Our show is scheduled for 11am tomorrow – congratulations #teamTAFE! Thanks so much for your work 🙂
Continue reading “Week 8 Online & Social (2/4): Promo Off Campus”
Week 8 Online & Social (2/4): Promo Off Campus
Category: Online & social media
Week 7 O&S (26/3): Choose your exercise
Hey folks! Today you will be able to choose what you do. In all three cases, it would be great to have the work completed by the end of class. So here goes:
- Make a story about anything except COVID-19. Your story can be written, audio, video, photos, or graphics (or something else you come up with!) It can be for any platform (Off Campus, TAFE Radio, our socials)
TIP: Remember the next show’s theme is ‘pirate’, so that might be a way to start coming up with ideas) - Make something to promo the show ( <- poetry!). This will be for one (or all) of our social media platforms. One idea is maybe to do a story about how we’re putting a show together despite physical distance. It *might* include a chat with Brian about how he pulls off the remote radio magic
- Use this morning for a WordPress workshop with me
Whichever you choose, you must write a quick outline of what you plan to do before you do it, and be specific.
I will be creating some quiet rooms for people to break into so I can work with them on their ideas. As always, we value collaboration, so if you want to work with someone else, let me know.
We will stay in Zoom, in rooms. It makes it easier for me to facilitate if anyone needs advice, or if you want to show me what you’re doing.
UPLOADING:
Audio stories should be uploaded to the Future Shows folder in the Google Drive
Written stories can be submitted for Off Campus to the Stories folder
Socials stories will be by negotiation with me 🙂
Thursday March 19
SEO and Writing for online
Ways to make your writing clearer and more accessible
- Write so people can scan
- Keep your writing simple
- Use “chunking” to group pieces of content – it helps to give readers relief from intimidating walls of text
- Keep sentences short
- Keep paragraphs short – a one-sentence paragraph is ok! Two sentences are fine too
- Break up paragraphs with white space
- Use subheadings to lead your reader through your story (also makes the story more scannable)
- Think visual: use photos, videos, infographics, and maps to break up text
- Use bullet points to summarise information
Write in 3D
Think about your stories not as two-dimensional pages, but as spaces your readers can move around, dive into, and navigate in the ways they choose.
- Use links to related articles (on your site, or someone else’s)
- Use links to original sources (documents, data, people you quote in your story)
- Use links to credit visual material
- Embed your links in key-word phrases – don’t use the full URL
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
The most popular search engine by a long way is Google, though there are others. Search engines look for a few key things when they’re ranking a page:
- the page HTML header
- the headline
- body text
- keyword tags
TIP: When you’re writing your story, think about the keywords you might use if you were looking for the story
Good things to read for more online writing tips:
BASIC Principles: B is for Brevity (on the really good Online Journalism Blog)
Writing Style for Print vs Web
Exercise:
- Find an example of a good online article that uses all the techniques for good online writing and SEO
- Rewrite one of your own stories or pieces of content using the techniques above and optimise it for reading and SEO. Post on WordPress, and be ready to show us at 12 noon!
Finding the pieces – working out what you need to know
Use class time to continue planning and researching your stories.
Continue reading “Finding the pieces – working out what you need to know”
Telling a story with Instagram
If you’ve been using Instagram for a while, you would be aware of a very successful (and often very beautiful) account called Humans of New York. The Insta account has now grown to include a web page, Facebook page, and a book. It’s also spawned possibly thousands of storytelling sites just like it.
