Using social media sites

Everyone knows about Facebook and Twitter these days but you may not be aware of the wide range of other social media tools out there that can help promote you and your work. Tumblr is a tool to share video,text,audio,links.text in a way that is linked to hashtags (#) so searches can be done using your twitter account. Path is another tool that I use for photo journalism,  similar to Instagram but Path  allows you to geotag your information as well as make comments. Flipboard is a magazine format that collects feeds. Feed collection is a primary tool for the blogger and social networker as pulling together diverse and related information will be a key skill of the 21st Century. Tweetdeck does this for your Twitter feeds.  Vine is intriguing as you can use short video clips to entertain your followers with. Creative use of animated gifs could be an activity for schools to use. Thinglink attaches hotspots to your images so that you can find out using a variety of information types – video,text,links. Touchcast does a similar thing but is linking other users more dynamically than thinglink does. It also embeds websites to show as you speak so is social networking presentation tool!  Aurasma Lite is a virtual learning tool that allows information to be linked to your camera – useful for autistic pupils and aspergers syndrome pupils to follow instructions or gain social skill ideas when a certain image is shown. A bit like sooped up flashcards. To that extent Google Goggles on the Android platform but can be accessed through Google search on the iPad  allows information to be found via photographs. Having wandered off from social media tools to more personal tools this short blog may be giving more ideas on how to use these tools to meet individual needs. Watch out in the online resource section an article describing what personal & social media tools can help individual needs.