Creating publicity leaflets

Introduction

A well designed publicity leaflet can make a very large impact on the people you are trying to reach. Your leaflet should look professional and convince the reader that the organisation, product, service or event is of very high quality.

Below are some design ideas that will help you in creating a high quality product.

Content and Purpose

Keep the content limited – choose only one or two main purposes for a single leaflet. Some possible purposes for your leaflet are to:

  • highlight an aspect of a business,
  • canvas for members,
  • introduce a new aspect of an organisation,
  • present products/services,
  • publicise an event.

Decide on the audience. For example, if you are publicising/seeking members for a sport club for children will your audience be the children themselves or their parents? The audience will affect the words you might use in your leaflet and might also have an effect on the images you choose.

Audience by Drew McLellan
“Audience” Image by:drewm Drew McLellan Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Write the content next. Keep it simple – use short sentences, simple vocabulary, and short paragraphs. This will make your message more effective and easier for your audience to remember the main points.

Design, Organisation and Layout

Choose a size that allows you to include your content without it looking overcrowded but also avoids too much empty (white) space. The size should also suit your purpose.

Organise the text with headings/sub-headings. These headings are very important – they need to contain the whole message because many readers will skim read these to get the gist (overall idea) of the content. The text below the heading should expand on your message.

Contrasting colours are good for catching attention but take care not to overdo the colours. Make sure that text stands out from the background and the headings also stand out from the rest of the content.

Use images (graphics) that support the content. Don’t use them just because you like them. Emphasise your message by using text and graphics side by side. Images are good for making an impact. Colour images have been shown to hold the attention of readers. If you have a logo then use it to add more impact.

Information

Contact information is vital and must be accurate check the phone number, company name (spelling), full contact information, emails, websites etc. NOTE if you are making a leaflet as part of your studies you can invent contact details but be very careful that you do not accidentally use real details belonging to someone else.

Make sure that if other information is necessary that you include it – for example: opening hours, prices/costs, regular meeting times, regular match/game/coaching days and times.

Conclusion

Publicity leaflets need to be eye-catching, they also need to keep the attention of the reader once it has been “grabbed”.  Knowing your audience, using the strategies you have already learned for visual texts and planning your layout carefully will help you achieve this.

 

A new dimension for your posts

Introduction

Finding new ways to make your posts more interesting is always fun and can also help demonstrate employability skills such as those in technology! Here you will find out how to sign up for “Slideshare” and “Prezi” two different ways of adding presentations to your blog. We will also show you how to “embed” these types of presentation in your blog.

Slideshare

“Slideshare” is a simple way of uploading and sharing Powerpoint presentations. So if you already know and use Powerpoint you may want to use this to share your employability skills presentation.

This short screencast gives the steps for signing up to Slideshare. Once you have signed up you are directly in an upload screen. However you will get an email with a link for you to click to confirm your membership. Remember to click this or your account will disappear!

The embedded Slideshare below will show you how to upload and embed a Slideshare

 

Prezi

Prezi is a tool for producing and sharing presentations completely online. The main features are that unlike Powerpoint it is not linear and that it uses a zooming technique to move between items.

Here is a screencast on signing up for Prezi

The short embedded Prezi below will show you how to embed a Prezi. For learning how to use Prezi checkout the help in your Prezi account

Vokis

For making and embedding Vokis see “Lina’s Blog”

Conclusion

We hope you have fun embedding Slideshares or Prezis and Vokis in your blogs. They are a great way of adding an extra dimension.

 

What you SEE is what you learn!

Introduction

Visual texts and increasingly audio-visual texts are something we meet with all the time. Visual texts are ones where images or graphics of some kind play a major part in “getting the message across”. This doesn’t mean they are necessarily “word free”. Many visual texts combine words and images to strengthen their message. Audio-visual texts combine voice or other sounds with images to achieve their objectives.

“Good” visual texts

To be able to “write” good visual texts you need to know about some of the features that can be used to create effects as well as about the factors such as audience that will affect the content. We talked about some of these in virtual class. If you need to revisit them login to the course website and checkout the recordings for “Week 2 Day 1 – morning” and “Week 2 Day 2 – morning”. Or take a look at the slideshare

View more PowerPoint from Jo Hart
where you will also find information on signing up to ToonDoo. This is the medium we are going to use to make visual texts on online safety.

Making a visual text using ToonDoo

Those students and lecturers for our first pilot ELFADA course who were online during the virtual class session on visual texts made a Toon together. We did this through desktop sharing with each person taking turns to control my desktop and add their own choice of character and text.
This was great fun to do. Toons are a great way to express your personality online whilst staying safe! Making visual texts is a good learning activity for any subject you are studying. You can use them as we are doing to learn about and share your own ideas about online safety.
The wonderful thing about posting to blogs is that you can update posts when something changes. I am doing exactly that here by adding the joint ELFADA toon from the second group of ELFADA students. As with the previous one this was great fun to make!

Our second group joint ELFADA toon

However there are lots of other ways to use them to make learning more fun.
For example to help you remember the different meanings of two words that sound the same but have different spellings and meanings, as in this simple text above.

Saving Toons

Something we did not really cover in the session was saving your Toon and capturing the link so here is a screencast to help you if you get stuck on this.

You can add your Toons to your blog posts in two ways. We have already look at adding a link – you can do this with your Toon by saving the link and inserting it in the post. Next week we will be looking a adjusting images to a suitable size and inserting them in posts.

Conclusion

Visual texts are a great learning tool as well as being fun to make. We hope you will carry on making Toons and other visual texts for learning. Remember to leave a comment on this post. The more practise you get at commenting effectively the better. Was the post useful for you? In what way was it useful? Was there anything about it that you thought worked very well and why was this?

Making your blog truly YOURS!

Introduction

This post is about going into your blog for the first time and making it yours by:

  • “customising” it with a theme that you like;
  • making an avatar (image for yourself);
  • uploading the avatar into your blog profile;
  • using “widgets” in your sidebars.

Logging in to your blog

You will have been given a link for your blog. Click the link and this will take you to the public view of your blog.

Next you need to login to your blog so that you can change it to suit you. For this you will need your username and password. You should have an email with those. If you don’t know them then contact your lecturer. Click here for a reminder about how to log in to your blog.

Once you have logged in for the first time it is a good idea to change your password. Make sure you choose something that you will remember!

  1. Go to the top right of your blog dashboard screen where it says “Howdy, yourname”;
  2. Click the arrow for the drop-down menu Click “Your Profile”;
  3. Scroll right down to the bottom of the profile page;
  4. Type in your new password and then re-type it in the second box – this helps you to be sure you haven’t made a “typo” in your password.

 

Your blog theme

Your blog theme is one of the things you can change to make your blog very personal. All of our blogs have the same theme when they are first set up. They also have the same example blog post and example comment. Once you get going it is a good idea to delete the example post and comment. Changing your theme is a big step in feeling that you own your blog!

Our blogs are hosted by Edublogs on a CYOC Edublogs Campus site. One of the best known bloggers worldwide in education works for Edublogs. She is an ex-TAFE lecturer from WA – Sue Waters. Sue writes many excellent blog posts in her role for Edublogs. They include “how to” posts, information posts, ideas sharing and many others. One of her “how to” posts is this one about changing your blog theme. This is just one of several Edublogger post links that we will use to help you learn about blogging.

Making an avatar

An avatar is an image you use to represent yourself online. Some people use a photograph. I do so myself because this works for me as an educator with a large global network of colleagues. However as a student – especially if you are under eighteen – we prefer you to use another image for your CYOC blog identity. This is for safety – we will discuss this later in the course during the Digital Safety project.

There are many different sites where you can create avatars, some use a photo as the base, others give you a series of features that you can make into a cartoon. You can also use your own images as long as they are not of other people. You MUST NOT take images from the web – these belong to the persons who created them and using them may be theft! On the left is an image made with FaceYourManga. This is one that is free and also lets you save the image as a file. Some avatar sites need you to capture an image from the screen and edit it. You will learn how to do this for projects later in the course.

To create your Mangatar avatar checkout the Slideshare below:

Widgets

Widgets are the things that sit in the sidebars of your blog. They have many different functions, you can choose the ones that are most useful for your purposes and you can also move them around within and between the sidebars. Checkout this Edublogs post on widgets including the most important ones to have on your sidebars. I love to know where my blog visitors are from so some sort of graphic of this is really important for me and I always have a ClusterMap in my own blogs.

Conclusion – One last thing for you to do on this post

Once you have uploaded your avatar and added one or more widgets  add a comment to this post to tell us what was easy and what was hard about making your blog truly yours, and why this was so!

Edublogs webinar overview. RSS – your connection to the globe

Introduction

This was a fantastic session by Sue Waters (Edublogs Support Manager) who is well known to so many of us as @suewaters on Twitter and through her terrific posts on The Edublogger. As always with Sue’s sessions this one was very interactive with lots of discussion and ideas shared through whiteboards, textchat and audio.

The Session

As usual we recorded the session (please let me know if you access it). After introductions Sue began with a poll to checkout how many of us were already using RSS and/or a personalised home page. A higher proportion of participants were using a personalised homepage than were using RSS.

Next Sue sought ideas from the group about our perception of  RSS – this led to discussion about the name itself and its lack of clarity for most of us. There was a general feeling that Really Simple Syndication was in itself a confusing name and a consensus that it would have been more comprehensible if the name was Really Simple Subscription. I certainly found it totally confusing when I first met it but finally realised that the “Syndication” part of the name was probably derived from the news industry sharing of stories to different outlets.

Sue then made the logical progression from: now we know what RSS is; to how we might use it.

HowDoYouUseResize

These points then formed the basis for a more detailed look at how RSS can be used. Sue also Application Shared her own RSS feed to illustrate her explanations and to show us how easily feeds can be added and organised.

Sue made references to using a personalised homepage such as iGoogle to manage RSS and any other feeds, links and  information. We had a FineFocus session on using iGoogle as a personalised homepage late last year.

Conclusion

I so enjoyed this! I always love Sue’s sessions because there is always so much interactivity and so much to learn. I have been using RSS for quite a long time although in a very low key way, and I gained new insights and tips. As always I took away ideas, eg using a search of my feed for information and things to explore further eg NetVibes.

PS if you are interested in finding out more about a range of Web2.0 Tools checkout the  Edublogs Teacher Challenge on Free Tools including my challenge on using PhotoFiltre for image editing.

Next Webinar

SerendipitybsmallOur next session is an Edublogs “Serendipity” session on Thursday April 14th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (Afternoon/Evening USA) or Friday April 15th at 7am West Aus, mid morning Eastern States Aus depending on your timezone (check yours here) – in the usual Elluminate room. This is one of our fortnightly unconference sessions where we invite you to bring along your “hot topics” and “burning issues” for our poll on the topic of the day. If you want to propose a topic in advance then visit the Serendipity Wallwisher and add your topic.

In the Future

If you are a regular visitor to our webinars you will know that we alternate “Fine Focus” sessions on specific topics with “Serendipity” the unconference sessions where we choose a topic by poll at the start of the session. Sometimes the very fact of being asked for “hot topics” or other ideas for discussion or learning tends to make our minds blank. This has prompted me to start a Serendipity Wallwisher for topic suggestions. Please visit the wall and add your ideas for Serendipity topics so that we have more choices to consider. Some of these ideas might also form the basis for future “Fine Focus” sessions.

Edublogs webinar overview – using ToonDoo

Preface

If you access the link to the recording it would be great if you could either tweet me (@JoHart) or leave a short comment on this post to let me know. I would really like to know if it is useful to people when I post the overviews & recording links

Introduction

The purpose of this session was to take a look at one of my favourite online tools, the cartoon making site ToonDoo. I use this a lot both for learning resources and to engage my students in developing texts.

The Session

As usual the webinar was recorded and we began with a look at what people would like to gain from the session and finding out who was familar with Toondoo. This led smoothly into an opportunity to share links for other cartooning websites.

We moved on to look at a couple of the ways I use ToonDoo both for learning resources and for students to create their own visual texts. Then came the really fun bit, using Application Share to share the Toondoo website and to jointly make a cartoon. I asked for volunteers to build a cartoon and gave control to several people in turn. The resulting cartoon is here:

WebinarToonResizeFollowing the successful use of “homework” last week when we went away to make Vokis. I thought maybe a similar homework this week would be fun. So we invite anyone who was at the session (or in fact anyone who reads this post/watches the recording) to make a ToonDoo and either Tweet the link or put it in a comment to this post. Then we can all enjoy. 🙂 We already have one person @jofrei who has completed the homework with her ‘toon entitled Webinar Toon

UnforseenResize

 

I was rather hoping I would not be expected to do any homework this week but decided that it is always fun to make cartoons so here is mine. I have cheated a bit in that this is one is one I needed to make for the Induction disc I am developing for my online literacy students. I’m trying to underscore the information on digital safety and digital identity with cartoons.

 

Conclusion

I enjoyed presenting this session very much. Partly because it felt very interactive with lots of particiption and partly because I like “playing” with ToonDoo. I also think that these sort of combined “techie how to” and “teaching strategy” webinars are a good combination. This is because sometimes learning about a great tool is not enough in itself – ideas on how it can be used/applied in a learning context are really helpful.

Next Webinar

SerendipitybsmallOur next session is an Edublogs “Serendipity” session on Thursday March 17th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (6pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday March 18th at 1am CEST, 7am West Aus, 10am NSW, depending on your timezone (check yours here) – in the usual Elluminate room. This is one of our fortnightly unconference sessions where we invite you to bring along your “hot topics” and “burning issues” for our poll on the topic of the day. If you want to propose a topic in advance then visit the Serendipity Wallwisher and add your topic.

In the Future

If you are a regular visitor to our webinars you will know that we alternate “Fine Focus” sessions on specific topics with “Serendipity” the unconference sessions where we choose a topic by poll at the start of the session. Sometimes the very fact of being asked for “hot topics” or other ideas for discussion or learning tends to make our minds blank. This has prompted me to start a Serendipity Wallwisher for topic suggestions. Please visit the wall and add your ideas for Serendipity topics so that we have more choices to consider. Some of these ideas might also form the basis for future “Fine Focus” sessions.

Webinar Overview – Using Layers in GIMP

Introduction

Our recent Edublogs webinar recording here was a “Techie How To” in which Phil Hart (@philhart) introduced, and gave us an opportunity to explore,  some of the tools that he uses for editing layers in the GIMP image editing application to produce a variety of effects.

The Session

As is often the case with “Techie How To” sessions (because they are aimed at particular interests) this was a small group. There are advantages with small groups for this type of session as they provide much greater opportunities for interaction and participation.

After a brief introduction Phil set the scene for the tools he was going to look at and started Application Sharing to show the example image with associated layers to be used in the session.

AppShareGIMP

Because the group was small Phil was able to provide plenty of opportunities for “playing” with the tools. He did this by giving control of his mouse to participants so that they could try out the effects for themselves on different layers in his image. There are (as I have said before) some limitations to this – the inevitable lag in response when the mouse is being controlled remotely being the main one. My personal feeling (based largely on the high level of positive comments from participants in previous sessions) is that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed the session because although I have used GIMP a little I have never really got to grips with layers in any image editor. Something that I took away from the session was a better awareness of how useful the facility to use layers could be for me. I know I will still use a simpler editor for the majority of my editing but I will certainly head for GIMP when I want to do something more complex.

Next Webinar

SerendipitybsmallOur next Webinar is an Edublogs Serendipity – unconference session so bring along your hot topics and burning issues (what makes you spit with anger or thump a tub with passion) and throw them into the melting pot for the poll to choose our topic in the first ten minutes.

Join us on Thursday July 22 nd at 23:00 GMT/UTC (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday July 23rd at 1am CEST,7am West Aus, 9am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the usual Edublogs/Elluminate Community Partnership room

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Webinar Overview – Imagine Your Image

Our most recent recorded webinar was a “Techie How To” in which we looked at some of the tools in a simple free image editor – PhotoFiltre. I use PhotoFiltre a lot because I rarely need the more sophisticated features such as layers. This was one of those sessions where I did the presentation as well as facilitating. I always find it more difficult to write an overview for these as I feel too close to the content to be as objective as I should be. I always welcome comments on any of these webinar overviews but particularly so when I have presented the content and thus am not sure about my own objectivity!

The Session

I very much enjoyed doing this session – as I was able to show one of my favourite “e-toys” (PhotoFiltre) through the medium of another (Elluminate). We began by finding out where we were all coming from on image file formats and editing, followed by some quick thoughts on why we and our students might want to edit images.

ImageEditReasons

Size changing and cropping (used most by my students, my colleagues and myself) were both suggested several times. We then moved on to consider briefly the features of a basic image editing application that we would consider most important for ourselves and for our students. Easy to learn and free topped the polls.

Next we took a quick look at the accessibility and functions of some of the most frequently used tools (all on drop-down menus). Size is one of the most significant items that we all often need to change to suit different contexts so we looked briefly at some common sizes we might use and also at the impact of when we make the change on file sizes and consequent download times. Other tools briefly reviewed included cropping, adjusting colour balance, brightness/contrast and filter effects.

Then it was time to play! I shared PhotoFiltre from my desktop and invited participants to try out some of the tools on some pre-loaded images by taking control of my desktop. Using application share in this way has some limitations – for example there is an inevitable lag in response when the mouse is being controlled remotely. However I feel that it has great benefits from the interactivity point of view and is more effective than simply using the sharing to demonstrate. I would love some feedback on this! We finished the session as usual with questions and feedback.

Conclusion

My personal liking for PhotoFiltre is because it is easy to use and free to download and is thus a good option for my students who are literacy/numeracy students working online. They often have both limited access to computers and limited IT skills. I have also suggested it to many of my colleagues as they rarely need sophisticated editing capacity such as layers and they also find it very useful for basic cropping and size changing especially of images they intend to upload into the Learning Management System. If you do need features such as layers then you could take a look at GIMP also free.

Next Webinar

SerendipitybsmallOur next Webinar is an Edublogs Serendipity – unconference session so bring along your hot topics and burning issues (what makes you spit with anger or thump a tub with passion) and throw them into the melting pot for the poll to choose our topic in the first ten minutes.

Join us on Thursday July 8th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday July 9th at 1am CEST,7am West Aus, 9am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the usual Elluminate room

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Webinar Overview – Introducing Scratch

Intro

Check out the recording for this  “Techie How To” session by guest presenter Carl Bogardus (on Twitter as @weemooseus) who showed us how he uses Scratch with students to develop a variety of visual and interactive projects and how this can help students with maths and logic as well as developing basic programming skills.

The session

Carl did an excellent job against all the odds – technical issues with audio and uploading slides meant that he presented the session “off the top of his head”. We started with a look at the Scratch

Scratch

homepage and Carl told us a little about how the site works. He then “played” a project developed by one of his former students to show us the sorts of things that can be done. Next Carl showed us how simply the program blocks can be put together, modified and then instantly tested.  As an illustration of how he uses Scratch to develop maths and logic skills Carl built a very small program to move a sprite by inviting suggestions from the group about how to achieve particular effects and then implementing these so that we could see if we were right! The session finished with questions.

Conclusion

Many thanks to Carl for providing a great introduction to an application that could, in my opinion, be useful for developing engaging learning resources as well as for students themselves to use in developing their own skills

Next Webinar

SerendipitybsmallOur next Webinar is an Edublogs Serendipity – unconference session so bring along your hot topics and burning issues (what makes you spit with anger or thump a tub with passion) and throw them into the melting pot for the poll to choose our topic in the first ten minutes.

Join us on Thursday June 24th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday June 25th at 1am CEST,7am West Aus, 9am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the usual Elluminate room

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Did you know? Elluminate – who did that?

Elluminate has a whole range of features that many people are not really aware of. So I thought maybe a series of short posts on some of these features might be useful to others. Here goes with the first one!

Did you know?

If you are a moderator/facilitator you can see who makes which contributions to the whiteboard. This is very useful for a number of reasons – the importance of these will vary depending on your participants:

  • You can ask contributors by name to expand or elaborate on their contribution
  • Allows you to attribute contributions (useful if posting about a session later)
  • Enables you to help and encourage those who are not participating
  • You can evaluate individual contributions for assessment purposes
  • Lets you target individual help to anyone who is using an inappropriate whiteboard tool for a purpose
  • Allows monitoring and management of inappropriate participant use of whiteboard eg language

Some of the above are particularly useful for me in that our assessment is competency based and that I work with a number of school age students identified as Youth at Risk. So if a student is making innapropriate comments on the whiteboard or indulging in bullying I can protect others by removing the ability of that student to write on the whiteboard

exploreobjects2

To see who has written what:

1. Go to Tools

2. Mouse down to Whiteboard

3. Select Explore Objects

The object list appears in order with most recent change/edit last, in a new resizable, movable window that you can position anywhere on your screen including outside the Elluminate window.

Have fun! Surprise your participants when you know by magic “who did that?”