Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

This morning at the Massachusetts School Library Association's conference (a fun conference that I highly recommend) Pam Berger presented some good ideas for working with primary source documents and Web 2.0 tools. One of the ideas that she shared and others elaborated on was the idea of using word clouds to help students analyze documents. By copying the text of a document into a word cloud generator your students can quickly see the words that appear most frequently in that document. Here are five tools that you and your students can use to create word clouds

Earlier this year, Dan Pink shared in one of his newsletters about how he uses text expanders to dramatically reduce the amount of time he spends replying to e-mail. I’m not the most tech-savvy person, but the idea of having short abbreviations for frequently typed text appealed to me. So I started using a text expander this summer and was AMAZED at how easy it was to use and how much easier it made responding to frequently asked questions.

As I often do when I find something to be of great benefit, I started telling everyone who would listen (even some who wouldn’t!) about it. But I found that few people were giving text expanders a try because they either were concerned they would be too complicated or didn’t see the value. I completely understand those concerns so I thought I would outline the simple 3-step process....