What is Digitally Supported Literacy?

Literacy and numeracy is a big problem in New Zealand, with 1 in 5 having low functionaly literacy. One of our clients, Adult Learning Support, is involved in helping adults who struggle with their reading, writing, spelling and maths.

We are working with them to create electronic versions of short stories that have embedded support for struggling readers. These take the form of videos with the text of the story on screen, narration by Nelson's Matt Lawrey, and visual cues to help them find the line they should be reading and "hoops", like slurs in music to help them read words in chunkys which is a skill developed by good readers.

The Work is being funded by AKO Aotearoa and will be released with the creative commons licence so that others can build on the work we have done.

This is an extract from an interview with Michael Stelzner, social media expert and ReelSEO's Grant Crowther. Michael also shared some exclusive Facebook video tactics and business success stories and gives 10 reasons you should definitely consider Facebook as part of your online marketing mix.

1. Audience – Facebook is the 2nd largest trafficked website, with over 500 million active users.
2. Referrals – Facebook is the 2nd largest referral source for video.
3. Mobile – 150 million active users take Facebook with them everywhere they go.
4. Time – Many people spend a lot more time on Facebook than on Google
5. Versatility – Many video formats are supported for uploading
6. Length – Facebook allows up to 20 minutes, 5 minutes more than YouTube
7. Connectivity – A wide range of sharing features and engagement opportunities. While Facebook doesn't let you share it's content onto other social networks (like YouTube and Twitter), because of its large member base, you will certainly have many more connections from the onset that may lead to better sharing potential.
8. Search Engine Visibility – Facebook videos are visible within Google Search.
9. SMO (Social Media Optimization) – Excellent keyword encoding (aka, "tagging") capabilities.
10. Conversions – Hot triggers around the video for taking an intended action.

Read the full article at ReelSEO

This article is a great reminder about what to think about when recording video to go online on Youtube or on your own website. It's written by Mitch Joel, who is the president of Twist Image, a digital marketing agency. And it's written—by the author's own admission—by a guy that doesn't do much video production. But he watches plenty.

Things to think about are:

• Lighting - don't need to spend lots, just be creative
• Audio - needs to be good
• Don't Fidgeting
• Keep Eye Contact
• Rehearsal before you record
• I'll add one of my own - if you don't have a tripod to keep the camera steady, sit it on a table, if you're outside sit it on a fence post or somethng so it doens't move all the time!

Check out the Joel's full article Do's and Don'ts for OnlineVideo Production

We have quite a few new Joomla and WordPress tutorials online now. They are available via our our client pages. To access them you will need a username and password. Please contact us if you haven't received one yet. Most of the tutorials on how to use the Joomla editor are now up, how to create a Joomla menu item, how to upload images in Joomla are now compelete. Using the WordPress editor and a tutorial about how and where to use keywords effectively in WordPress are also online.

Coming soon are tutorials for uploading images in WordPress.

If there are special ones that you would like to see up there let us know and we will see what we can do.

If you are not currently a client and would like to access the Joomla tutorials and the WordPress tutorials online please contact us and we may be able to come to an arrangement.