Using YouTube to Inform

Despite being owned by Google, YouTube is still the number one search engine. While most of the videos on YouTube are there for entertainment value, there are many educational videos out there.

Finding Videos

The US Department of Education has a YouTube channel with hundreds of videos. Many of the technical assistance centers funded by the US Dept of Ed also have their own YouTube channels with hundreds of uploaded videos. Channels funded with education dollars include: 

The National Early Childhood Technical Assistance Center has many wonderful training videos. The Technical Assistance Center on Social and Emotional Intervention for Young Children or TACSEI channel has wonderful videos about supporting young children's social and emotional development. There are also YouTube channels featuring the work of many of the Parent and Training and Information Centers, which are funded with funds from Part D of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).  

Creating Playlists

One way to make it easier for families, and the professionals who support them, to find high quality videos that address their informational needs is to create playlists. Playlists can be grouped by topic area, for instance, Assistive Technology, or Social and Emotional Interventions. Another great option is to use your YouTube channel to feature different videos.  An organization might choose to showcase a different video each month.  

How are Families Using Their Own Videos to Inform and Support?

Creating, and even editing, videos is getting so easy these days. Many phones take high quality video. Families of young children with disabilities use their phones to take and share videos. These videos may be used to show their children's strengths or to illustrate specific challenges. Families use video to celebrate hard won achievements, like those first steps, or the first time a child figures out how to propel their wheelchair. Families often share videos with one another, this can be particularly helpful when a child is resistant to using new equipment, or when a parent might want to see how someone else coaches their child to try something new.  It is important that the professionals who support families be aware of these practices and provide guidance to families on how they can protect their privacy.   Using video can definitely help families to feel supported, however families need to be aware that once videos are out on the web, they have little control over who sees or shares them.

How Can You Use Social Media to Develop Leaders?

Social Media really lends itself to developing leaders. Social Media can be used to provide new leaders with an opportunity to develop their communication skills. The instant messaging features of Facebook or the ability to hold a live chat using twitter can provide new leaders with an opportunity to use technology to gather, share experiences, ask questions and develop new skills.

Got Writer's Block?  How To Get that Blogpost Written

When working with new leaders it is often important to provide a recipe. In the Guest blogpost above the family leader was asked to share about her experience attending her first national conference.  The organizers provided her with a list of questions to get her started.  The questions included:  How were you picked to attend the conference?  Did you need to submit an application?  What did you do to get ready to attend the conference (did you meet with other members of your state team before the conference?  Did you have to make your travel arrangements?  How did you handle childcare while you were out of town?  What types of clothing did you pack for the trip).  What did you learn during the conference?  How will you bring that information back to your state?  What didn't you know before heading out town, that you wished you had known?

New Role?  Want to Share?

Another way to expand family leadership skills is to ask family leaders who may have new roles, Chair of a Committee, Chair of a Council, or staff to a committee.  To write a few blog posts about this new experience. This type of blogging can help answer questions for other family leaders.  It can provide a forum to explore changing roles, the complications that arise when a family leader moves into a role or when a family leader is also a provider or professional staff. Sharing these experiences can be helpful to other family leaders, and can create a community of practice.

Word to the wise

I am a self-professed social media diva. I enjoy the ability to share information, to support others and to connect via social media. However, I also make ample use of my privacy settings. On my personal blog, I don't use my children's real names, and instead use fictional nicknames. I also assist others to increase their social media presence. On a recent webinar I was talking about some of the potential pitfalls of social media use and realized that I didn't have any pictorial examples.  So last night I went searching for some examples quickly found a half-dozen Facebook bloopers. 

As you can see I removed any personal information and blurred the photos to protect the innocent. The top one is just hilarious. The poster provides their name, the name of the main guest, the date, time and location and shares the post with EVERYONE--that little globe means anyone can see what has been posted to Facebook  And then there is the description!  This is a no, no for obvious reasons. There are a number of ways to avoid this problem. The original poster could have created a closed group, or a group private message or they could have created an event that required folks to private message the organizer for the location details. 

This one was found on a state department of health page. For some unknown reason State Department of Health pages are rife with these kinds of posts, or worse.  I've seen people post their phone numbers and Social Security #'s looking for a lost Medicaid card--a quick trip to their profile provides their address and birth date and a criminal has all they need to steal their identity! What surprised me was that this state page, and a few others I have found, respond to the posters using the newsfeed. It would be wise for this page, and others experiencing this type of problem, to periodically post a reminder to readers that they should use email or the private message function to share personal questions or concerns.  Additionally, the administrator should remove any posts that provide personal information.

This one is courtesy of a friend. The post was shared only with this friends friends, but that could still be a lot of people. As you can see my friend let everyone know that they were in transit and would be abroad over a holiday weekend. Again, here's where that private message function would be a better bet. Of course, this was how I found out that my friend would be away for the weekend, but I wondered how many other people learned the same thing?  

Have any Facebook No no's to share?

Making your PowerPoint Presentation Interesting

People say they hate PowerPoint presentations. This is not news. Nor is it news that what they really hate are uninteresting PowerPoint presentations. You know the one's that rely on the standard PowerPoint template and only use the bullet point outlines to organize their presentation.

How Does One Improve their PowerPoint Presentation?

First, buy some books and attend some trainings (F2F or IRL) on how to make your PowerPoint slides more interesting. Check out some simple graphic design books too! One of the best tips I found was to create your own photos and clipart. When you are using your own images you don't have to worry about copyright infringement or your participants connecting your images to some other text in their heads.  For example, recently I was working on revising a presentation that discussed special education teams. The photos for the slides looked like this:

I'm concerned that this may result in some cognitive dissonance. As a curriculum designer and presenter I know that my participants are learning new vocabulary and trying to shift their thinking on certain preconceived notions. Thus I don't want cutesy pictures either. I want to be mindful that a picture of a boys baseball team might make people think of winning--there is no "winning" in special education, teams aren't competing, they are working collaboratively, no one team member is more important than another.  I also don't want families to think, "my child will never play on a team like this."  I don't think this is over-thinking things, you may however, disagree.  I'm thinking I may have to get a few friends together, hand out some photo disclosure forms and snap a few pictures.

Pictures Don't Tell the Whole Story

Great design won't make the whole presentation (though it does help). One also needs to know the material and engage the audience. It is important to insure that your intent and your audience's expectations match. If your audience is expecting to share their knowledge, you had better have space in your agenda to let them share their wealth. It is also important to know how to moderate and facilitate the discussion so that one participant doesn't monopolize the conversation. You want your participants to leave your session just like they would leave a great restaurant:  satisfied, yet still wanting more. Rather than handing out doggy bags you can indicate that participants can talk to you after the session if they need more information.

Webinar

I joined an online training on Thursday. I have been joining a biweekly webinar group to keep my online training skills up while I work on curriculum development. One thing that I realized during the training was it is a good thing to have a few experienced folks in the training. Particularly during online trainings. This training was on Google+ and Twitter, both platforms that I have familiarity with, though I did learn new things!

Experienced?

This was a hands-on training. Some of the training was on the fly. As the trainer showed participants how to set up a new google+ account or twitter account, it helped that some of us have already done this and could quickly link back to the account so that the others could see an existing account. Those of us who had used the two platforms were also able to answer questions either in chat or via phone during the training will the trainer opened the social media or uploaded documents.

Sharing the wealth

I enjoyed the opportunity to join others concerned with disseminating information and learning new software. I enjoy learning how to use new software and figuring out how to make the most of it for my own uses.

Is it stealing?

One of the things that I love about Web 2.0 is how free many folks are with their information and expertise. I've been researching how to assist people when researching on the internet. For me that has lead me down many other paths--I was the type of student who could spend hours looking up one word in the dictionary, because I found so many other interesting words on my way to the one I wanted/needed.  But I digress. 


Researching on the Internet
I've been tooling around today over on the NICHCY website. I've always turned to NICHCY for information on early intervention and special education. They've also got some great information on sharing or disseminating information and how to research.
Steal This!
The section I love the most, is their page called steal these dissemination strategies. They have model language for social media policies, Facebook posts and tweets and they encourage sharing, re-purposing and linking like this.
So I don't think it's stealing if it is encouraged, but I love that it is encouraged! What do you steal--or shall I say repurpose?  And do you make sure to mention where you originally found your material?

More fun with Pinterest!

We've been talking about Pinterest during our last few posts, here and here.  We have been busy pinning and pinning, adding pinners to our board and well, we realized that our board was getting unwieldy.  So, we've broken the EI Board into a group of boards.


Rearranging Boards
There are no hard and fast rules for how to arrange your Pinterest boards.  However, if you want others to follow you, it is helpful if you think about your board name, what others might look for and how to categorize your board.  So our EI Board:  is now broken into the following boards:

• Adaptive/Behavior/Responsibility
• Assistive Technology
• Fine Motor
• Gross Motor
• Sensory
• Social Emotional
• Speech/Feeding

Added Bonus

Rearranging our boards has also meant that we've picked up new followers!  Folks we hadn't interacted with before.  (Blogging about Pinterest, and sharing our blogs on other sites has also lead us to other Pinterest followers as well).

We're in love...

On Saturday, I posted about Pinterest. Today I am going to show you how I've been using Pinterest for my early intervention work. I began by just looking at all of the different boards out there, and as I mentioned, like Alice you can find yourself in a any number of crazy places!  So let's backtrack and talk about how I found some of my pins.  

Once I realized that I wanted to collect pins that reflected images around early intervention and assistive technology I first searched the kids section. There I found many other images from OTs, PTs, and SLPs and teachers. Then I went back to some of my tried and true websites and started pinning those images as well.  And then I thought, wait a second, I am repinning from others, why not invite those folks to pin to my board?  And you should see how it has exploded, I've added a dozen followers, too!   

Here's another shot of my EI Board, which you can follow here: http://pinterest.com/caseywaid/ei-ideas/

Are you using Pinterest?  If so, I'd like to follow you and read about what you are doing with your boards.

Bookmarking

With so many websites, videos, and blogs out there, bookmarking is even more important than ever. We are currently grooving on the new Delicious site to keep track of our bookmarks. The new Delicious allows you to create stacks, or interest areas, identify images from the website, etc., and share your stacks with others. You can also follow others stacks.


Why Bookmark?
We would argue why not. But, O.K., we'll bite. Delicious, Reddit, Digg, and other Bookmarking sites, allow you to create lists of sites so that you can quickly find those sites,even when away from your own computer.  Here's an interesting overview of how to use social bookmarking sites, I haven't decided if I completely like the aesthetic, let me know what you think: social bookmarking know how


What Are We Bookmarking?
This week we were researching Assistive Technology, and each time we found a new bookmark we quickly added it to our stack. We can share our stack via email, links or they can be found by other Delicious users who can follow our stack. We can also search Delicious for other stacks.


What Will You Bookmark?
What bookmarks will you create? What will you include in your stacks?

Community of Practice

Professional Development
Another way to inform and support is to create a Community of Practice (COP). As long as the internet has been around, there have been COPs. Sometimes these were accomplished using listserves. A local or national group would create a listserve and invite people they know to join.  In the last few years COPs have migrated to sites like Ning! The T A and D Network, a network of programs funded by OSEP has had COPs for some time and is now using a Ning site as well (You can see more on OSEP here or here). To operate a COP like the one used by TADNET, requires paying the fees required by Ning! and hoping that folks can find your COP, or you can simply join TADNET.