Enhancing your work through the strategic use of social media and other technology tools
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Powerpoint presented at the Region 5 RPTAC meeting. Denver, CO June 25, 2009
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Enhancing your work through the strategic use of social media and other technology tools
- 1. ENHANCING YOUR WORK THROUGH THE STRATEGIC USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA AND OTHER TECHNOLOGY TOOLS Stephen D. Luke, Ed.D. Director, National Dissemination Center for Children with Disabilities (NDC/NICHCY) Region 5 RPTAC Conference June 26, 2009
- 4. TA&D NETWORK 1. OVERVIEW OF OSEP TA&D
- 11. TACC OVERVIEW 2. OVERVIEW OF TACC
- 23. 3. OVERVIEW OF NDC/NICHCY
- 36. NATIONAL DISSEMINATION CENTER TA&D’s
- 39. NATIONAL DISSEMINATION CENTER 4. TECHNOLOGY TOOLS & ANALYTICS
- 59. NATIONAL DISSEMINATION CENTER Email Analytics
- 63. NATIONAL DISSEMINATION CENTER Social Media Analytics
- 90. THANK YOU! Stephen D. Luke, Ed.D. [email_address] www.nichcy.org www.facebook.com/nichcy www.twitter.com/DrNICHCY www.linkedin.com/stephenluke
Notas del editor
- Title Slide: National Dissemination Center for Children with Disabilities
- A Network of Technical Assistance and Dissemination Centers funded by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP)
- A bit of contextual reference. NDC/NICHCY is funded out of the Department of Education > Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services (OSERS) (circled in red here) > Office of Special Education Programs (seen on next slide)
- Here’s a schematic of OSERS, note that NDC is funded out of the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) and is part of their technical assistance and dissemination (TA&D) network.
- Here’s a schematic of OSERS, note that NDC is funded out of the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) and is part of their technical assistance and dissemination (TA&D) network.
- Here we’ll begin an overview of NDC activities…
- Here we’ll begin an overview of NDC activities…
- As the current director of NDC/NICHCY I am standing on the shoulders of a giant. I am very fortunate to continue to work with Suzanne – on both NICHCY and Suzanne’s new project funded out of the US Dept of Health & Human Services. The Family Support Center on Disabilities: Knowledge & Involvement Network (we call it KIN for short) offers a centralized resource on the full range of options available to individuals with disabilities and their families. http://familysupportclearinghouse.org/Pages/Home.aspx
- As the current director of NDC/NICHCY I am standing on the shoulders of a giant. I am very fortunate to continue to work with Suzanne – on both NICHCY and Suzanne’s new project funded out of the US Dept of Health & Human Services. The Family Support Center on Disabilities: Knowledge & Involvement Network (we call it KIN for short) offers a centralized resource on the full range of options available to individuals with disabilities and their families. http://familysupportclearinghouse.org/Pages/Home.aspx
- KIN has recently launched a the KIN Family Forums where you can participate in discussions addressing the full range of disability-related issues -- early intervention and education, employment, legislation and policy, different disabilities, quality family supports and programs, health and mental health, housing, transportation, recreation, and lots more. http://kinforums.org/family/
- First it probably makes sense to provide a quick overview of the National Dissemination’s Center’s 2 main priorities: Develop and disseminate information about children with disabilities and IDEA that will be readily accessible to a broad range of audiences. Provide leadership in the design and implementation of integrated, responsive, and effective information dissemination strategies. Activities associated with the first priority are really nothing new for our center as this is the type of work we have been doing for more than 25 years. Over that time we’ve learned a lot about effective dissemination and with our new project period, which began in October, we have been asked to share some of what we’ve learned. To be sure, we’ll also be consolidating and sharing the knowledge that is currently distributed across the TA&D network.
- NDC maintains a comprehensive website providing a full range of information on disabilities in infants, toddlers, children, and youth, IDEA, which is the law authorizing special education, No Child Left Behind (as it relates to children with disabilities), and research-based information on effective educational practices.
- New pubs!
- NDC’s monthly newsletter News You Can Use is crammed full of useful news and resources from around the TA&D Network and beyond. Each month you’ll find useful information for families, educators, administrators, and others interested in the education of children with disabilities.
- A prime NDC objective: establishing the collaborative use of evidence-based dissemination practices across the TA&D Network. NDC is currently working with 6 TA&D projects (including the Alliance) to pilot this work.
- Here’s a screen shot of the National Dissemination Center’s home page. You’ll notice that we have some topical categories, “Disabilities,” “Help Babies,” “Educate Children,” “Laws,’ etc down the left hand side of the page, and specific target audience sections “Families and Community,” “Early Intervention Providers,” “Schools and Administrators,” and “State Agencies” across the top. There are also links to read current news, sign-up to receive our electronic newsletter, find out more about the OSEP TA&D Network, etc.
- Remember the placemat? It’d take quite a while to browse through each site looking for information of interest to you (I know, I’ve tried!). One thing we’re really excited to share with everyone is a powerful new search function on the NICHCY web site…
- Our Search is a powerful and revolutionary new tool we’re rolling out in the new project period. From our search users are able to enter a keyword and our search engine will return results from projects across the TA&D network. To be clear, we’re not talking about products that individual centers are manually entering into a database, we’re talking their entire site’s content, web pages, PowerPoints, Word documents, Excel files, PDF’s etc. This essentially makes the National Dissemination Center’s Search Page the “Google” for TA&D! You can see in this screen shot a search for “parent” returns over 3,500 results. Note the “Content Source” section on the right hand side, here is an expandable list of centers across the TA&D Network that have information and resources related to parents. No longer do you have to make your way through the whole placemat, center by center by center. We bring it all to you from this central location. (Note: in order to expand the “Content Source” and other boxes on the right hand side of the page, you’ll need to be working from within Internet Explorer or Firefox with IE Tab enabled.)
- This effectively makes NICHCY a search engine for the TA&D network!
- If you’re only interested in seeing results from a specific project, you can click on the project name and our search will filter results to display only those results from that project’s web site. Here we’ve filtered results to show only RTI-related results from the PBIS site.
- Similarly, you may be interested in only seeing PowerPoints related to RTI. Easy, just click on the PowerPoint link and you’ll receive results from those centers that have PowerPoints related to RTI on their website. In this example you can see that there appear to be 42 PowerPoint presentations related to RTI from projects such as the PBIS Center, the Center on Instruction, the National High School Center, IDEA Partnership, the Alliance, etc.
- So how can we measure the effectiveness of this work? That’s where Web Analytics can help…
- And what, exactly, do we mean when we say “web analytics?” I find the following definition to be a useful one: “ Measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web site usage.” (from http://www.webanalyticsassociation.org/aboutus/)
- There are a number of tools, many of them freely available, designed to help you make sense of web site usage. All of those listed here, all offer free services except for Web Trends, which has been at this game from the beginning.
- As for the our center, we use Google Analytics. Like many of the other tools mentioned in the previous slide, you’re required to place a snippet of code on each of the pages you’re interested in tracking (the code will not show up as visible to users of your site). Here’s a shot of the main dashboard which provides a quick snapshot of site statistics.
- Google Analytics offers a number of cool features. One of my favorites is their map view of user activity. Here’s a snapshot of usage of www.nichcy.org from around the world. These numbers reflect visits to our site from October 1, 2008 – March 17, 2009. As you mouse over each country you’ll see usage statistics for each.
- Another view allows you to see data at the city level.
- Once you click on a country, you’ll see an additional level of data. In this case, clicking on the United States reveals a map where you can obtain statistics on a state-by-state level. This may be of particular interest to projects working regionally, or with specific states. Such a snapshot could reveal where outreach is working well, or where additional efforts may be needed.
- A click down to the state level provides a picture of user activity within a given state. In this case, we see the high volume of visits from New York City, as well as visits from other cities and towns across the state, including my own home town of Utica (where many of these hits are no doubt coming from family members who are trying to figure out what it is exactly that I do for a living.
- Finally, one can click down to the city level to catch a snapshot of activity. In this case we can see that activity from within NYC has been trending upward since the beginning of the project period.
- Another tool worth a look is the “Keyword” feature which compiles a ranked list of keywords users have entered into search engines like Google and Yahoo and ultimately resulted on a visit to your site. In this case you can see that there were over 97,000 different keywords used to access www.nichcy.org with the most popular being “nichcy,” “nichy,” “children with disabilities,” some permutations of “national dissemination center,” and “national information center for children with disabilities,” “emotional disturbance,” & “intellectual disabilities.” If your site has Search functionality you can also use Google Analytics to similarly track compile a list of terms visitors search for once they are on your site. Taken together, this information can serve as an informative needs analysis.
- With Google Analytics’ “Overlay” feature you can see exactly where visitors are clicking on each and every page. Here we have our home page and we note that 8.7%, or a total of 11,787 clicks between October 1, 2008 and March 17, 2009, have been on “Disabilities.”
- Then, once browsing on the “Disabilities” page one can see the most frequently clicked link is “Specific Disabilities” which receives 39% of the clicks. Such information can prove quite informative when considering site architectural design. It can also reveal certain “weak links” in your site that may need to be bolstered by repositioning or featuring elsewhere.
- Google Analytics’ “Top Content” Feature ranks your pages in order of most frequently visited or viewed. This information can be informative across a number of levels. For example, you may choose to feature vital content on your site’s most popular pages.
- With a bit of tweaking to the Google Analytics code, we can leverage the tool to give us a sense of how many times visitors click on PDF’s, PPT’s, Word Documents, etc. Here we can see that visitors viewed 1,483 different PDF’s from across the TA&D Network a total of 24,995 times in the time period from December 9, 2008 to March 17, 2009.
- We can also use Google Analytics to provide insight into how well we are doing in raising the visibility of the TA&D Network and pointing visitors to sites across the network. The same snippet of code that is used to track document downloads can also be leveraged to track the number of times visitors clicked off our site to visit other TA&D sites. In the example above we can search for “nectac.org” to find that visitors to our website were sent to 409 different pages on the NECTAC site a total of 2,339 times in the period from December 9, 2008 to March 17, 2009.
- All totaled from December 9, 2008 – March 17, 2009, visitors to nichcy.org have been referred to over 2,000 different pages across the TA&D Network a total of 10,155 times.
- So, it’s one thing to sit there and count web visits and pageviews and the like, but if you’re strategic in your approach, you can also use Google Analytics to drill down deeper into your site content and obtain clear and detailed information about your site’s utility. In our case, every content page on our site has an associated print-friendly page that visitors can invoke by clicking on the “Print This Page” link. Having the ability to count the number of times users load a “Print-Friendly” page will provide important insight into the quality, relevance, and usefulness of the page content. Note that every print-friendly page on our site ends with the string “PrintMode=true” – we can plug this string into Google Analytics to give a rough approximation of how many times users have printed content from our website.
- Here we can use Google Analytics to search specifically for pages containing “PrintMode=true.” Results indicate that between October 1. 2008 – March 17, 2009 922 pages on our site were viewed (and most likely printed) a total of 21,788 times. (Note that it is not possible to count the number of times users print a non-print-friendly page so using this technique actually underestimates the total number but still provides some insight.)
- In addition to tracking the use of “print-friendly” pages we use additional tools to help us better understand how our site visitors value our content. Two tools that are easily to implement are user feedback ratings and social sharing tools. Feedback ratings allow visitors to rate your content which can tell you what content is really hitting the mark with users and what content really isn’t. Providing visitors with an opportunity to leave a comment with their ratings not only gives you the chance to capture favorable comments from visitors who are pleased, but also supplies unsatisfied visitors with an efficient mechanism to let you know why they may not have rated a page very highly. For example, perhaps they had difficulty locating information they were hoping to find. If the information did indeed exist on your site, then this sends a message that you may need to make it more prominent or accessible. If the information does not exist on your site, such feedback, when taken together with other feedback, may suggest that you include it. Social sharing tools, like print-friendly pages, provide an additional layer of information over raw usage metrics. In our case we use a tool that allows visitors to share content they have deemed valuable with others. In fact, the tool we use (available from sharethis.com) allows users to share content in a variety of ways including: Sharing via popular social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious Posting directly to their blog or to Twitter Sending a link via email, instant message, and even text. The ShareThis service allows you to create an account where you can login to see which of your pages have been shared, how many times they’ve been shared, and how they’ve been shared. Social sharing has the added advantage of making your content portable. With such tools you also effectively enable faithful and satisfied users to conduct outreach on your behalf, spreading news of your site and content to friends and colleagues. And any peek inside an intro marketing book will tell you that word-of-mouth marketing is among the most valuable! We’ll cover social media more in a bit, but first….
- A list of additional resources relating to web analytics.
- Email analytics.
- Here’s a screenshot of the National Dissemination Center’s electronic newsletter we call “News You Can Use.”
- Just as in Web Analytics, there are a variety of tools, some commercial, some freely available, for your project to manage and track newsletter use. In our case we use the commercial solution Constant Contact. Prior to using this tool we tried to manage our newsletter subscriptions in house and over time, as the number of subscribers grew, it became more and more difficult for us to manage effectively. The beauty of Constant Contact and these other mailing list tools is that they manage your subscribers for you, allowing users to subscribe and update subscription information themselves as well as unsubscribe if they no longer wish to receive your transmissions. These systems also do a nice job of alerting you when messages bounce back to you (e.g.; when an email address is no longer valid for example) which can be a major headache when trying to manage subscriptions manually. Most of these services allow for the easy creation of either html or plain newsletters, complete with templates that you can modify to give you a personalized look.
- Most of the tools listed also generate some useful analytics including the number of subscribers who were sent a mailing (our subscriber list is at 8,600 subscribers and growing), the number who actually opened the message, and of those how many actually clicked on a link. Here we have a screen shot that includes some a partial list of links included in a recent issue of “News You Can Use.” You can see that we like to pass along information and resources form our own site as well as sites across the TA&D Network and beyond. Taking a look at user activity provides a nice snapshot for us as to the type of content that is of interest to our target audiences. It is also possible with some of these tools to do a targeted follow-up via integrated survey tools. For example, if we find that subscribers have clicked on a link to a particular product, (e.g.; “IDEA Training Curriculum”) we can follow-up with those subscribers directly with a survey.
- Social Media Analytics is a young but rapidly emerging field.
- What do we mean when we say “social media?” Well, many people can relate to viewing videos on various blogs and websites. In many cases (if not most) the video being viewed is an “embedded” video whose root origin is actually at YouTube or other video sharing site. Note here, I’ve included a couple easy-to-use tools to help you caption videos for the purpose of making them accessible to those with visual impairments.
- For example, here’s a video on Early Recognition of Child Development Problems developed by CDC which they posted to YouTube. We determined that the video would be of value to members of our target audience so we grabbed the code provided right here on the page and in turn…
- … posted to our Facebook page and our Twitter account (you can also see the video embedded on CDC’s own page). Think about the implications of this for a second…we’ve become a cog in CDC’s dissemination of this content. They’ve not asked us to. We simply deemed the content valuable for our users, and because it is in a form that makes it portable, we can grab it and share it with them. When you hear people speaking of social media or Web 2.0, this is part of whet they are talking about – social sharing and portability of web content. No longer do users even need to know about your website to view your content! And talk about leveraging resources, we didn’t have to invest time and resources into producing a similar video…
- In case you might be doubting the potential of social media note the case here of a video originally designed for and presented to a high school faculty meeting in Centennial, CO….
- So how to measure such use? If you have a YouTube account you can use YouTube’s “Insight” feature to help with this, but I recommend checking out TubeMogul.com which will help you upload videos to a variety of popular video-sharing sites, including YouTube, and then help you track viewing and sharing behavior across the internet.
- Another way to apply “portability” to your content is to deliver information in the form of RSS feeds. You’ve probably all noticed this seemingly ubiquitous orange symbol out there on the internet. As mentioned here it’s best used for frequently updated content such as news and blog entries.
- A clever and informative video from commoncraft explaining “RSS in Plain English.”
- By way of illustration, here’s an example of news content that we publish on our site that users are also able to subscribe to via RSS. There are many types of readers individuals can use including email applications such as Outlook, browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox, as well as web-based services users can customize receive feeds of their choosing. In this example we see that the news content can be read in personalized views of Google and Yahoo news aggregators.
- The measurement of RSS is an emerging science, but here are several tools and resources to help you measure their reach and effectiveness.
- Blogging has emerged as yet another popular tool that leverages the ability of content to be both social and portable. Blogging takes a static web page and transforms it into content that is much more engaging in that readers are typically able to provide comments, sharing additional information, resources, and points of view. Readers also have the option of coming to your page to read your blog, or subscribing to it via RSS to receive it where they prefer, including embedding it in their own website.
- Social bookmarking provides another measure of how useful your users find your content. Unlike using a traditional browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox which save “Favorites” or “Bookmarks” to your own individual browser, social bookmarking sites like those mentioned here allow you to save your bookmarks their online service. This has the immediate practical value of providing you access to your bookmarks on any computer with internet access. It also allows you to tag the content in whatever way that makes sense to you and “share” your bookmarks with others who also use the service.
- You might do the equivalent of “Googling” yourself to assess your relative presence in the social bookmarking scene…
- You can also perform a topic-specific search, not only to assess your reputation in such a space, but also to get a sense of other sites people are finding useful. Here we searched by the tag “special_education” to see what came up….
- Here a search for “rti” returns some familiar results, and perhaps others not so familiar. One might care to take a look at those sites that have high numbers of bookmarks to see what type of information is available as well as how it is presented. So one can use social bookmarking sites as another tool for discovery. Certainly Google has its value in returning pertinent information, but with social bookmarking you can directly leverage the wisdom of the crowd to guide you to helpful information.
- Here a search for “rti” returns some familiar results, and perhaps others not so familiar. One might care to take a look at those sites that have high numbers of bookmarks to see what type of information is available as well as how it is presented. So one can use social bookmarking sites as another tool for discovery. Certainly Google has its value in returning pertinent information, but with social bookmarking you can directly leverage the wisdom of the crowd to guide you to helpful information.
- One can’t speak of social media without referencing social networks, particularly two social networks, Facebook and Twitter which have both experienced tremendous growth over the past year. While Facebook stands as the world’s most popular social network, Twitter’s rate of growth outpaces that of any other. Facebook, in fact, is the 7 th most popular destination in the web behind Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, Wikipedia and eBay. A recent report from March 2009 shows that Twitter, Ning, and Facebook with the fastest rate of growth over the last year.
- One Web 2.0 mantra to note: “Live where your users live.” True people are still visiting websites, and using Google to find information of interest, but considering the staggering popularity of these social networking sites, it may makes sense to establish a presence on each. The details of how to do so and engage users are beyond the scope of this presentation, but our center will be providing some of the how-to’s in the near future. In this slide we see the National Dissemination Center’s Facebook page. According to Google Analytics, can receive upwards of 14,000 pageviews/day. So we know there are many, many people benefitting from the long hours we put in…but it’s something else altogether to see the smiling faces of those who have, of their own volition, chosen to become fans of our page on Facebook.
- Facebook also provides insights along a number of dimensions. In this case we are viewing the growth in the number of “fans” of our Facebook page. You’ll note that we first put up a page back in November of 2008 but didn’t promote it at all until just last month. Still, you’ll notice that there were those who found our page, either via Facebook’s Search or an external Search engine such as Google. We first publicized it our February newsletter, mentioned it again in March, and posted a link on our website earlier this month.
- Finally we arrive at Twitter. Again, the details on how and why one might leverage this network to disseminate and engage users is beyond the scope of this presentation, but it should be noted that we currently see a lot of opportunity to make meaningful use of this platform.
- The metrics for analyzing and assessing use are, like metrics for other social media, are still emerging. Bit if you’ve already dipped your toe into Twitter’s waters, or are considering it, here are a few places to begin…
- The metrics for analyzing and assessing use are, like metrics for other social media, are still emerging. Bit if you’ve already dipped your toe into Twitter’s waters, or are considering it, here are a few places to begin…
- NDC Staff.
- TA&D is leveraging the social networking platform Ning to facilitate communication and community building across the TA&D Network.
- Slideboom.com and slideshare.com are two popular presentation-sharing sites that allow you to upload presentations that can be embedded across the internet just like YouTube videos. In fact you can find this ppt there, download it, and even copy and paste code to embed it on your own site!
- Here’s the powerpoint embedded on NICHCY’s site…
- Thank you!!