Communicating with Students Using Technology
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
1 like•443 views
This document discusses using technology and social media tools to communicate with students. It outlines listening tools like surveys and monitoring, sharing tools like blogging and videos, and interacting tools like Facebook and Twitter. The goal is to provide frameworks for using these free and low-cost tools to listen to students, share information with them, and facilitate interaction. Key takeaways include the importance of podcasting, blogs, surveys, and flash drives for communicating with today's technology-savvy students.
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
Similar to Communicating with Students Using Technology
Similar to Communicating with Students Using Technology (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Communicating with Students Using Technology
- 2. Technology and You: Communicating with Your Students Christina Martin, Access Group Web Channel and Interactive Marketing Director Dino Koff, Dartmouth Medical School Director of Financial Aid and Student Affairs
- 6. Millennials Their Cell Phones
- 8. The Bad News
- 9. Getting Started • Groundswell • Framework for thinking about how to use these tools • “The Ladder”
- 12. Listening Tools • Surveys/Polls – Survey Monkey • Easy to use • Question logic for best results • Analyze the data to formulate action items Free!
- 13. Listening Tools • Monitoring – Google Alerts – RSS Feeds – TweetBeep Free! Free! Free!
- 15. Sharing Tools • Blogging – WordPress – – TypePad – free trial, $9.00/month – Blogger – couldn’t find pricing Free!
- 16. Sharing Tools • Presentations – Camtasia (<$200) Brainshark (<$200) – SlideShare Free!
- 17. Sharing Tools • Videos – YouTube Free!
- 18. Sharing Tools • Texting – Mobilitzer – $10/month to $2,000/month – Clickatell – pricing based on credits
- 19. Sharing Tools • Paper to Online – eBooks – Access Group’s eBook • Webinars – GoToMeeting • Internet Conferencing – Skype Free!
- 20. Interacting Tools • Facebook – Listen: forums, discussions, polls – Share: comments, posts Free!
- 21. Interacting Tools • Twitter – Listen and share: monitor buzz, share posts Free! Free!
- 22. Key Takeaway!
- 25. Survey Monkey
- 26. Mint
- 27. Flash Drive
- 28. Technology and You: Communicating with Your Students Dino Koff, Dartmouth Medical School Director of Financial Aid and Student Affairs dino.koff@dartmouth.edu Christina Martin, Access Group Web Channel and Interactive Marketing Director cmartin@accessgroup.org
Editor's Notes
- In this session: Give you a framework for understanding today’s technology options Explore some of the tools out there Show you real-world examples of FAA’s Goal – that you can do this, without a lot of time and money! Technology and You: Communicating with Your Students More and more, communicating with your student requires the use of technology. Keeping up with the latest and greatest can be a daunting task, but there are resources available that are not only user-friendly and effective, but that are fun, tool. W will introduce tools like survey monkey, among others, an we’ll discuss the benefits of activities like podcasts and webinars. Even if you don’t exactly speak your student’s language, you can still use technology to your advantage.
- The good news is that the current situation is a perfect storm: Millennials are wired, they love technology, and they need you
- Recent Pew Research Center study, millennials are defined as between 18-29 years old. - Limited barriers to entry - they’re online, they using these tools
- - They think positively of technology
- We know how they LOVE their cell phones!
- And, the best part of the perfect storm – they need you and what you do!
- - The bad news is that they expect immediacy in their communication tools, they want it now! - So, you are probably thinking – how do I start, what do I do first.
- A great place to start is reading a book – you can download it to your Kindle or iPad. Forrester Research’s book, Groundswell is a great read for understanding these technologies from a strategic perspective. Before you jump in with both feet, get a framework for what you’re trying to accomplish –
- Forrester created a ladder graphic to understand your audience. The good thing is that your audience, these millennials, are on the top rungs on the ladder – so they are ready to use these tools with you! This framework can also help you to understand what types of activities you may want to investigate, based on what you’re trying to accomplish. So, let’s dig in a little deeper.
- Now, we’re going to walk through the tools, as we mentioned in the session description – give you real tools/names of tools, that you can look up, and for most of the examples – they’re free, my favorite price!!! I’ve broken these tools down into three categories: Listening – tools that you’ll use to listen to the “buzz” or “chatter” that is currently going on. You can use these tools in your research arsenal to better understand your students and their needs. Sharing – so you’ve listened, and you know what you want to say – let’s explore some tools to let you share online. Finally, we’ll look at platforms that have both listening and sharing components - let’s start listening …
- A couple great resources, and many have free options: Surveys and polls: Survey Monkey is a great platform for creating online surveys and polls. Without having any programming skills, you can set up an online survey, send out invitations, and then run the numbers (do the analytics) about the findings. Survey Monkey is very flexible there are: More than 15 kinds of questions Question logic, skip features Pre-designed templates based on common survey designs Security Analytics – get real-time results, you can set filters and segmentation (how specific audience types responded, etc.) Download the results or chart and graph right inside Survey Monkey Survey Monkey has provided some ??? As a reminder to try them out when you get back to the office!
- Monitoring is another great listening activity – your students are already out there – what are they currently saying? A great place to find low hanging fruit – if their already discussing a topic, you can swoop in and get a quick win! - Two listening services to use, depending on where “in the cloud” you want to listen: - Google Alerts – “listens” on the public Internet, blogs, articles, news stories – you select key words that you want it to “listen” for and then you receive an e-mail with the conversation it finds. You can also set up a client for RSS feeds. RSS Feeds are basically creating your own Internet channel. I use Google Reader – then if you find a blog or news source that you want to subscribe to, you can subscribe to the feed and then go to one place, Google Reader, and read your blogs. - Tweet Beep listens on Twitter – so you set up keywords and phrases that you want to listen for within Twitter. For example, I search on “financial aid” and these are a few of the tweets that came up.
- Again, this gives you a flavor for the fact that students are talking and sharing. Listening is a great form of primary market research to help you understand your audience. The good, the bad, and the ugly – it’s all out there, so better to be aware of it! Moving on to the sharing tools – you can create a platform to respond to the good, bad, and ugly, as well as create self-service forums for your students to get their own answers.
- So once you have things that you want to share, you need an online venue to share these thoughts, ideas, tools, videos, whatever you can create digitally can be shared. A great place to start is set up a blog. The common misconception is that you need to write full “articles” to have a blog – not true. Short, sweet, to the point snippets are great – easily digestable pieces of wisdom. Lists are always great – top 5, top 10, whatever. Blogs are also great b/c you can tag your content according to topic, so it becomes an online encyclopedia, by topic. The top blogging platforms are WordPress, TypePad, and Blogger. The are very easy to use. You can usually watch a tutorial and be up and running the same day. You don’t need programming experience – if you can type in Word, you’re all set. They all have what’s called a WYSIWIG (what you see is what you get) editor with an interface just like Word. Also, they come with templates, so you don’t have to have design help. You’ll probably just need a graphics file of you logo – there is an easy to attach interface, and you’ll have a very professional-looking blog in no time.
- You probably already have a library of static presentations. As we saw from the attitude survey, this audience isn’t keen on sitting through a presentation, so add some flair – make them into a video. There are a couple easy, low cost tools that allow you to create a voice-over video on static presentations. Once you’ve completed these presentations, you can put them online for your students to find on your blog, or if you’re not ready for a blog, try SlideShare. Basically, it’s the presentation YouTube site. I did a search and there are over 2800 PAGES of presentations on financial aid. With SlideShare, you can: Share slideshows publicly or privately. There are several ways to share privately. The site said you can synch audio to your slides, but I haven’t tried their tool for this.
- Of course, another venue for sharing is YouTube – Broadcast Yourself. I did a search on YouTube for “financial aid” – yielded over 5,000 results. Wanted to point out this video from Duke – Nice job! Easy – video camera, little editing, Camtasia can handle, and there are two key things off this video result See the comment from TheCateDiva6 (wonder where one thru five went to school?) – any how, Cate commented that she loves the video and thanks Duke. This generation is also more trusting of peer comments and ratings, than advertising or messaging that the school is going to put out. So if just one student is swayed, this video paid for itself and then some. Also, look at the number of views, ok, so subtract the views from Alison, her family, and me – over 2,400 views – imagine being able to serve over 2,000 students without any face time or phone time. That’s good through put of your office! Again, the time and money to finish the video had to pay for itself a couple times over!
- As we saw from the earlier slides – sending text is like breathing for this audience. According to Wikipedia: SMS (short message service) or text messaging is the most widely used data application in the world, with 2.4 billion active users, or 74% of all mobile phone subscribers. Admittedly, the ease of use for this technology hasn’t developed as fast at the other methods for sharing, but with the level of demand, I’m sure it’s going to catch up. One real-world example I know of some doctor’s offices using text to remind patients of appointments or that results are in/call the office – so, if missed appointments are a problem for your office, this could be a good solution. Also, if you’re looking to market to potential students, Forrester says that SMS is one of the most marketing communication mediums with 5 times better response rates than direct marketing. So the solutions are out there. I found two that look promising: Mobilitzer and Clickatell – it doesn’t look super easy or cheap, but maybe you could get an intern to check it out for you.
- I know we all have forests of paper – this group, Millennials, aren’t crazy for paper either. A good option is to take paper-based materials, specifically how-to kind of materials, and create eBooks. eBooks can either be read online or you can convert to a file format for readers – Kindle, iPads, etc. Excuse this self promotion, but I’m going to open an Access Group ebook to show you how nicely they look online. Very easy to do – we created the materials as if we were going to print, and with the help of Quality Publisher and $25, we created these e-books. Webinars and Internet Conferencing – while the earlier research says that Millennials aren’t crazy about webinars, I have to say from our experience, they are still a good format for distance learning. If you don’t have a university wide solution, Go To Meeting is an easy to use vendor. There is a cost, about $50 a month. Still, if you can service multiple students at once, the return on the investment looks pretty good. The nice thing about doing webinars is that you can record them and post them online, then they become more like a video. Skype is real-time video conferencing over the Internet. It uses voice over IP technology, meaning the voice comes out the computer speakers, not the phone line. If you place a Skype call and the receiver is using Skype, then there is no cost. There is a fee if the recipient is on a mobile phone with video conferencing capabilities. I like video conferencing b/c you can at least tell if they are paying attention!
- Now to the ultimate in technology platforms -- Facebook and Twitter. Both of these platforms are enabled for both listening and sharing. Facebook – it’s not just for posting words, you can add just about any file type under the “tabs” . You can also use Facebook as a type of listserve by posting discussions and questions to engage the audience. Access Group has two Facebook groups – one for our borrower base in repayment, that’s just Access Group. The other is for a law student audience, that’s under the campaign name, Enlighten Your Load. We’re seeing really promising interaction with this audience – question posting, question answering – we set it up as a mentoring site for our legal borrowers to mentor the incoming class. There really seems to be a need to enable this type of communication.
- Twitter is for interacting too – you can post information or listen, as you say from a previous slide to the buzz. Twitter is free too. It’s very easy to set up and maintain. We also have a Twitter page that we are just starting. We are using this for following schools and tweeting the content of the All Access blog, geared toward schools, and share relevant articles that we find.
- So, in closing – there are three key takeaways: In the immortal words of Kent “Flounder” Dorfman: [play] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuXxy8cjZQA&NR=1 You CAN do this and it’s FUN It doesn’t cost a lot of time or money And use these and the students will stampede to your schools! I’d now like to turn the floor over to Dino, where he’s going to walk you all through real-world examples of these technologies in use: