Google Places
We added our school to Google Maps a little while ago using their Places feature as it seemed like a good way to help people find us. You can register your school as a place on maps by visiting this link.
Adding your details is very easy, and at the end of the process they ask you to verify who you are. We did this by postcard- they sent a card to us, we proved we got it, all good. In addition to basic details you can also add web links, photos, youtube videos, pretty much any other data you think is relevant.
Google Places also has a nice admin interface that runs behind it. I can keep track of how many people have searched for us, how many searched for related terms and got us, and what they did once they found the listing. For example, I know that in the last month nearly 7000 users saw us in a local search, and of that number 4000 then clicked on to visit our website. Interesting stuff, and justifies being on there I think.
Ah, and it’s free.
Evernote for iPad
We have some iPads in school now… A set of about half a dozen out to members of our new techs school improvement group for trials up until Christmas. I’ll post some first impressions in a week or so once we’ve had a bit more of a chance to play, but I wanted to write about Evernote today.
Evernote has been part of my workflow for a little while now, and it is the first iPad app that I really find genuinely useful. Open up the iPad in a meeting, start a new note and I take down the key points I need. I’ve also discovered the iPad version has a nice little record button at the top so I can take the audio of important sections to refer back to later. All works beautifully, and is simple enough that it doesn’t interupt the flow of what I should be doing.
What is great about Evernote is what it does after I’ve finished the meeting. I hit the save button and don’t think about it again, but in the background it syncs it back to their servers and out to all of my other devices that also run the app. If I go back to the office and open up Evernote on my computer the notes are already there, same at home if I need to quickly refer to something. The iPhone app syncs as well so when I’m trying to quickly find that random one-liner I wrote down when out and about it is all there too.
If that’s not enough to convince you I’ve mentioned the text recognition on here before but it is worth saying again. Take a photo of a page of text on Evernote for iPhone and you can search the actual written content in Evernote. Cool.
Google Moderator
We installed Google Moderator into our Google Apps setup this morning to try a few things out ready for September. Google Moderator is a tool for collecting the opinions of a group, their tagline is ‘helping the world find the best input from an audience of any size’. It’s something we have been talking about ever since we saw mystarbucksidea.com, knew we wanted to try something similar with our stakeholders but hadn’t got a tool to do it.
Moderator is also available for non Google Apps users, just head over to google.com/moderator to start your own. The only difference as far as I can tell at this stage is the apps version creates closed pages, our questions/suggestions are only visible to users on our domain. Sure making them public is a setting that will appear as the tool moves through the beta stages, but at the moment if you want to do this you have to do it on google.com.
How it works is really straightforward. You create yourself a question that you want to ask your users and it allows users to upload suggestions to answer it. Users can then vote on each others ideas, it tracks the most popular. You can also respond to suggestions, to let people know which ideas you are engaging with and why.
From September we’re going to try some simple small things. For example, we are currently redesigning our media server setup (Wildern TV) so will open up new feature ideas to the community. We also want to try the bigger Starbucks style projects to really start to engage with our community. Coming first will be a myWildernIdea(?!) for our community arts venue, and following that a similar setup to take contributions for staff and students. We want to start at this scale to track what kind of content is coming in, and make sure we have systems in place to effectively respond and action the ideas that come in. If this goes well we hope myWildernIdea(….) will open up to our parents and the community as a whole later in the year.
Image source- suggestion box by hashmil on Flickr
Recent Comments