Helping Organizations to Find Solutions for Digital Learning

Recently we have heard a number of disheartening stories of schools of all sorts – from academic to trades to athletic to creative – that are considering closing as a result over uncertainty over how long the doors to their physical locations will be closed as we work to flatten the curve of the spread of COVID-19.

We can help your organization to transition into an online learning environment for both the short term and long term (if that is so desired).

What this could involve is:

  • finding and setting up the right digital learning solutions for your organization,
  • training your instructors in building and teaching their courses online,
  • helping your instructor’s get their courses online, and
  • fine tuning instructor’s online courses and the organization’s online classroom environment in the long term.

Click through the slide deck below to learn more about our experience and how we can work with you to create digital learning solutions for your organization.

Please reach out, if we can be of help to you.

The Gift of Learning : Storytelling and Digital Media Courses

With it being that time of year where many people are purchasing gifts, I’ve been pondering spending and what is important to me. It had me thinking of that old proverb …

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.

Photographer: Cristian Palmer
Photographed by Cristian Palmer, care of Unsplash.

There is no greater gift than learning a skill that helps you to pursue your passions. This is the reason why teaching is an important part of our work, that our team values.

The Importance of Teaching to Our Team

When I started speaking in 2008 about bridging the worlds of media, interactive and cross-platform storytelling, and digital media, it occurred to me that while inspiring people through my talks was great and all, to truly help people to take action, they needed a course giving them guidance and support while they build and craft their storyworlds.

Interactive Storytelling
Erica Hargreave and Caitlin Burns on a Panel on Convergent Storytelling.
Photographer: Liz Kearsley

A year later, after pitching the local post secondary schools, my first post-secondary school courses launched at BCIT and Capilano University. Since then my team and I have also built courses and workshops and taught community, undergraduate and graduate courses at Ryerson University, Humber College, and NVIT. In addition, we’ve helped build new programs and revise old programs. It has both been an honour to teach and share with others, and fulfills a passion of ours. We love teaching.

Creating Our Course Online

In 2011, after speaking in Egypt, we recognized that to truly make a difference to people that could most benefit from our courses, we needed them to be available online.

Erica Hargreave speaking on ‘Real Time’ Storytelling at the UNWTO Conference on Working with Media in Challenging Times in Marsa Alam, Egypt.

Thanks to BCIT and our colleague Kevin Ribble, they were by 2013. This has also allowed Lori Yearwood to help build and teach those courses with me.

2020 Courses at BCIT

I am happy to share that as we move into 2020, we now have 2 online post-secondary credited courses and 2 intensive community courses offered through BCIT’s Broadcast Media and Communications Part Time Studies. All of our courses are project based, in which our students come out of them having built or built upon projects of their own that they are crafting for their future endeavours.

For those of you who are looking to give yourself and someone in your life the gift of learning this year, these are a few of the courses that we will be teaching in 2020:

Photographed by Ian Schneider, care of Unsplash.

More Coming on StoryToGo

Also keep your eyes peeled on StoryToGo, our contemporary media community as we’ve long been talking about offering mini online courses and tailored online and blended courses for organizations there. This is something that you will see launch in 2020 with more course offerings from us and our rich group of storytelling friends and colleagues.

If you have a course that you would love to see offered through StoryToGo, please let us know in the comments, and if you wish us to tailor create a course for your organization, please send us an email.

Photographed by by Danielle Macinnes, care of Unsplash.

Raising a glass of whatever your preferred beverage to a happy and rewarding new year and new decade, rich in learning!


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Storytelling and Digital Media Courses from BCIT

Vidme – How to Get Started and Verified

As storytellers and storyworld strategists, we keep our eyes and ears open for newer storytelling tools, platforms, and social networks on the rise. A recent one that has got us quite excited is Vidme.

Basically Vidme is a social networking platform for hosting your video content, as well as watching and engaging with the content of others – much like YouTube and Vimeo. It’s defining characteristics are that it also includes elements of Reddit and Twitch in it’s design. By sharing user engagement history, as well upvotes on both user videos and comments, it encourages users to engage with one another.  Unlike Reddit, however, there is no down voting of content, and as such it is fostering a positive and supportive community of content creators.

Currently, Vidme is getting the attention of many newer video content creators, as a great platform to grow on and share their video content.  After spending the last couple of weeks experimenting on the platform and getting to know the community, we’d have to agree.  This is a social networking and video hosting platform with a lot of potential. Also as a newer video content creator on Vidme there is a lot of opportunity to get noticed. Case in point, if you look at the photo below, that is one of our videos trending on Vidme in just our second week on the platform.


Guide to Getting Started and Verified on Vidme

For those of you interested in learning more about Vidme and how to be successful with your Vidme channel, here is our Guide to Getting Started and Verified on Vidme:

To review my 3 main tips were to:

 

  • Engage, Engage, Engage!!!

Engagement is what we should be doing on all our social media platforms as that is after all what ‘social’ media was designed for, but all too often we neglect to do this and just use our social media feeds to broadcast.  Vidme has been designed to remind people of the importance of engagement and as such many users (ourselves included) are discovering the magic that happens on social media when you become a part of an engaged, supportive community.

  • Wait to Apply for Verification Until You Check-Off Everything on the Verification Checklist.

Golden Goose, care of DonkeyHotey.

Image care of DonkeyHotey.

On Vidme the golden goose for many Vidme content creators is getting their channel verified. Why? As it gives their channel additional privileges, including the possibility of showing up under the trending videos, being able to monetize their channel, and adding their channel to different categories.

To get verified you need to: gain 50 followers, add an avatar and cover image to your channel, upload one video of your own, and adhere to the community rules. The process to doing this, helps to get you exploring, engaging and building a community on Vidme, which is a very good thing.

However, as is too often the case, we carry ego with us, thinking that rules don’t apply to us, so many people try to apply for verification early, before they have met the rules.  This usually results in two things: 1) you are turned down and feel resentful, or 2) you get verified (usually as you have really great quality video content or have a big audience on YouTube) and the community resents you for jumping the cue. In other words: wait to apply for verification, until you have checked off everything on the verification checklist.  If you do what I have suggested in the video above, it won’t take you that long and you will be better off for it.

To help you get started, review the Verification Page and visit the Vidme FAQs.

  • Participate in the Vidme Subreddits – both official and unofficial.

Whether you have had good or bad experiences with Reddit in the past, the Vidme official and unofficial subreddits are positive spaces to engage with other Vidme content creators and share content on Vidme.  A few subreddits I recommend checking out are the official Vidme subreddit, Vidmeos for sharing your Vidme videos, and Vidmelove for connecting with positive Vidme creators and content.

Just remember: read and follow the rules of the respective subreddits, and follow the Reddit 10% Rule. For those unaware, the Reddit 10% Rule is that for every 1 thing of your own that you share, you comment and engage with 10 other people’s posts on Reddit.

Advice from other Vidme content creators:

Having discovered the #vidmelove community, thanks to taking the time to explore Vidme and  to engaging with other Vidme content creators on both Vidme and Reddit, I asked the #Vidmelove community for their advice on getting started on Vidme.

Here is some excellent advice from @MutantPixel, @SpeedyGaming and @LinktheInformer in the #vidmelove community:

  • Use #Hashtags.

Hashtags work and are used on Vidme as a way of cataloging and searching for content on Vidme. To catalogue your content with hashtags on Vidme, simply add the appropriate hashtags to the description below your video.

  • Steer Clear of the Drama.

Vidme is a newer platform that is gaining a fair bit of attention at the moment.  As such, Vidme is working on defining itself and the direction it wishes to take, as is the community using Vidme. This attracts a certain amount of unnecessary drama.  My advice?  Avoid this and don’t fuel it.  Life has enough real problems, without creating manufactured drama.

  • Share Your Vidmeos (aka Vidme Videos) on Other Social Networking Platforms.

While engaging on other social media platforms, like Twitter, Facebook, Stumbleupon, Pinterest, Tumblr, Google+ … etc share links to your vidmeos in a engaging and meaningful manner, so that you aren’t simply broadcasting and spamming your audience.  If unsure if you are sharing in a meaningful and engaging manner, look at your social media feed and answer these questions:

  1. Do you provide an interesting / engaging teaser to the vidmeo, before sharing the vidmeo link?  Your answer should be ‘yes’ here.  If it’s not, then it is time you start doing this.
  2. Are all your posts on your feed sharing vidmeos and other posts that lead people to content you have created?  Hopefully your answer is ‘no’ here. If it is ‘yes’, then you are likely spamming your audience and might be looking a little self involved.

Be sure to checkout Trinding.com, as a new social networking site, designed specifically to share links to your online video content.

Another great tip, shared with me by @Hoshi-Hana is to create content that you are passionate about. Don’t create something just because others are doing it or you think it might be popular.  To have staying power and be invested in creating new video content long term, you need to like what you are doing.


Pen and Paper, care of Dinuraj K.

Photo care of Dinuraj K.

Other Vidme Tips?

If you have other tips to being successful on Vidme, we’d love to hear them in the comments below.

Are You On Vidme?

If you are on Vidme, we’d love to come check out your channel. Please add a link to it in the comments below.


More Tutorials

For more in-depth tutorials and coaching from our team, sign-up for one of our courses at BCIT, or book us for a custom designed course or workshop of your own. You can find the details at the links below:

iMovie Tutorial: How to Rotate a Video

On more than one occasion, I have been so excited to capture greatness on video, only to discover upon playback, that I have held my phone improperly and recorded an upside down or sideways video! This makes the video virtually useless for sharing ~ or so I thought, until figured out how to fix it. In case this has happened to any of you, or should it happen in your future, I thought I’d share an iMovie tutorial on how to rotate a video.

I have been able to do some basic editing to videos right on my phone within the iMovie App, however the option to crop or rotate does not exist that I have been able to find. Determined to fix my most recent upside down video, I uploaded it to my computer and imported it into iMovie there.

upside down video

As you can see, everyone on my subway ride is hanging from the ceiling. That would have been cool if this was an amusement park ride, but instead I had some editing to do. Here’s how I did it…

iMovie Tutorial

Once you have imported your video in iMovie and have started a new project with it, click on the clip you need to adjust and then from the window menu select Cropping, Ken Burns and Rotation.

editing in iMovie

Click on the arrow icon in the direction you want your clip to flip. Each click will rotate your clip a 1/4 turn. Sometimes your video is sideways and not all the way upside down so the 1/4 turn option is great.

break dance on the subway

Voila! Now it is only the talented subway dancer I captured who is upside down. Once your video is right side up, simply select ‘Done’ and return to editing or finish your video.

I hope you have found this iMovie tutorial to be a welcome relief for those pesky times you simply hold your phone the wrong way and have an upside down world to deal with! Here is my edited video of a breakdance on the subway in its entirety for you to enjoy.