Use Examples That Are Relevant To
Students’ Lives

Rather than using examples and scenarios in word problems that are far removed
from students’ everyday lives, teachers can incorporate social media
experiences. This allows the students to relate to the subject matter and see
how what they are learning in class can apply to their own lives. For example,
a math problem involving distances could mention that various students have
logged their locations on FourSquare, and from this information the students
must decide who is closest to their own location and therefore the best person
to meet for coffee.



Set Up Facebook Groups And Events

With Facebook now ubiquitous as a tool for students to connect with each other,
it can be a great way for teachers to facilitate group learning and projects.
By setting up a Facebook group for a class project, students can collaborate on
work, share research and update each other on their progress. This project can
now exist as an integrated part of the student’s social experience, so that
they can easily collaborate without feeling like they are putting their lives
on hold to do so.



A Teaching Twitter Account

A dedicated teaching twitter account can also be a vital weapon in the
educator’s arsenal. Interesting links to relevant subject matter can be tweeted
to students so that they can gain a wider knowledge of the learning material.
Reminders about the due dates of assignments, dates of exams and tests and
special equipment that they need to remember to bring into class can be easily
communicated without much hassle or inconvenience to the teacher.



Consider a Class Blog

A class blog, with responsibility to update delegated to the students
encourages them to think about how best to express to others what they have
been accomplishing in class. Parents can also read this information and gain a
greater understanding of what their children are accomplishing in class and
learning during their time at school.



Be Careful With Your Own Information

Make sure that you do not overstep boundaries in your use of social media. You
should never add students to your personal Facebook or Twitter accounts and
should ensure that only friends can see your updates. If using teaching
accounts, you should make sure that students limit your access to their profile
or else you may be privy to private information that could put you in a
difficult legal position.

Today, the BC Human Resources Management
Association (BC HRMA) held
an interesting Round Table workshop to share some of your favourite business
development tools, tools that bring ease, efficiency and effectiveness to you
and your work.

Here are some of the tips we shared with those attending. We look forward to
hearing about your favorite tools.

Business Development Tools from A-Z

Google Alerts – get automatic notification of any Google
updates on specific items you are tracking. You can put in any key words you
want to track, then get immediate, daily or weekly summaries. Useful for when
your business is mentioned, tracking when competitors are mentioned, or tracking
trends you are watching. www.google.ca/alerts

Hootsuite - for managing Twitter and Facebook postings,
especially if multiple accounts and/or multiple users www.hootsuite.com

Internet Seer – monitors your website from and if your site
is down, sends you an email, cell phone or pager alert to notify you of the
problem. www.internetseer.com

Intervals– web based time tracking, project tracking,
billing www.intervals.com

Magento – powerful open source ecommerce system, with
advanced options www.magento.com and www.synergycc.com/advanced-e-commerce

Meet-up – great site for finding events and groups of people
with like interests www.meetup.com

Silverstripe – powerful content management system, with
advanced options. www.silverstripe.org and www.synergycc.com/content-management-system-cms

SoftSearch – a great for finding business and specialty
software. Over 50,000 products- software and web-based solutions. www.softsearch.com

Synergy Connect – enables you to add customer social media
community to your website. Your own brand, on your own website. Includes
discussions, tips, photo sharing, events, polls, blogs, discussion forums, and
more. Can also use as a private company communication platform. www.synergy-connect.com

Zimbra – web based email system, with awesome spam filter
option

This workshop was facilitated by Lee-Anne Ragan, President, Rock.Paper.Scissors
Inc. so I look forward to sharing her resources
and tips as well, when I receive a copy.

What are your favorite time saving and productivity tools you use in
your business? Share them here...

Frank Gregus and team are passionate about making and sharing their great award winning wines!

"Pacific Breeze winery has picked up 50 international wine making awards since the winery opened in 2005 and opened its doors to the public in 2007", proudly explains Suzanna de Souza. 

"The awards have helped create that demand and buzz in the wine industry," she said. "It's forced us into expansion because demand is so high. We have some really big accounts and we've recently taken over the space next door, which doubles our size."

The facility will now take up 6,000 square feet.

"We're using it for production, and we're going to be creating a corporate meeting facilities and a lounge and a larger tasting room," de Souza said. 

They will also be be hiring more tasting room staff and presenters to keep up with this growth.

They are a hidden gem in New Westminster, BC.  Drop by their tasting room, and let them know Synergy referred you! 

6-320 Stewardson Way, New Westminster

The Vancouver Whitecaps Football / Soccer Club has added an interesting use of social media to their website.

Now, thanks to these two GigaPan photographs from Ronnie Miranda,http://173.203.18.202/news/2011/03/mls-debut-gigapan-photo  fans can zoom in and find themselves and their friends.  The images stitch together more than 200 photos totaling over 2000 megapixels.  In addition, Vancouver Whitecaps FC is the first Canadian entity to use the GigaTag feature, which allows fans to tag themselves via their Facebook account.

This picture of Kathy Woolverton, Synergy's President, is taken from the far corner of the stadium - part of 200 photos stitched together. The final hi-res file is 100,872 X 19,890 pixels or 2,006 megapixels.

Thrilled to be a Vancouver Whitecaps Soccer fan being a part of history on March 19, 2011, at their Major League Soccer (MLS) debut March 19, 2011 against Toronto FC.

What do you think?

What other use of social media in sport have you seen?

-The first
thing you notice when you pick up an IPad 2 is that it is significantly
thinner and that it now has 2 cameras, one on the front for face time
and one on the back for pictures and video. The problem with these two
cameras is that they are very low quality and camera on the back is
nowhere near as good compared to the iphone 4's camera.

-One of
the bigger improvements of the Ipad 2 is that the graphics are better
and faster. The Ipad 2 is running with Imagination's PowerVR SGX43MP
which is a multicore chip that allows the Ipad 2's graphics to perform
nine times better than the first Ipad.

-The Ipad 2 is also a lot faster because of it's new 1ghz A5 dual core processor
compared to the A4 single core processor used by the Ipad. Along with
this would also be the Ipad 2's increased battery life which can last
for a little over 10 hours.

-The Ipad 2 comes with a new
case/cover created by Apple, it allows you to protect your screen, and
it is also magnetic so it can be folded up into a stand when you're
watching a movie.

Overall the Ipad 2 has it's improvements but if you already have the first Ipad i see very little point in
purchasing the Ipad 2, unless you are one of thos people that has to
keep up with every little thing apple releases, in which case go for it.
Now if you do not have the first Ipad I think the Ipad 2 definitely
deserves some consideration since it has the same price as the Ipad when
it first came out and has its improvements.

Halde and BDC vice-president Ian MacFadden also noted the reluctance of many small Canadian companies to invest in so-called ICT spending — information and communications technology. ICT spending can help boost productivity by making companies  more
efficiently run, MacFadden noted. That message doesn’t always get through.

“To understand the value of investing in ICT, you really need a strategic approach, and a lot of small companies don’t have that approach,” he said.

"Canada's lackluster productivity risks hampering the country's economic recovery; higher productivity helps make our products more competitive in export markets," outlines Tiff Macklem, Bank of Canada deputy governor.

"If needed another more immediate reason to invest in productivity gains and improve our competitiveness, this is it," he said in Calgary. Macklem also noted that Canada ranks 17th in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development standings when it comes to business spending on research and development. He also pointed to a World Economic Forum study which puts this country in 19th place for innovation.

In an interview with the Star’s editorial board, Halde said too many small business owners think that innovation is something best left to technology firms like Research in Motion or other big companies that can afford it.

“We’re trying to get entrepreneurs out of their comfort zone,” said Halde. “We need to get them into the mindset of thinking of innovation … as part of their business strategy.”

Too often, there’s a perception that innovation means radically new ideas like RIM’s creation of the now-ubiquitous BlackBerry, he says. “We are on a bit of a kick to try to get them to stop thinking of innovation as PhDs in white lab coats.”

Innovation can sometimes mean something as simple as taking an existing idea or product and tweaking it slightly, or using it in a new way, Halde said, citing the example of a company that decided to add a second level to each of its cargo containers. “That doubles the productivity right there.”

Statistics Canada data released Monday showed that Canada's productivity grew by 0.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010. In the U.S., productivity grewby 0.6 percent in the same quarter. Over the entire year, productivity grew in Canada by 1.4 percent; in the U.S., that figure was 3.8 percent. That gap has been growing for the better part of three decades.

_________

Synergy works with business owners to help implement technology solutions to meet your specific needs, help your business streamline your operations, improve productivity, and increase revenues. Call today for your complimentary strategic consultation.

Your thoughts and comments?

What would you like to improve in the productivity and innovation of your business?

Instead, we need people who understand governance to control and drive policies and management around the services we're creating, and those not yet created.

UMPCs create a design challenge by virtue of being a tweener -- neither a cell phone nor a laptop, said Phil McKinney , vice president and chief technology officer at HP's personal systems group. "The UMPCs -- OQO and those guys -- are trying to be too much on the small side, very heavy, not great battery life, they get hot in your hand too when you use it. But when you get north of 9-inch screens, you're getting pretty close to a laptop," McKinney said.  

With IDC predicting 20 percent growth in thin clients, that outlook is good right about now.

InfoWorld Editor at Large Tom Sullivan covers a variety of topics for news and features, as well as produces the InfoWorld Daily podcast.

Also at the conference, Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia.com, which is community site supporting development of wikis, cited the company's open source search efforts with its Wikia Search project. The project currently is in an alpha stage of development.

Paul Krill is an editor at large at InfoWorld.

Leveraging the power of content and social media marketing can help elevate your audience and customer base in a dramatic way. But getting started without any previous experience or insight could be challenging.

It's vital that you understand social media marketing fundamentals. From maximizing quality to increasing your online entry points, abiding by these 10 laws will help build a foundation that will serve your customers, your brand and -- perhaps most importantly -- your bottom line.

1. The Law of Listening
Success with social media and content marketing requires more listening and less talking. Read your target audience’s online content and join discussions to learn what’s important to them. Only then can you create content and spark conversations that add value rather than clutter to their lives.

2. The Law of Focus
It’s better to specialize than to be a jack-of-all-trades. A highly-focused social media and content marketing strategy intended to build a strong brand has a better chance for success than a broad strategy that attempts to be all things to all people.

3. The Law of Quality
Quality trumps quantity. It’s better to have 1,000 online connections who read, share and talk about your content with their own audiences than 10,000 connections who disappear after connecting with you the first time.

4. The Law of Patience
Social media and content marketing success doesn’t happen overnight. While it’s possible to catch lightning in a bottle, it’s far more likely that you’ll need to commit to the long haul to achieve results.

5. The Law of Compounding
If you publish amazing, quality content and work to build your online audience of quality followers, they’ll share it with their own audiences on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, their own blogs and more.

This sharing and discussing of your content opens new entry points for search engines like Google to find it in keyword searches. Those entry points could grow to hundreds or thousands of more potential ways for people to find you online.

6. The Law of Influence
Spend time finding the online influencers in your market who have quality audiences and are likely to be interested in your products, services and business. Connect with those people and work to build relationships with them.

If you get on their radar as an authoritative, interesting source of useful information, they might share your content with their own followers, which could put you and your business in front of a huge new audience.

7. The Law of Value
If you spend all your time on the social Web directly promoting your products and services, people will stop listening. You must add value to the conversation. Focus less on conversions and more on creating amazing content and developing relationships with online influencers. In time, those people will become a powerful catalyst for word-of-mouth marketing for your business.

8. The Law of Acknowledgment
You wouldn’t ignore someone who reaches out to you in person so don’t ignore them online. Building relationships is one of the most important parts of social media marketing success, so always acknowledge every person who reaches out to you.

9. The Law of Accessibility
Don’t publish your content and then disappear. Be available to your audience. That means you need to consistently publish content and participate in conversations. Followers online can be fickle and they won’t hesitate to replace you if you disappear for weeks or months.

10. The Law of Reciprocity
You can’t expect others to share your content and talk about you if you don’t do the same for them. So, a portion of the time you spend on social media should be focused on sharing and talking about content published by others.