Twitter/Website - Words to Avoid

Found an interesting article about twitter bios at http://www.bnet.com/blog/small-biz-advice/8-words-that-should-never-appear-in-your-twitter-bio/1752?promo=713&tag=nl.e713

The general message was to right in plain language without hyperbole, exaggeration, or fluff.

A related article about website was at http://www.bnet.com/blog/small-biz-advice/10-words-that-should-never-appear-on-your-website/966?tag=content;drawer-container which again highlighted the importance of plain language without the fluff.

Prezi - A New Presentation Tool

Our latest "cool tool" is Prezi - introduced to us by two different presenters, we decided to play with it a bit this week and try it out. Here's one example of a prezi - it's worth looking at as it also talks about corporate "story" and we've discussed trying to document our story for Life Strategies - perhaps this is one way to capture it with words, quotes, pictures, and a timeline?

Here's another example - a wee bit long, but perhaps some of you would be willing to create a Prezi with 10 things about you...to share here and with our students?

Google Docs

Cassie and I have been fiddling with Google Docs. There are definitely limits. It seems like it's best used with a small project team and with documents that aren't heavily formatted.

For one organization, we've posted a document listing upcoming blog topics - a simple document, amongst a few contributors, seems to make sense.

However, we wanted to use Google Docs for our policy manual (which has a lot of necessary formatting). It seems like the Intranet or our own computers may still be the best home for a document like this. Google Docs might be useful when crafting/word-smithing new policies.

I'm interested in your thoughts and reflections

Shared Learning

Just wanted to update those of you who we don't see quite as often about what's been going on "in head office" (AKA the garden patio :-)). Our revised website is almost ready to launch (thanks Deirdre!), Cheryl has worked miracles with Moodle (it finally has graphics!), and we're actively working with SUCCESS again designing Essential Skills training. We expect fall to be busy...and the focus of our work internal to Life Strategies is "consolidate." To do this, we're working on integrating our social media (blogs, websites, linked-in, Twitter, Facebook) to make them work better for us. We're also going to be more consistent with writing and design standards (Cheryl will work with us to develop and share the standards) and we'll develop and use more templates (for flyers, handouts, PowerPoint, etc.). We'll be working on smaller project teams, so wanted a means to share some information with our complete team (hence this blog!).

We miss the shared learning and tech tips from our team meetings, so hope that this blog will allow us to continue to learn together. Did you notice you can even upload video? So, if something's easier to just "show us" try that. :-)