take after getting the engines working. I will be updating this with any progress and with apps on the iphone and android market place I also plan on some great first hand experiments to find the best way to boost sales and optimise for apps to appear both in Google and on the mobile market places.
To be kept up to date with our progress and what we learn enter your e-mail address below
December 25, 2011SOPA Godaddy Protest – 21,054 domains moved so far
This site as with most of my domains are registered under godaddy, with the reddit protest day on the 29th of December I will be attempting to move my domains to a new registrar. If you don’t know what’s going on, have a look at the SOPA bill that could pass, and you’ll notice godaddy as one of the supporters of the bill that could literally change the way the internet works and is accessed by everyone.Reddit picked up on this and decided to protest in their own way.
Reddit have decided to make it the 29th domain moving day to move your domains away from godaddy to one that doesn’t support SOPA. Godaddy are going back on their support now, but after initially claiming the reddit protest didn’t make a dent, 21,054 domains have been moved so far (and its not even the day of the official move yet) they are certainly going to feel it now and seem to be going back on their support, possibly just an attempt to stop people moving their domains away and forgetting the whole matter. Reportedly Wikipedia are moving all their domains away from godaddy and the icanhazcheeseburger network are supposed to be moving their domains away (reportedly they have around 1000) so this is going to add up to a hundreds of thousands dollar impact on their business.
December 19, 2011HTC Desire Update 19th December 2011
Just as I get my new amazing Galaxy Nexus (face unlock is so good) My old HTC Desire gets a new system update. It just seems to be a small 6meg update so I’m not sure if its a full gingerbread package or just some basic system updates. Once I’ve installed the update and run it all I’ll update again with what exactly has been updated and changed.
There have already been announcements saying that there will be no Ice Cream Sandwich on the HTC Desire and its doubtful that if this gingerbread that it will be the full gingerbread experience.
“We’ve been forced to accept there isn’t enough memory to allow us both to bring Gingerbread and keep the HTC Sense experience on the HTC Desire. We’re sincerely sorry for the disappointment that this news may bring to some of you” – HTC
