Web Tools
There are some fantastic web based tools available now, both to help you with your own work and and with your work with children and young people (or adults!)
Presentations
You can download my slides from Deep Impact and Regional Pilots Officer training on Social Media and Online Safety.
Pop over to Tim Davies blog for loads more information, ideas and inspiration and download his great One Page Guides to everything you will need to know to get your project online!
You can download the Young Scot Social Networking Conference Report, for a good summary of some of the issues of doing youth work online.
Online Safety
There are some great resources to help your young people (and you) stay safe online.
Help Booklets from CCPAS
CEOP – Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre
Social Networking
Twitter – micro blogging. Share your thoughts in 140 characters.
Remember that one of the most powerful tools on Twitter is the search box combined with hashtags. Give your project, conference or event it’s own tag (e.g. Deep Impact 2010 becomes #DI10). Encourage people tweeting about your event to use the hashtag and you now have a live update of what’s happening at your event. Simple.
Facebook – the biggest social network
Ning – create your own social network. You can have invite only networks or open ones.
Blogs
Wordpress.com – create your free blog
Wordpress.org – download great blog software to power your own hosted website & blog
Blogger – another great free blogging platform
If you want some advice on blogging the ProBlogger is a good place to start with great ideas on content and engaging you readers as well as building your audience.
Wikis
PBWiki - easy to use free wiki
Etherpad – a wiki that several people can edit at the same time. Great for group projects.
Photo Sharing
Flickr – great photo sharing site
Some cool free webtools
Firefox – the best web browser, period. Better than ever with loads of add-ons.
Animoto – briliant tool for creating professional looking shows using your photos.
Buzzword – a proper word processor… online
Youtube – everyone like to have a go at this video sharing site but there are some brilliant talks, instructional videos and plain crazy things to watch
Skype – great free video phone and instant messenger
Slideshare – free powerpoint sharing. You can even share narrated presentations
43Things – share your goals, read other’s tips, encourage people…
Some WordPress Plugins
Featured Content Gallery is a great plugin which gives you a clickable slideshow which pulls photos from any posts or pages. Great for a front page! Download it.
Twitter Tools allows you to link your blog with Twitter. Your blog will ‘tweet’ each time you post and you can display your Twitter stream in a widget in the sidebar.
TinyMCE Advanced gives you loads of option to format your text a post or page. Lots of formatting buttons to choose from!
NextGEN Gallery another nice slideshow tool. I’ve used it on my Photography page but it also has a range of sidebar widgets!
PodPress is a great podcasting plugin with iTunes integration and now a sidebar widget for easy access to all your wise words! Check the sidebar for some of mine!
Connected
Connected began as a very practical day of training and discussion on how you can use the new tools and possibilities of the internet and mobile phone technology to enhance your work with young people and churches.
At the first Connecetd training day we set up a number of websites to help both demonstrate how easy that was, how useful it could be and to allow us to widen our discussion about using online apps and tools.
I look forward to connecting with you at the Connected website or wiki or here on my blog.
Here are some great videos from Common Craft which explain some of these tools.
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