Target audience: Educators, entrepreneurs, app developers, family members, iPad owners.

At the first Launch Education and Kids held this week at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley outpost in Mountain View, VC/entrepreneur Jason Calacanis launched a new conference series that showcased 30 inventive startups — some of which will likely change the face of education or learning games for kids. Or both.

The most interesting person I met was Semira Rahemtulla, CEO and co-founder of a cool new tablet app called PlayTell. The San Francisco-based startup on Tuesday launched the private beta of its new app, currently available for the iPad, which lets loved ones share a reading experience over the Internet. Grandmas and grandkids, aunts and nephews, soldiers and young children, you now have a way to experience reading a book together online, even if you’re thousands of miles apart.

PlayTell (tagline: “Play together, even when you’re apart”) lets you read a book with your loved ones while you’re in a video chat. While we grown-ups use GoToWebinar or WebEx for collaborating online over business, until now there wasn’t a way for families to share reading materials at the same time, and then to capture their shared experience through photos or video (a feature coming in a few weeks). The reading catalog is understandably small at this early date, but it will grow over time as libraries and book publishers come on board.

Check out my 5-minute interview with Semira (conducted, by the way, in a very noisy hallway without a tripod). She had some wonderful insights about how children as young as 2 interact with the iPad and how children as young as 3 and 4 come to expect to reach out to their parents or loved ones at any time through our always-on connections.

Watch, download or embed the video on Vimeo

Congratulations to Jason and his team for another successful Launch conference — it’s become perhaps the best venue to see top-flight emerging startups that have the potential to be game-changers.

The post PlayTell: Video chat and storytelling that connects loved ones appeared first on Socialbrite.

PTA conference: Embracing community outreach while protecting student privacy

On Friday I flew down to Anaheim to give a 90-minute presentation, “Communicating in a Networked World,” to a packed room of about 250 attendees at the California State PTA Convention.

We had a great give an take about how social media can be used, by Parent Teacher Associations and other organizations, to advance schools’ and school districts’ business goals. I present at a lot of workshops and it was great to see the amount of interaction throughout the session — not just questions to me but PTA reps pitching in to help their colleagues.

Topics covered Facebook, Twitter, storytelling, Pinterest, Scoop.it, community strategies and more. More than half the workshop was spent on Facebook — probably 80 percent of the PTAs in the room had a Facebook page, compared with 20 percent that had a Twitter account.

Business reasons for using social media

Why use social media if you’re a PTA or educational association? I suggested these reasons as a starting point:

1. Enhance the educational experience at your school (this needs to be the main reason, and one that you revisit time and again)
2. Promote your PTA, school or school district
3. Involve the community in decision-making
4. Feedback loop with community
5. Enlist volunteers

1. Build an online community of supporters
2. Raise funds for a cause or campaign
3. Get people to attend your events
4. Enhance existing communications programs
5. Connect with peers at other PTAs or potential partners.

A fair chunk of the workshop was spent addressing issues of student privacy and legal liability. Legal waivers, understandably, are a part of life in the social media trenches at local PTAs. The best solutions I heard were these:

• Get students’ parents to sign a waiver form when you’re at an event where you capture images of the students for use on Facebook or elsewhere.

• Make sure the waiver doesn’t just cover the school but also the PTA, which is in most cases a separate legal entity.

• But I also pointed out that a fair amount of outside content can be shared on Facebook and Twitter, including student groups like Hiki No Student News, a network of more than 70 public, private and charter schools, from elementary level through high school, in Hawaii. There are a number of interesting student-run citizen media outfits whose updates are worth sharing on Facebook — without a waiver of any kind.

A resource page for PTAs

I created a PTA landing page on Socialbrite to help PTA reps and educators access resources and tutorials on how to monitor key terms, how to create media and tell stories, how to strategically use Facebook and Twitter, and how to enlist the community on behalf of your organizational mission. Feel free to download the presentation on SlideShare.

The post How to use social media for students & schools appeared first on Socialbrite.

Matanya’s Hope tells stories of Kenyan schoolchildren through photos & video

Multimedia storytelling can be an incredibly powerful tool for your organization to attract funders, motivate volunteers and demonstrate the power of your message.

Our friends at Matanya’s Hope asked us to create a visual story for their nonprofit by seamlessly blending photos and video footage that they have captured over the past several years with original interviews, music and graphics we developed.

Founded in 2005 by Illinois native Michelle Stark, Matanya’s Hope is a nonprofit dedicated to educating children in Kenya. Last summer I accompanied Michelle to Matanya Primary School and saw the destitution these children and their families face: severe poverty, hunger, lack of clothing. And I realized why Michelle is dedicating her life to this cause.

For nonprofits and other organizations looking to capture their stories through powerful imagery, here are some simple tips for creating professional-looking video:

• Use “b-roll” (stills & video)
• Incorporate stock music
• Use narration or background sounds

How to incorporate b-roll

By using B-roll – still photographs and short video clips referencing what the interviewees are talking about – you can make the video much more interesting than by solely using “talking heads” (straight interviews of people talking without any additional footage). As we are hearing Michelle talking about the children with “no shoes and torn and tattered clothing,” the still photographs visually reinforce what the interviewee is saying. B-roll also allows us to edit the interviews without a noticeable cut (“jump-cut”) in the action or picture on screen.

Use background music to add texture

Background music was also selected to set the mood of the video. Royalty-free music can be purchased online from a number of stock music websites for a modest charge. One of my favorites is Triple Scoop Music. There are also a slew of free sites offering rights-cleared music, generally using Creative Commons — see Socialbrite’s Free Music Directory.

For the Matanya’s Hope video, we licensed a song from a local Kenyan composer we discovered while we were there filming the video.

Narration and background sound round out the piece

Using natural, or ambient, sound captured while videotaping b-roll is another effective way to make the storytelling more compelling. Background sounds of children talking in a classroom help create a more natural, captivating video. Natural sounds can also be useful in making transitions or in reinforcing a point the speaker is making.

Next up: We’ll share our learnings on professional interviewing techniques.

And please make a donation to support Matanya’s Hope’s efforts to educate children in this region of Kenya. All net proceeds from the sale or leasing of photographs from the Matanya’s Hope gallery will go directly to the children of Kenya this charity supports.

Related on Socialbrite

• Online advocacy video best practices
• How to find amazing, powerful stories for your nonprofit video
• How nonprofits should be using visual storytelling
• 10 secrets to video storytelling success

The post Techniques to add dazzle to your advocacy video appeared first on Socialbrite.

Guest post by Katrina Heppler
envisionGood.tv

We met up with Jon Bischke, founder of eduFire, in San Francisco to learn about the launch of eduFire’s new Tech Channel, an online video learning platform that provides live, interactive video classes in social media, PHP, WordPress and other tech areas.

In this video interview, Jon describes the new Tech Channel’s offerings and tells us how eduFire is using social media throughout the company’s platform. Continue after the jump for a full transcript of the conversation.

Full transcript

Katrina: So here we are in San Francisco. I’m with Jon, the founder of eduFire.

First of all, what is eduFire?

Jon: Sure, eduFire is a platform for people to teach and take live classes over the internet. So we’ve got thousands of teachers and thousands of students who are conducting live classes online using video, text chat, and audio, and other types of technologies.

Can you tell us about the new classes you’re launching now?

Jon: Sure. We feel one of the biggest things that are in demand right now are technology skills. And it’s an opportunity for people to learn something and find a new job or directly apply it to their existing job. So, we’re launching a tech channel where we’ve got dozens of teachers who are teaching classes in things like PHP, how to effectively use social media, how to implement WordPress, skills that a lot of employers are looking for right now.

We think that learning online is great for people because they can do it in their own time, they can do it from home, it’s very flexible. And we’re really excited for the potential for the Tech Channel, and are looking forward to bringing onboard lots of good teachers and people interested in learning those skills.

How are the teachers vetted? How do these teachers qualify to be teachers?

Jon: Yeah, so what we do is we have the community basically vet who’s a good teacher and who’s not using some crowdsourced techniques. So, teachers come on eduFire they post a profile, it’s kind of similar to a LinkedIn profile where they state their credentials and other things they’ve done in their past. And as students take classes from those teachers they rate those teachers. And what we do is we use an algorithm to have the top teachers rise to the top teachers rise to the top of our list and the not-so-good teachers kind of fall off. So over time you’re only seeing the best teachers on eduFire.

What classes will you be offering related to technology?

Jon: You know we’re really excited by a wide range of things. So we have programming classes, things like PHP and Ruby on Rails, classes around things like social media marketing have been popular -– some things like Facebook and Twitter and how you can effectively use those in your business. Other skills, like implementation of things like WordPress. And then other things too –- more casual learning, Photoshop, how to optimize your Macintosh, or whatever. So it’s a really wide range of things, but all related to technology.

How are you getting the word out using social media?

Jon: That’s a great question. We get a lot of our visitors who come from Facebook, who come from Twitter. A lot of our teachers will post messages when they’re teaching a class. Our students will often post messages to Twitter as well that they’re taking a class on eduFire. So we feel that social media is kind of a key component of next-generation education because people want to learn with their friends, they want to see what their friends are doing. If people are following a certain person and they find that that person is teaching a class that would be very interesting to them… So, social media has been very effective for us and we feel it’s only going to grow over time.

How much do these classes cost?

Jon: It’s all over the board. We have a lot of classes which are free, which is a great way if you want to dip your toe in  the water and experience what eduFire has to offer. We also have classes that range anywhere from five dollars to anywhere up to fifty dollars. We also have a subscription service too, so you can pay thirty dollars a month and for that price you can really get access to almost all of the classes on our site. And that’s unlimited access. So if you really want to ramp up your tech skills in a quick amount of time, that’s probably your best value.

Do you find that the teachers are coming from all over the world or are they mostly here in the Bay Area or in the U.S.?

Jon:We have over 200 countries represented on the site. So it definitely is a global audience. The majority of our audience is in the U.S., certainly with technology, a lot of people in the Bay Area [as well]. But yeah, we get people from all over and that’s really interesting because you can learn how to program PHP from a guy in Germany. And when have you had a chance to do that before in the past?

Where can everyone find you on the Web?

Jon: It’s eduFire.com.

And on Twitter?

Jon: Twitter is twitter.com/eduFire.

Reposted from the envisionGood.tv site.

Related

• eduFire: Real-time Web learning (Socialbrite)

• MindBites: The how-to video marketplace (Socialmedia.biz)

The post eduFire expands its tech curriculum appeared first on Socialbrite.

Twitter just announced its first corporate social responsibility effort on its blog.

See the video above — featuring Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Room to Read founder John Wood and Crushpad founder Michael Brill — to get the lowdown on how this campaign will help 50,000 kids abroad learn to read.

From Twitter’s announcement:

We’re just getting started as a company, but we believe thinking long term about making a positive impact will allow us to grow in the right direction to make a difference as both a technology and a business.

For Twitter to be at its peak in utility, people who would have never had access to the world’s information need to be able to not only receive it but engage with it, too. Room to Read, a San Francisco based non-profit, will help us make that happen by bringing libraries and literacy to the world’s poorest regions.

Together we’ll be making some awesome wine over the course of a year to benefit @roomtoread, and with each case sold they’ll be able to supply about 60 local language children’s books to educate the 300 million kids around the world who can’t read.

You can follow us throughout this initiative and even participate in barrel tastings and other activities along the way thanks to the folks at Crushpad. If you want to get a bottle of our limited Pinot Noir or Chardonnay, visit the Fledgling Initiative and contribute. Good wine has never been better!

Based on my experience with the Sharing Foundation in Cambodia, I know how important it is for children in developing countries to have books to read in their own language.

And, with a donation, you get a bottle of wine, too!

Republished from Beth’s Blog.

The post Twitter: Bringing reading to world’s poorest regions appeared first on Socialbrite.

Last night was the coming-out party for Socialbrite at the monthly NetTuesday gathering in San Francisco. About 40 people turned out for the event at PariSoMa, the coworking space at Howard and Tenth. Here are a half-dozen shots snapped by organizer Sarah Kennon and me.

And here is what the NetTuesday Meetup members had to say about the event.

A few notes from the evening:

• I kicked things off with a rundown of the Socialbrite team and the resources offered by Socialbrite, including the Sharing Center, Social Media Glossary, Web 2.0 productivity tools, directory of social media reports, guides to free photos, free music and free video footage, and directory of cause organizations.

• Jacob Colker, co-founder of the Extraordinaries, discussed the “micro-volunteer” opportunities using mobile devices in their spare time that people could sign up for. The Extraordinaries is now available as a free iPhone app. Socialbrite will publish a video interview with co-founder Ben Rigby soon.

• Schlomo Rabinowitz sketched out VideoCampSF, coming to BAVC Oct. 16-17. Two days of sessions can be had for just $65. (Register here.) The stellar lineup of instructors includes Melissa Rowley, Jen Myronuk, Katrina Heppler, Sukhjit, Markus Sandy, Adam Quirk and Bill Streeter (hey, I know all these folks!).

• Katrina Heppler outlined her promising new venture, envisionGood.tv. (She’s also begun contributing video dispatches to Socialbrite, like the one immediately below this post.)

• Michael Stoll and two of his staffers came by to fill us in on The Public Press (which will be getting a new domain name next month). The nonprofit publication provides noncommercial news for the Bay Area and has been raising funds for story pitches on Spot.us.

• I outlined the mission of the Public Media Collaborative, a group of Bay Area technologists, activists and bloggers who put on training workshops, chiefly for community organizations. Our next daylong workshop will be Oct. 23 in Oakland.

• Program manager Liberty Smith told us about the National Service Learning Clearinghouse. Service learning is a teaching and learning strategy that integrates meaningful community service with instruction and reflection to enrich the learning experience, teach civic responsibility, and strengthen communities.

It was also great to see Hiroyasu Ichikawa again after meeting him at SoCap09 last week. Ichi, a writer-consultant who’s part of the Japan Social Entrepreneur Forum, recently launched NetTuesday Tokyo, with two meetups of about 30 people so far.

The post Socialbrite’s night at NetTuesday appeared first on Socialbrite.

Guest post by Katrina Heppler
envisionGood.tv

Want to learn a foreign language from the comfort of your home? Want to meet up with fellow students around the world? Or are you a teacher or trainer who wants to share your knowledge for a fee in an online setting with live interaction?

In this 4:50 video interview, founder and CEO Jon Bischke shares details about his new company, eduFire (tagline: “Live video learning”), an online platform that provides learning on subjects from A to Z by teachers around the world. More than 5,000 instructors are teaching more than 30,000 students. About two-thirds of the students are in the United States but word is quickly spreading internationally.

Head to the site to sign up for any course you’d like to take — say, a foreign language. All you need is a broadband connection; you can text in questions to the teacher during the class. Some instructors are making $50-$100 an hour.

The interview was conducted outside a Peet’s in San Francisco with a Flip Ultra recorder. Follow them on Twitter at @edufire.

The post eduFire: Real-time Web learning appeared first on Socialbrite.

For the past few weeks, several of us (most notably Kara Andrade) have been working on pulling together what’s shaping up to be an extraordinary end-of-summer event at San Francisco State: Seize the Moment.

I’ll be presenting a Social Media Bootcamp with David Cohn, founder of Spot.us, to kick the morning off on Aug. 28. The all-day event will be geared to ethnic media publishers and feature multiple tracks: a Multimedia Content Bootcamp, a Website Warriors track, a Storytelling Toolkit track, a Business Innovations track and a Social Networking 101 track presented by the Public Media Collaborative (David, Susan Mernit and I are among the co-founders).

Conference details

What: Seize the Moment
Presented by: Renaissance Journalism Center at San Francisco State University and ZeroDivide, in collaboration with New America Media
Agenda: A hands-on educational workshop to help members of the ethnic and community news media learn how to harness new technologies and reach new audiences. In-depth workshops will teach you new media skills and social networking strategies; show you how to grow your Web presence and introduce you to innovative business strategies to help your news outlet navigate through and even thrive in this tough economy. Some participants may want to opt for Nuestra Voz, a day-and-a-half boot camp taught in Spanish.
When: Friday, August 28, 2009
Time: 8:30am – 7:00pm
Location: San Francisco State University College of Extended Learning, 835 Market Street, 6th floor, SF
Registration fee: $25 (are you kidding?)
Facebook group: Join here
Information: [email protected]

Bootcamp details

What: Social Media Bootcamp
Presented by: JD Lasica & David Cohn
Description: Like other news publications, ethnic news publications are seeing a steady erosion of readers to online platforms. This session will show you how to use the new tools of engagement — forums, social bookmarking, Twitter, widgets, Facebook and mobile — to reach new audiences, create communities of interest and become relevant to a new generation of users.
Time: 9 am on Aug. 28

Public Media Collaborative

(Susan Mernit, with Jay Rosen, at BlogHer 2005)

I’ve written before about the Public Media Collaborative, which is working with the Renaissance Journalism Center, ZeroDivide and New America Media to put on Seize the Moment , but now’s a good time for a quick recap.

• Back on Jan. 15 I wrote about the first meeting of the PMC, held at TechSoup in San Francisco, where we laid out the goals of creating a digital salon with monthly meetings that center on a particular topic or cause; as a support group with a communication channel to let others know about timely efforts; and as a resource center offering workshops/bootcamps around social and public media. Susan Mernit was the prime mover and shaker behind the group’s formation.

• Amy Gahran chronicled our second meeting, held March 11 in Berkeley.

• On May 1 the Public Media Collaborative presented workshops at Journalism Innovations II put on by Independent Arts & Media.

• And on May 26 we met over dinner in Oakland to discuss next steps with an eye toward working wtih SF State to put on an August event.

Where Socialbrite is more focused on working with nonprofits and social change organizations on social media strategies, on providing resource materials and offering workshops, Public Media Collaborative “strives to be a resource and umbrella for Bay area organizations and individuals, bring people together across disciplines and out of their silos, yet united in agreement that community, discourse, vision and action power positive social change.” Clearly, some overlap, but that’s why we’re collaborating.

The post Social Media Bootcamp at Seize the Moment appeared first on Socialbrite.

Tim Ferriss, author of the best-seller The Four-Hour Work Week, appeared today via uStream at the Inbound Marketing Summit during the session “How to Create a Worldwide Social Media Phenomenon.”

He took questions from the audience, and I asked how he decides which causes to support.

It wasn’t an idle question. Ferriss has become a remarkably adept advocate for philanthropic causes in a startlingly short time. He has successfully made use of social media tools to raise thousands of dollars to build schools in Vietnam, libraries in Nepal and India, and most recently, to help thousands of classrooms in the U.S. obtain basic classroom supplies. (Source: WalletPop)

Tim singled out three organizations and initiatives as exemplars of philanthropy in the age of Web 2.0:

• Donorschoose.org, the remarkable organization founded by Charles Best (I did a video interview with him Monday and hope to post it soon). Ferriss, who sits on the organization’s board, said the ability for users to select the specific educational causes they support and to receive tangible feedback are key drivers of its success.

• Roomtoread is a global organization that has established more than 7,000 libraries in the developing world since 2000.

• Charity: water, the nonprofit that was the beneficiary of the Twestival event in 205 cities, is representative of a new breed of charitable organizations, he said. Some of these groups have smartly begun to set up an administrative structure in which 100 percent of donated funds go directly to the cause, with a separate fund, generated through other means (such as a small add-on to support the group’s operations), paying for administration.

Seeing the first-hand results of your donation — whether it’s a Google Earth shot of the new drinking well drilled in Ethiopia for $5,000 or the plaque on the front door of a new school built in Vietnam — is a powerful incentive for individuals to participate in the culture of giving.

The post Tim Ferriss’ method of supporting causes appeared first on Socialbrite.