RebelMouse rediscovered (and other social media tools)

It’s times like this that I am reminded how cool Twitter can be.  Social media is a huge feature of my day to day activity. Twitter provides me with up to date information, links, new contacts and ideas. For example:

@fionajharvey Also anyone who can help with #rebelmouse or #Storify? Thanks.

— Sara Demain (@SaraDemain) January 18, 2014

Thanks to Sara, I was reminded about Rebelmouse. I looked at RebelMouse a while ago, but didn’t do much with it (apart from have a play) I have focussed more on Storify (which we are now looking to use for teaching) and I’ve been using Scoop.it which I have found to be incredibly useful for my own research into MOOCs. But RebelMouse is fun, and pulls together all the social media into one place to produce a kind of magazine style presentation of all your activity. I can see how this could be useful, to save time if nothing else, it can bring your website to life and allow all those posts on other platforms to bring together your area of expertise (that’s if you have been using social media as a curation tool, which I sort of do).  Thanks for that Sara, I’ll delve a bit deeper into Rebelmouse and try it out with the other social media accounts I manage.

For anyone saying it’s a waste of time, you just don’t follow the right people. One day, I’ll blog about some of the cool people in my networks but today, I thought I’d just share this little interaction.

For the curious, I’ve added a short summary of the tools mentioned above (and Evernote). 

 

 

This is a fabulous tool for pulling together web-based links into one place, in a visual way. I started using this when I established my Twitter network so that it provide me with links to resources, people and ideas.  The problem was, Twitter moves so fast, I was getting far more links and resources than I could handle.  I was adding them to the usual places, Bookmarking (Chrome, Mozilla), Favourites (IE) and I had been using Delicious which was useful because I could share with groups (so people on a course for example).  The problem was remembering what they were about, just seeing a text link didn’t prompt me to remember why I had saved it and sometimes, even my description wasn’t enough. Then Scoop.it came along, provided me with visual links, I could tag them and annotate them. Why is this any better? I am forced to review the page before I post it, I can then write a small review of what it is about and why its useful and then tag it according to a defined set of tags (like codes) so I’m actually able to use it as a kind of mini pre-thematic analysis.  Saved me a heap of time on my dissertation!

Other cool things about Scoop.it are that it allows you to follow other people, see other people based on categories and you learn to follow those who have taken the time to review the site before the post under a category.  It’s like a quality control filter.  Use it like a search engine and its even better.  I didn’t mention if you set it up with the right key words, they suggest sources for you to review.  Love it.

 

 

 

Pulls social media content into one place to create a narrative. You then can create ‘stories’ around topics, add in your own headings and text so that your perspective can be shared. Because it uses # (hashtags) I’ve used this to capture Tweetchats, workshops and we also show the Digichamps how to use it for live events.  I first saw it used by The Whitehouse and now we have academics using it for feedback and teaching.

 

Grabs all your networks to one place and produce a visual magazine style production of your activity on the networks you have provided access to. This is useful if you have taken care to use the social media in a strategic way.  So I tend to use social media to share content with others about educational technology ideas or tools.  If I see something interesting I’ll share.  Obviously, some of my content isn’t related to that (makes me human), so I can edit those bits out of my Rebelmouse ‘magazine’ but what I thought was cool about this was, that it demonstrated that I was actually sharing quite a lot of interesting stuff, and to top it all off, I can use a WordPress plugin to produce a page on my own blog.  Think I’ll give it a try!

Wonderful app for productivity (as they call it) provides you with a tool for note taking, has audio recorder, photos, links etc and syncs with anything else you have it on. So, the example I always mention is that when I am out and about demonstrating or discussing plans for world domination, using my iPad for example,  I know that when I go back to my office and sit down at my desk, all my notes and associated media are there, filed away under using the Calendar to provide the title of the note.  Very very useful.  It also syncs with Outlook so that I can clip emails that are of interest (I use this to collate emails thematically around topics – MOOCs and iPads have been a hot topic on mailing lists and I never know when I need to refer to them).