Tag Archives: social networks

Treasure kids’ artwork with Artkive and Art My Kid Made

For our last bit of visual fun online, let’s look at two apps that take real-world visual art and turn it into a digital treasure.

What Is It?

ArtKive app homepageArt My Kid Made and Artkive are apps for iPhone or iPad (Android coming soon) that let you easily take a picture of a child’s artwork, add information about it, and share it with friends and family. Art moves easily from the refrigerator to the world!

How Does It Work?

Both apps work the same way:

  1. Download the app and create an account for a child
  2. Use your iPhone or iPad to take a picture of the child’s art
  3. Add the child’s name, age/grade, the date created, a title, and any additional information
  4. Save the image to the app’s cloud storage, easily accessible from anywhere in the world
  5. Share the art via email (ArtKive) or Facebook, Twitter, & Evernote (Art My Kid Made)

Screenshots of Art My Kid Made appThere are differences, though. Art My Kid Made instantly shares images to Facebook, Twitter, or Evernote, as well as uploading to its own web page. It also has a simple photo editor that lets you add “stickers,” effects, text, and crop the image to just the best bits. They also feature an “Artist of the Day” on their website and Facebook page.
 
 

Tagging screen in ArtKiveArtKive makes it easy to keep several kids’ worth of art organized by their first names, and you can create a small Share Circle of email address to send the image to only the people who care most. ArtKive will also eventually let you print the artwork as a calendar, on a mug, or as a picture book!

Why Is It Useful?

If you have children in your life at all, you know that one of the hardest things to do is to organize (or get rid of) the artwork they make at school and at home. It’s all precious, and an important part of their growing up. These two tools help you preserve and organize this part of kids’ lives, and share the art easily with friends and family.

If you’re one of those friends and family, you can use either app to help you organize art made by grandchildren, nieces & nephews, cousins, godchildren, children of close friends, students, or any other kids in your life. ArtKive, with its drop-down menu to choose the artist, makes managing multiple accounts a snap.

You can also take pictures of more than just drawings and paintings. Capture and share that A+ school assignment, the clay paperweight, an image from a school play or musical recital, or any other moment from a child’s life. Check out the Facebook pages for both apps (in the list below) for more suggestions and ideas.

Help & Resources

Try One New Thing – Our 1st Anniversary Post

As we finish out June, we are also finishing up the first year of Learning for Life Online. For anyone who’s been reading along since the beginning: thank you. I’m going to work hard to make the second year of LLO as fun and fascinating as the first.

For our 50th post, I’d like to challenge you to choose one of the tools or services we’ve looked this past year and sign up for it or try it out. Pick something that intrigued you but you never got around to it, or something that looked ridiculous and you want to see if you were just missing something. Doesn’t matter how big or small a thing it is – just do it. Review the basics of playing with a new online tool or playing with a new gadget and remember to have fun!

Try One New Thing and play around with it for the month of July. As you try it, comment on this post with your experience or thoughts, and any suggestions you have for using it.

Rather than make you go back through the past year to look for your one new thing, here’s a quick reference list:

It takes time to make a social tool a part of your life, including your life online. Whatever you choose to do, give it to the end of July and then see what you think of it. Let us know here if your opinion has changed, and how.

Thank you all again for following along, and enjoy your One New Thing! See you in July…

Social Games – Playing together, wherever you are

Going from practical to fun, let’s look this week at social games – those games you see everyone playing on their smartphones, tablets and laptops.

What Are They?

Social games are exactly that: online games that you can play on a social network like Facebook, or games that require social activity to play. Some are just board games played online (like Scrabble or chess), while others feel more like video games with monsters and quests. However, the most uniquely social games don’t look anything like a real-world games; instead, you are part of an online world where you might be a farmer, or an aquarium owner, or a mafia don. You earn points for doing all the things that a farmer or don would normally do, and by working with other friends playing the game, you can earn more points and get to higher levels of play.

The big difference between social games and most other games is that the game never ends. You might win individual rounds, but there is no ‘finishing’ the game. Just like real life social interactions, you keep going until you choose not to play.

Why Are They So Popular?

First, these are games. They’re easy to learn, easy to play and – because they’re usually on a mobile device – easy to take anywhere. Just like any other video game, board game, or physical game, players enjoy figuring out how the game works and getting good at it. Then, there’s the social aspect. Even when you can’t physically be near your friends, you can still play games against them. Your best friend might just be at work or at home across town, or might have moved to the other side of the country or the world, but you can stay connected by playing a game ‘together’ whenever you want. Finally, not only do you get to play games wherever you are and with friends near and far, but you can use those networks of friends to help you play the game by sharing experience, game money, or by lending another sword to the fight. Have more friends, conquer bigger monsters or farm bigger farms, earn more prizes, then get more friends as you explore new places in the game. See the fun, yet?

Three Examples

Farmville is one of the oldest and most popular games on Facebook. Each player creates a farm, where they can virtually plow, plant and harvest crops and trees. Players also care for their farm animals: milking their cows and collecting eggs from their chickens. As you tend to your farm, the game posts updates to your Facebook timeline and your friends can see and share in everything you do, especially friends who also play Farmville. Zynga – creators of Farmville – have nearly a dozen Facebook games, all of which are social games.

Words with Friends is a word-building game based on Scrabble – play letters to create words and earn points for each letter you play. You create an account, and then you find other friends who are also using Words with Friends and challenge them to a game. Since it’s a smart device app (for iPhone, iPad and Android), you can play it anywhere!

Draw Something is also an app-based game, where you draw clues to help the other player guess the word you’ve been given. Draw Something also lets you send messages to friends within the game, save the drawings you make and send them to Facebook and Twitter. Available for iPhone, iPad and Android.

Help & Resources

Finding and Sharing…and Being Social

Last week, we took a look at using more traditional sources of news online to find neat stuff to share. Now, let’s look at the social news sites that make finding and sharing news a much more interactive experience.

What Is It?

Social news sites are places where users – anyone in the world – can post a news story that they’ve found online and share it. Then, other users get to vote on that story, making it appear higher or lower on the list of news items. In this way, the reading community decides what is more interesting or relevant. The same goes for any comments on a story – they can be voted up and down, depending on how interesting they are or what they contribute to the conversation.

Digg was the first general social news site to be well-known beyond the computer industry. It was also one of the first to introduce the “voting” feature. Digg now has Newsrooms specifically tailored to different topics. Read more About Digg.

Reddit (say the name out loud to get the joke) has been around nearly as long as Digg, and it still has the very personal feel it had at the beginning.

Slashdot was one of the first social news sites, focused mainly on science and technology. It’s still one of the go-to places for geeks to get their news, and the conversation in the comments is usually as good or better than the posts.

Fark is a social news site with the motto: “We don’t make news. We mock it.” Try Fark out if you’re a fan of sarcastic humor and weird news.

Now Public is a website for citizen journalists – everyday folks who actively try to find news near them and report it, especially when it doesn’t appear on big media like newspapers and television.

Newsvine was originally focused on political news, but has expanded to include any sort of news from around the world.

Social to Personalized

StumbleUpon is a site that lets you you vote on what you find, and then the site will suggest other stories based on what you tell it you like and dislike. It’s a great way to discover things you would never have known to search for on your own.

Pulse is a social news app for iPhone, iPad and Android that makes news visual. You can choose news sources to create your own personalized news reader from around the web. Read more about how Pulse works.

Digg has also added a customizeable section: the Newswire lets you fine-tune your Digg experience according to your likes and dislikes (not just the community’s). Get more of what you want by choose filters or seeing what’s Trending. (More about Newswire)

How Is It Useful?

Even on the web, major news outlets like newspapers and television news programs can only cover so much, and they don’t often point to all the fun and interesting things in blog posts, on image sites, and in little-known corners of the internet. Social news sites show that by distributing the work among millions of readers (otherwise known as crowdsourcing), much more information can be found and shared than if a single organization tries to do it all by themselves.

Help & Resources

The Social Library Catalog

Learning for Life Online tool #4:
The social Boston Public Library catalog

As more and more people join social networks like Facebook and buy from online retail stores like Amazon, they have come to expect the same kinds of features in all of their online services. Most recently, library catalogs have started to offer useful social features like ratings, comments, sharing, lists and following.

What Is It?

Early in 2011, the Boston Public Library launched its new library catalog. In addition to all the things we expect from a library catalog – good search results, information on where to find items, account information and item renewals – the new catalog offers fantastic interactive features.

How Is It Useful?

Search. The first and best feature of the new catalog is its keyword search and ranked search results, and you don’t need to sign up to use it. Just like Google, this search uses the popularity of items (based on number of copies and number of holds) to give you the most likely results to your search. Searching on “The Help” will take you straight to all the copies of the book; a search for “Harry Potter movies” will get you all of the library’s DVDs of the films, as well as additional items.

Lists. Taking a cue from Amazon, the new catalog makes it extremely easy to create lists and share them online. Anyone can create a list about any topic and include current items in the catalog, items not yet in the catalog (found on Amazon) and related websites. If you have a passion for anything – science, history, painting, carpentry, computers, childcare, baking, health, crafts or travel – you can make a list to help others learn more about it.

Tags. Tags are words and phrases you can add to an item to describe it and make it easier to find. Any user can add tags that describe the genre, tone or theme of a book, movie or album, and any user can search for other items with that tag to find more things to watch, read and listen to.

Sharing. You can share interesting books, movies, CDs and lists straight from the catalog to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and dozens of other sites. Just click on the sharing icons on any item or list to share that information through nearly any social tool you already use. You don’t need to copy and paste anything to share – you do it all right from the catalog.

Following. If you notice that other users often comment with interesting reviews of items or create awesome lists, you can choose to Follow those users just by clicking a button. Don’t worry – it’s nothing creepy. Following just means that you’ll get recommendations for things to read, watch and listen to based on the items that these other users thought were awesome. Better still, the new BPL catalog is linked to other library catalogs across the US and Canada, so you might be following someone from Ottawa, Seattle or New York!

Try It Out

Visit the Boston Public Library catalog and try a few searches. Type keywords into the search bar at the top right corner and see what you get. Use power searches to find very specific things: “Children Chinese DVDs” will show you everything the Boston Public Library owns, not just individual DVD titles. Use the drop-down menu next to the search bar to find Authors, Titles, Subjects, Tags or Lists on topics you’re interested in.

If you have a Boston Public Library card, register with the new catalog by typing in your card number and four-digit PIN. Registering will let you request items to be held for you and allow you to add content like comments and tags, rate items and create lists. Sign up, choose your own username (so you don’t have to type in your library card number any more) and make sure to enter your correct birthdate so you have access to all of the site’s features.

During the Learning for Life Online program, we’ll often create lists of items related to online tools and skills and share them through the blog, Facebook page and Twitter feed. Use these lists to find all sorts of useful books and sites for living life online.

Help & Resources

Facebook – The Basics

Learning for Life Online tool #2:
The Learning for Life Online Facebook page

Ah, Facebook. It seems like everyone is Facebookin’ these days, from the high schooler across the aisle to your mother (it’s the only way to keep track of everyone any more, right?). But what is it, really, and how is it useful to you?

What Is It?

Facebook is a social network – a place where people go to stay connected to friends, family, coworkers and aquaintances online. To create an account on Facebook, go to the main page and fill in the information under the words Sign Up. You will need an email address before you begin; you can quickly set up a free account with GMail or Yahoo!Mail if you don’t have an address yet.

How Is It Useful?

If your family and friends are already on Facebook, then it’s another place to tell them what you’re up to. You can easily share updates, videos, neat web sites, or photos. It’s a great way to invite people to events, and you can use the chat and message features to talk a little more directly to individuals.

People are using Facebook to reconnect with old school friends and past coworkers. They’re also “liking” their favorite places, musicians, famous people & TV shows to get the latest news.

Facebook (or any social network) is no substitute for getting to know people in person, but it can help to keep folks connected even when they’re far apart.

Try It Out

If you don’t want to create a Facebook account right now, you can still see what it looks like. Check out the Boston Public Library Facebook page or the Learning for Life Online page and click around to see what’s there.

If you do want to jump right in, go to Facebook and get going. In upcoming Learning for Life Online posts, we’ll walk through more of Facebook’s features, including the privacy settings and photo albums. In the meanwhile, talk to a friend or relative who’s been on Facebook if you get stuck anywhere. You probably know a few.

Help & Resources