Online Presence Part II

This is the second part of the Online Presence Assignment. Please review the open sections of the first part of this assignment. They contain important information about the steps you need to take to complete this assignment.

The key steps:

  • Get set up on Twitter
  • Get set up on Evernote
  • Add your Twitter and Evernote links to your online presence document.

Twitter

If you don’t already have one, create a Twitter Account. To get started, you need only enter a name, an email address and a password. Again, you could use a name like FirstNameLastNameBc, where FirstNameLastName is your first and last names. For instance: charliecalvertbc.

Please make your account public. If you don’t want your regular Twitter account to be public, then please create a separate account for this course that is public.

NOTE: Twitter allows you to broadcast short phrases to the world. There are scenarios in which it makes sense to broadcast to a private group, but in general, the purpose of Twitter is to broadcast messages to anyone who wants to listen. In this course, we are exploring the cloud as it presents itself to the world. Public Twitter accounts are one of the major hubs in the cloud, and it is important that you learn how to use them.

After you create the account, you will be taken through a wizard that helps you get plugged in to the Twitter community. There is a “Skip this step” option to help you move through the prompts, or you can fill in any available options that you find appealing.

After you are set up, you should edit your Profile from the black menu bar at the top of the page. Make sure your twitter account Profile includes:

  • Your name.
  • A picture of yourself
  • A short bio
  • A url pointing to your your web site, which could be the Google site we just created, or some other site if you prefer to use it.
  • For your location you can just enter Washington, or be more specific if you want. For instance, you could enter Bellevue, WA.
  • Follow my CalvertBc Twitter account and leave a message to @calvertbc announcing your presence. Remember tweets are 140 characters or less, so keep you message short. To see who has left you a post, choose notifications from your menu bar.

The last time I looked, it was not particularly easy to delete a twitter account. If you make a mistake and want to start over, you can try searching for solutions on the web, or just abandon the corrupted account and create a new one.

Sooner or later some student always seems to ask: “Why Twitter?” That is a reasonable question. Twitter is an odd tool, but it is particular well suited for use on mobile devices because it works with small chunks of text. It is true that a huge amount of useless junk is posted on Twitter every day. On the other hand, some of the smartest and most powerful people in the world have Twitter accounts and use them regularly, sometimes to great effect. This is particularly true in the development world. Lot’s of smart developers post to twitter regularly, and following them can be very useful. It is a great way to see what the best minds in the industry are thinking.

I have also found that many people don’t really understand how Twitter works or how to use it. Everyone should know how to use Twitter. It is a part of the fabric of modern life. We will not spend much time with Twitter, but I do want to be sure that everyone who passes through my mobile and cloud courses understands this relatively simple tool, and knows how to use it.

Evernote

You should do much the same thing in Evernote as you did in Google Drive and in Microsoft SkyDrive. Your Evernote notebook, however, is read only for those who share it. You have to pay to create a notebook with notes that more than one person can edit. There is no need to perform the upgrade to the paid version in this course.

Create a new synchronized notebook by choosing **File New Notebook. Name it according the pattern established in earlier exercises. For instance, **Prog270-Calvert-2017. Place some or all of your document in an Evernote note that is part of this notebook. Choose Synchronize. Now switch to the share tab, choose Manage Shares and share it with:
  • charliecalvertbc@gmail.com

Here is the page in the web version that I use to share notebooks:

Evernote Share

Here is the second step of the sharing process:

Evernote Share 02

After you share the notebook, add three tags to your note:

  • BC
  • Prog270 (or whichever course you are in, such as Isit320.)
  • 2016

The first tag stands for Bellevue College. The second should be the name of the course you are in, whether it is Isit320, Isit322, Prog270, Prog272 or Prog219.

NOTE: For a long time, on the desktop, I found it easier to actually install Evernote as an application, rather than using the web based tool. I’m not sure that is still the case, but nevertheless the install is not a bad idea. If you can’t install the desktop application, then you will now find the web based application adequate.

Steps:

  • Optionally install the Evernote app. There is one for the PC. This used to be all but essential, but now is probably not necessary for most people.
  • Choose: File New Notebook (Ctrl-Shift-N)
  • Create a synchronized notebook with a name similar to Prog270-LastName-2017, where LastName is your last name. (As always, use your common sense to substitute the proper year and class if the one’s you see here don’t seem right).
  • Right click on the new notebook and choose Share.
  • Share the notebook with charliecalvertbc@gmail.com
  • Put a note in the notebook
  • More information is found here:

TIP: Many students struggle to learn how to place a message in a shared Evernote notebook. One technique that may help some students is to add content to Evernote by sending email. That will allow you to automate the process of adding notes to Evernote in the correct folder with a default tag. Assuming you have already created your folder, and already tagged one message with the tag Isit320, then you can send a message to the correct folder by creating a subject line something like this:

  • Test Message @Isit320-LastName-2017 #Isit320

If the message you see in Evernote has #Isit320 in the title, then you may have forgotten to first create the tag in Evernote before sending the message. More information is found in the Evernote documentation.

Turn it in

Create accounts for Twitter and Evernote if you don’t have them already. Demonstrate that you can use the apps and in general follow the instructions above.

Add links to your Twitter and Evernote accounts to your Online Presence document. Submit the assignment. As in the previous Online Presence assignment, it is helpful if you paste the contents of your Online Presence document into Canvas on the Text page, but I should be able to double check your latest work by looking at the document on Google Drive.