I am alway interested how various organizations are using online videos and tutorials. This one struck me as a particularly great idea. California schools, in conjunction with Common Craft Productions, put together this video to teach their communities how funding is structured for schools and what the community voice can do to make a difference.
After watching it, I could not help but think that this is a great idea for public libraries to use when lobbying for better funds. Why shouldn’t we be teaching our communities how to have a voice for the public library? Watch this short video and see how many ideas you come up with. How could you do something similar? What messages would you like for your community to hear and see?
…while a majority of parents with online teens still believe the internet is a beneficial factor in their children’s lives, the number of parents who see the internet as a good thing for their children has declined since 2004.
At the same time, there has not been a corresponding increase in the percentage of parents who think the internet has been a bad thing for their children. Instead, more parents are neutral about the internet’s impact, saying it has not had an effect on their child one way or the other. Read the entire story.
Question: Internet….Beneficial? Bad thing? No effect? All of the above?
I’m going with A and B. It’s hard to argue that the Internet has NO benefit to kids. It’s given access to a variety of new information sources. It’s given them the ability to connect socially with people all over the world. Has it also been a bad thing? Yes. It’s given predators a whole new avenue for finding and contacting young people. It’s too easy to get lost in the mass of information and never find what you’re looking for, and yes, it’s very easy to end up looking at the screen and ignoring everything else, including friends and family and work. The group that think there’s no effect one way or another….well, I just don’t know what they’re thinking.
PRWeb offers a new, free and (unfortunately, it was discovered that it is not free to post to it but free to for the viewer only - bummer, this could have been a neat tool) easy-to-use, service for organizations to increase the visibility of their news, improve their search engine rankings and drive traffic to their Web site. Check out this quick video and demonstration by the Common Craft Show to see how you could be boosting the press at your library/community events and services.
See, a “website” is not going to get people to come TO, hang out AT and tell their friends ABOUT anything. It needs to be MUCH more than just information.
It needs to be interactive. It needs to be participative. It needs to be updated regularly.
It needs to be THEE source, THEE go-to-place, the El Dorado, The Mecca … for a certain kind of people who want a certain kind of thing.That’s a destination.
Here’s a neat site I stumbled into this morning….The Department of Health and Human Services has a cool online tool to create a family health history that you can take for consultations with your health care provider. It’s easy to add information, and believe it or not, it asks for very limited information that could be used to identify you directly.
By default, it tracks heart disease, diabetes, and several cancers, but you can add diseases as well. You’ll see that I’ve added GERD and esophageal cancer in my chart because we’ve seen them more than once in my family.
As you build your health resources, this looks like a good one to add to the list.
