Hey everyone, welcome to this third and final episode in our series of looking at Azure Lighthouse from different perspectives today's perspective is the one from the Microsoft reseller or as they may be known in the industry now Microsoft service partners. So if you're tired of engineering your own solutions to help your customers or if you need to guide your customers in their cloud spend. This is an episode you don't want to miss. We're going to be joined by Patrick O'Leary from soft choice and we'll get right into it right now. Hi Patrick. How are you? Good. Good. I'm happy to be here. How are you doing? I'm good. I'm really happy to have you in our series on Lighthouse from different perspectives and your perspective is from the reseller portion, right? Yeah. Yeah. We are certainly a very large reseller from an Azure perspective and also we are an Azure expert MSP and do services as well. Okay. And how long have you been using Lighthouse? It's been over about a year and a half that we've been using the technology in our operational model with how we work with our customers. Okay. And what were you using before? What did you move from and that'll start the conversation? Sure. So we had built a bit of custom technology that we integrated. We utilized the components of Azure Active Directory and did a shared services kind of model where we would implement a centralized Azure AD topology and extend that and federate it within to our customers Azure subscriptions. Okay. It was sort of like Lighthouse in very many ways. It accomplished the same things, but it was engineered by some great talent that we have here at SoftChoice. So when we had the opportunity to switch to Lighthouse, it was like, oh, well, we've been doing this for a couple of years. It's awesome that there's sort of a package solution now that we don't have to have our own custom developed solution. Hey, you don't have to manage the code on top of managing your customers code? Yeah. Yeah. That was certainly a challenge that introduced extra layers of troubleshooting. And when you would have any type of issues you had to track down, there was that added layer of our own interaction at the security layer that we had to consider. And having broad knowledge of that across the teams proved a challenge, but it was solvable and it worked well. But then the Lighthouse technology really introduced some new capabilities that we want to take advantage of. So the cost and time that we had to develop to switch really made sense to us. Okay. So I'm a little shy in my knowledge of all of the different types of partners that we have and exactly where they fit in the ecosystem.  My initial thought was, okay, well, somebody wants to buy software, they buy software from you and deploy it. How does that Lighthouse in managing your customers environment, like how does that fall into the reseller model? Sure. So as a reseller, Microsoft has obviously moved away from boxed copies of Azure. It doesn't really exist, right? So a customer has to subscribe to that technology and subscribe to the use of that through what we tend to use the word to describe as consumption or consuming of that cloud environment. So as a partner that works in a reselling motion, the reality is we're not really reselling anything anymore. We're more of a services partner first than we are in the relationship we have with the customer. So that really drives the technology changes at sort of the use case level. So at a simple way to look at it is in the prior to subscription based licensing days, we would, every, you know, on a yearly cycle help the customer true up and understand their licensing spend and all that kind of stuff. And there was an EA three year cycle and those kind of things. And now that value has to be delivered on a month to month basis, because that true up cycle is technically down to minutes and seconds in some cases of the Azure services. So it's less about a routine interaction that we have with the customer over the course of years, it's more of like a day to day operational support and enablement partnership that we have to build with the customer. So if we look at how we delivered that prior service versus how we deliver the new model of helping customers use Azure in every way that they can. It's a lot more hands on it's a lot more tied into what the customer is actually trying to achieve. So Lighthouse really is the technology now that enables us to have that close relationship within the customer so that they're buying and consuming it and we're helping them do that. Okay, because I used to be in services with Microsoft and and premium service and that was my it was always a go to answer when customers came in with okay I've got licenses for this and I've got this program.  But now you're doing that on a like almost day to day basis. Yeah, yeah like constantly basically like the challenge with something like Azure is there's literally thousands of SKUs. So it's less about hey here's a bill that you get and here's all your SKUs it's really about how do they actively and dynamically deploy those things. So that that actually led us to becoming an Azure expert MSP partner, which enables us to really prove ourselves through an auditive process but the idea is that we want to be that go to contact point for the customer to use and learn about how to use further their Azure footprint and the technologies available to them. So it's inclusive of helping them govern helping them report on helping them secure, deploy, optimize all these kind of concepts of how they can use cloud or stuff that we want to deliver to them as part of really replacing the legacy reseller model with more of a services first approach and then, in effect, we're doing reselling but it's sort of as a result of us driving the services up front and lighthouse that is one of the core enabling technologies for us to do that. Okay, I was that that was perfect segue because I was just about to ask how does lighthouse fit in that model and how does it help you help your customers. Yeah, yeah, so the way it fits is that as you can imagine when when you're managing that relationship with hundreds to thousands of companies at one time. We have a fairly large footprint of customers that we work with every day in Azure. And the challenge is if you had individualized security connectivity for every single customer where you had to operationalize pretty much hundreds of our people to interact with all these 1000 plus customers. The issue is managing all that in a safe and secure way it's very easy for some of that to get lost in the noise or somebody writes it down on the classic sticky note on their desk those are keys to the customer castle that we do not want anybody to So what our initial use of lighthouse really was for was to reduce that risk profile and really raise our security and how we interact with the customer environment. And so we utilized it to implement a just in time and just enough access methodology so that when our people who do go hands on into the customers environment. They were requesting a time boxed access to that environment. And then also they have a an approval chain to get that access so they're only allowed to work with whichever customers authorized to work with during that time window. And finally it creates an audit trail. So for us, the use of lighthouse enabled us to timestamp the activities that that employee was doing in the customer environment, and that allows us then to have a audit trail of actions taken. So if a customer feels that we might have been involved in an issue that popped up we have the full audit trail showing what that engineer did at that time. And we can, you know, either defend or confirm the customers, you know, insinuation that we were involved in it. So initially it was it was highly useful and reducing our liability situation there, as well as, you know, really enhancing our confidence and having hundreds of people interact with thousands of customers and and not have that sort of worry in the back of your head that something's going to something's going to go wrong from a security prospect. Yeah, it's really as much as a comfort blanket for the customer as it is for you because you start with a very set and an auditable and and configurable set of permissions. So the customer doesn't have to worry that maybe you're doing something you shouldn't be doing when you're accessing those systems. Exactly. And because because it's all logged in reportable, we can generate reports showing that activity to the customer if they if they find that useful. It also helps them with their industry audits and other kind of compliance the audits as well. So a lot of times because many of our customers are in an industry where they've got to prove that partners that work with them are just as secured as they are, we have this technology to show their auditors and their, you know, and help them achieve that without worry from our perspective. So as a reseller or a managed or a service provider service partner, sorry. Does the governance of the your customers environment come into play like do you help them manage that part of of the Azure footprint. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we evolved over the past, let's say decade from that reseller relationship to the MSP and and you know more advanced services partner with these customers naturally. And, and you know the enabling technologies and reasons to do that are numerous but what I think really made the most sense for us is that when we start to look at how customers spend money in Azure, cost controls and governance mixed with operations, operational business rules that they want to enforce on that environment. Those are the two areas where our expertise in the resell motion in our, you know, our legacy of doing great work with Microsoft technology in that reseller process, translate very well into a managed services model that it that looks like on the surface a reselling motion, but under it is really the more modern way to help a customer buy and consume Azure. And that is through the governance that is really helping them implement policies and controls. And the way we do that is has evolved a lot we used to do it very manually on a per customer basis. And with the lighthouse technology, we can actually piggyback across that connection to implement automation and deployment technologies across the lighthouse connection point that we have. And that enables us to really be confident in a standard set of governance policies and procedures across all customers. And then we can customize per customer after that. So we do a lot of like really granular alignment of each customers, like purchase mechanisms and business approval rules and processes. Sort of, you know, a more common word these days is Phenops, but I would say it's more just general governance of how they use and spend money. Governance and financial operation is a very important portion of the business, especially when you when you're working in an environment that is pay for play like a consume model where it's not like you're deploying that server in your data center and you have so many cores and so much RAM and it's there whether or not you use it, but you've already paid for it so it doesn't matter in in Azure. If you're using it you're paying more for it. Yeah, so when we look at how these companies are spending money as they transition into more and more of their workloads going to a cloud consumption based operating model, the way that they think about money is very different. I used to be an internal IT. I also have worked in a data center hosted company in my past roles before joining soft choice. And that was very much a CapEx business model, multiple year hardware refresh cycles renewable pieces and seeing things like that. When we help customers migrate from that into a cloud consumption model, the ways in which they think about spending money versus the value they get for that money shifts from a depreciation schedule of a three or four year cycle or whatever they have on their hardware down to what's the benefit. What's the use what's the performance I get maybe down to the second or minute of that service. And they're thinking about things like throughput scalability burst ability business resiliency in a much different context than if you're just going to have multiple data centers with integrated data and servers. So that's one of the biggest areas that we see a lot of customers sort of change their viewpoint, and we have to help them with that because the old ways of thinking about spending money on technology really shift as well. And many customers can get there and get there fast and others need help. And so that's where we help in that in that purchasing relationship so we actually do two things to help them one is we fully report and give them full visibility and dashboards into how they spend money on Azure. Yep, down the skew we give them tools to do budget modeling and charge back build back to different lines of business these are things that you know traditional internal it on premise technology working with you know the accounting department solved decades ago, which now changes in the new cloud world. Does that include sorry sorry to interrupt but does that include right sizing. Yep. Yeah, okay. So your customer is using a lot more than they actually need that will come into your report and actually help them use the resources better. Yeah, yeah, we help them. We help them with that and we also help them consider alternative purchase models like reserved instances and optimizing their spend on compute in those kind of ways. And then we always, we always look at what's going to give them the confidence to start trying things in cloud that's where we marry up a 24 7365 support model so if they're doing Azure business with us they get those two things just for doing business with us, and they really ramped up their confidence level and then we, we add the value added services on top and and lighthouse underpins all those things in the way that we access those environments and then extend those technologies support services and automation engines into each of their Azure subscriptions. So you've mentioned so far that you have benefits in terms of policies and governance in terms of automation and and and support in terms of OPEX capex and financial operations for your customers. Any drawbacks. Anything that you wish would be a little different. Certainly so I think one of the, the interesting parts of the interaction with the customer is that they're looking for us to proactively warn them when there is an issue or an outage in their environment. And that gets difficult when it goes beyond the service layer so more complex the cloud environment gets the more application aware or output of that application aware your monitoring systems need to be. So from a, you know, technology standpoint we have to augment the capabilities with their party solutions which are fairly expensive. Depending on what the customers looking to do also require pretty intimate knowledge of their application or, or, you know, application stack. So that creates a pretty large uplift in the skills required to deliver those kind of services for those, those customers that are doing native cloud development, or, you know, highly dynamic workloads in cloud. That's one drawback you've got to as a partner we had to bring those skills to the table to meet that challenge. It wasn't plug and play and I don't, I don't know if there would be ever a future where that can be plug and play. But that's, that's a bit of an uplift I would say and capabilities and you got to convince the customer that you can actually dig into their application much deeper than they might be willing to let you to provide those insights. Right sizing of VM is fairly easy to predict them and analyze right sizing a massive application spread around multiple data centers globally using serverless compute everywhere that's a totally different scenario we're looking at user stories and you're getting into their dev ops, you know, processes as their CI CD pipelines and that's a whole nother level of interaction. So from that standpoint, it's a, it's a big jump to go from that resell support motion that we are, are heavily engaged into the much more intimate into the customer environment. The technology allows us to do both but convincing the customer they need that help is where it gets challenging. Yeah, but at least the customer can or your next customer can benefit from that knowledge that you've already acquired and get to that point much faster than they would if they were trying to do this on their own. Yeah, so absolutely. Our, I guess you could say it's sort of like an economy of scale scale. We have the ability to learn best practices update knowledge basis and then as we, as we, you know, solve these challenges for one customer in a specific vertical or industry that might apply to other individuals or other customers in that same vertical or industry, and we bring those best practices to bear we we update our baselines and our images and things like that and then it just constantly improves across multiple customers. One of the what I think the challenges is as they get used to our interaction level in the cost reporting and support and right sizing and those kinds of things especially at the infrastructure layer. I would like this to already know if there's a problem or an issue with the Azure layer, or even their application layers the Azure layer is a tough one because you know we're constantly juggling outage alerts and stuff across many customers so it's, sometimes it's hard to say is this an Azure platform issue like a service outage which is super rare of course but, or is it a specific to that customers application and code issue things like that so when you start seeing, you know those proverbial warning lights going off across hundreds of customers it's like okay how do we rapidly drill into this and determine that we need to escalate maybe back to Microsoft and suggest the problem at the platform layer rather than an individual customer. It's hard to it's hard to not when you're seeing all these warning lights as you mentioned across a bunch of different customers to not jump to the conclusion that there's an underlying infrastructure it might just be a coincidence. Yeah, but you can't make that assumption you still have to look it up and ensure that it's not a foundation system. Yeah, or even some outside Azure dependency service that we found you know maybe customers contracted with somebody like an Adobe, or something like that for other parts of their application stack and it's impacting services within the Azure cloud because they're all interdependent across you know a hybrid deployment with CDNs or third party DNS systems or whatever you know there's there's thousands of examples but that's always the challenge when we have this level of access the customers get used to it and they're looking for those immediate answers and sometimes we can't provide it even with the greatest technology. Well, Patrick that was that was actually enlightening there there's there's a portion of that sort of like reseller service partner that I've not been really close with in the last in the last few years and and I really enjoyed our conversation that it really puts in perspective the benefits for the reseller or the partner but also for the customers who are using those systems for support for fin ops for operations and and troubleshooting. So I want to thank you very much for spending the time with us to talk about your experience as a reseller or a service partner as you mentioned. I'm going to have to change that that that word in my head and now start stop using reseller and stop using service partner. So Patrick, thank you very much for spending the time with us. This was very educational for me and for our audience and I wish you all the best. Thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate you having me and it's been great to just talk about our last couple years of evolution as a reseller to a services partner and we're still reseller but most of the value ring is in that services sphere of influence with our customers so it's been awesome. I really appreciate it. Appreciate you asking me to be on the on the on the call here. All right. Thank you very much.


Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Bauer, I'm from Leicester, Massachusetts, and I'm the Civil Affairs Marine assigned to Task Force Quantico. The mission of Civil Affairs is to identify civil considerations for the commander to take on board and provide the commander with timely information to make relevant decisions on a daily basis. In this context, the Civil Affairs Marines are connecting with our Afghan allies who are here at Upshire on a daily basis to understand the needs of safety, health while providing respect and future possibilities and hope for our Afghan allies who are here with us. Operation Allies Welcome provides an opportunity for us as Marines to support the Afghan residents that we're living here in Upshire with. And some of the things that we identify as Civil Affairs Marines are resiliency within the community in which we partner with. And it's amazing to see the internal ownership of our new residents as they step up and want to provide expertise within their traditional areas. Some of them are sports players, some of them are teachers, some of them are doctors. And a lot of our Afghan partners who are here at Upshire are English-speaking, and they really want to play a crucial role to support the residents that we're sharing our space here with them because they want to take a partnership with the Marines here to provide the best support and services for their friends and neighbors within Upshire.


Good afternoon to everybody and welcome back to the research methods in educational technology workshop. I think that with that we should actually get started with the with the technical part of the workshop. So, if we all want to become ET researchers, one of the first things we have to learn is what is an ET research paper, what is in it, what should not be in it and so on. And I do not only mean the structure of the paper, but what should be the features in it, what do referees look for and so on. So, to explore this question more, what we will do here is, so we will look at a few examples and I would like all of you to vote by raising your hand, your real hand, not your virtual hand, inside your classrooms, inside your centres and the centre coordinator here can facilitate the vote and once the majority vote of the centre is known, the centre coordinator could please just reply to us through chat whether your answer from the centre is a yes or a no. So, we will do one trial first, please read what is there in the italics here. This is an example of a research paper, of a research, it is an example of a research idea and what you need to do is vote whether this looks like a research paper or not. Please take your time, do not start voting, this is, please take your time and is this really a research paper or is this a teacher, a faculty member doing something. So, take a minute, please read it and raise your hand in, so that your coordinator can see what is going on. Let us move on, what I see in the chat window is that there were a lot of yeses to begin with and then there are a few noes which are going up. The question is, is the paragraph written here, is it really a research paper or not and the correct answer is that no, it is not a research paper. So, all of you who voted yes, please stop voting for this particular question now, we will do some discussion of this question right now. So, all of you who think that this is a research paper, I would urge you very strongly to go back and read this. What is being written in this paragraph is an instructor who uses colored chalk or markers in order to draw pictures and waveforms. The instructor thinks that the usage of such methods will make the lecture clear to students. The instructor is correct in saying that the usage of such methods might make the lecture clear to students. However, a solution like this is tried by many instructors, it looks like an obvious or a known solution and simply compiling known solutions is not a research study, it will not help you write a research paper, even though the idea might have value as a teaching strategy. So, in your practice as a faculty member, you may have tried several effective solutions to improve teaching, but not all of them can be converted to a research study and what is required is that the solution is something unique and it is novel. If it is not a novel solution, if it is an obvious solution like the one we just saw, then it is very difficult to convert it into a research study. So, let us move on to the next example and again I would like you to read it first, think whether it is really a research study or is it a teacher thinking about the different tasks that he or she would do in the class. This is example 2, please take a moment to read it. All participants in all centers including IIT Bombay can just raise their hand to say whether they think the answer is 1 or 2. So, that the center coordinator can see what their answer is. Please stop voting at this point, let us discuss this example. Again, I am seeing a mixes of yeses and noes and there are two things I want to mention here. Firstly, the correct answer is still a no, this is not a research paper. The second point I want to mention is those of you who are voting as soon as you see the slide, you are getting it wrong. Those of you who are waiting to think and then convey the answer on the chat, there is a higher likelihood that your answer is indeed correct. So, for this example and for the few examples I again request you to take your time, read, think and only then vote. So, please stop voting on this question, let us discuss why this is not a research study. So, let us see what is happening in this idea. Again this is an instructor who has an idea which is slightly more interesting this time because he or she is explaining the importance of the topic and its practical applications to industry. This instructor is also trying to connect the topic to global and local current scenarios that exist in industry and exist in the real world. So, there is an idea here. On the other hand, as one of you mentioned in the chat, I only saw one answer which said that this only looks like a report and you are right this is a report of the strategy you implemented, it is not a research paper even if it contains a good idea. To be considered as an acceptable research paper, what you need to show is details of why your strategy is unique, how it can solve the problem and very importantly you need to establish evidence that the idea works saying that my students are happy, my students look like they are learning is not considered as evidence in a research paper. So, to summarize again for if you write a report of what you did and say that my students seem happy, it is not a research paper. So, let us move on to the third example. Again please do not vote for at least one minute after you see the example and only then you can start voting. The third example is related to the use of moodle. So, please stop voting, let us look at what is going on in this idea. Some of you may be surprised, but this particular idea that you saw the one with moodle is still not a research paper. So, those of you who think that this is a research paper, please see why we do not consider this as a research paper and even though it looks like the instructor is trying to use educational technology tool, what the instructor is doing here is using the educational technology tool in a very routine manner mostly for administrative purposes. So, use of an ET tool in a routine manner is not considered to be a research paper. In order to be considered as an acceptable research paper, what you need to do is implement an innovative method of using this tool and the innovative method must address some teaching learning goal. So, saying that you will use moodle to upload assignments and give quizzes will not be considered as a research paper and what I like all of you to do at this point is a slightly different activity. For the same idea that you saw a moment ago, what I like the participants to do is talk to your neighbor and come up with one innovative way in which you can use moodle for teaching or learning. A single innovative method that each pair can think of and share with their coordinator. Let us stop there for a moment. We saw that this is not a research study because the use of moodle is done in an extremely routine manner. So, how do you convert this to a research study? Think of one innovative idea that you can implement with moodle. At this moment, all of you should be discussing about an idea to convert this into a research study. We do not as we had mentioned earlier, we do not want all of you to sit passively and listen, nobody is going to give you an answer here. So, this is the time we can see what you are what is happening in your centers. So, this is the time where you have to talk to each other and share your ideas with each other. I see we start seeing one idea here, two ideas have started to come in please go on. Let me read out some of the interesting ideas that have started coming in from the centers. The question was how to use moodle in a more innovative manner. Some of the ideas that came in were that spoken tutorials can be used and uploaded on moodle and students can interact with the spoken tutorials on moodle to achieve some teaching learning goal that something perhaps you could consider to as a research study, as an idea for a research study, a couple of more people have written about using the chat forum in moodle to ask something, to have students interact about something very specific. Again, that can form the basis of an idea if you structure the question properly. Some of you have said that different forums can be used to for students to work on different projects within moodle that is something you can do. So, fine. It looks like in most of the centers you do have ideas on how to use moodle in an effective manner. The point we are trying to make here is what we said earlier that in order to be considered as a acceptable research paper, you need to use an educational technology tool in a more innovative way than for routine tasks. So, let us go on to the next activity and I am glad that there is so much active participation, but we will have to move on to the next mini activity. You can keep discussing these ideas during the tea break and the lunch break and next week and also on moodle during the coming week. Okay, here is the final such question. This here, the person is using moodle and interactive multimedia content and read it again think whether the idea as it stands can be considered as a research study or not. Take your time, think about it and only then please vote, do not start voting before you read it. Okay, it looks like there is a lot more knows this time. So, it seems like you have got the hang of this game. The answer is not always no, but for this question it is still a no except that we have said that the answer is a not yet as opposed to an outright no because the idea that is there in this paragraph does seem to have some basis to be converted into a research study. The person who is thought of this idea as considering animated videos to teach a certain concept they are also thinking about how to get the students more interested in interactive and so on. But what it looks like is that what is being done here is mere development of instructional material and if you only think of developing instructional material it is not a research paper even if the material has an interesting and innovative idea. To be considered as an acceptable research paper what needs to be shown what you need to do is show that the material has resulted in some improvement in terms of student learning or engagement. So, you need to connect the development of the material to some results to some evaluation that there is indeed an improvement in student learning. For example, this is the same example that is on this page. What you can do two examples of what you can do is written at the bottom of the page. You need to show evidence that the material has resulted in improvement in student learning or engagement. You can give a quiz to test students understanding on a concept learnt through multimedia and compare it with their understanding on a similar concept through a traditional textbook. So, you need to think of some such evaluation mechanism for the instructional material. So, let us just recap and summarize and these points are extremely important that is why we are repeating it over and over again. Compiling existing or obvious solutions like I am going to use colored chalk is not going to become a research paper. Reporting the strategy you implemented is not a research paper. Using an ET tool or any software tool in a routine manner is not cannot be considered as a research paper. And finally, mere development of instructional material is not an ET research paper. So, the important question in front of us at this point is what is a research paper? So far we have seen what cannot be considered as a research paper. We saw many examples and even though there was some potential there was some idea in some of the examples, none of them yet qualifies as a research paper. So, the two questions we want to explore now are what is a research paper and how do we convert this potential in the idea into an educational technology research study. Essentially, how do we take our ideas as teachers and practitioners and then convert it into an educational technology research idea. So, in order to do that what we will first do is examine some good papers, some strong papers that have already been published in educational technology conferences and looking at these papers, examining them and analyzing the features that are there in them would give us some idea of what is a research paper. Again, there is a lot of reading for you to do. So, I will pause at each slide, let you read it and then go on to the next activity. Let us look at some different types of educational technology research papers. And these are papers related research studies related to innovative classroom or lab strategies that have been implemented to improve student learning. There is a longish paragraph here I would like you to spend some time and read this. The title of the paper is how we teach impact, how we teach impact student learning and the authors have compared two methods. One is called peer instruction or peer discussion, second is a lecture method and this is in a programming course. What exactly has been done is present in this paragraph. So, please spend a couple of minutes to read this. Let us try to analyze this paragraph in detail. So, I am going to use the zoom feature so that you can actually read it, but at your end also please make sure that the screen is set to full size, you do not need to see the image of the instructor, you can you only need the slide at this point. If you look at the first sentence, the authors say that we look at the impact on student learning of the pedagogical approach. So, the problem has been described in a very precise manner. There is an impact of the pedagogical approach on student learning and that is what they are trying to study in this paper. Secondly, if you look at how they have done it, they are using a technique called peer instruction and that is novel because it is something different than the traditional lecture approach that one uses. So, this particular research study also has the feature that the solution tried, the idea tried to improve teaching and learning has a novel approach within it and these are the features that you want to try to connect to your own idea. We will come to that later, but as we are looking at the features in these bubbles in these callouts, start thinking about how you can make your own idea novel and how you can precisely define your own idea and so on. Let us look at some other features of this particular study. If you read the second sentence, it says we compare two sections of a non-majors programming course offered in the same term by the same instructor covering the same content and utilizing the same book labs and exams. So, what these people have tried very hard is to keep the conditions of the experimentation as similar as possible and the only thing they have changed is the solution approach the new idea of peer instruction in one of the classes because if you think a scientist and if you are performing an experiment, you want to keep, you want to control for the conditions that are not part of the experiment. You only want to vary one variable at a time. That is why these authors have implemented a very sound procedure by trying to keep all the other variables not related to the study constant and have only varied whether there is a lecture or whether there is a peer instruction method. So, in your research studies again you have to think of a procedure which is which is sound and is implemented systematically. So, this is just putting all the different features of this particular idea. There was a novel solution approach, there was a precise problem definition, there was a sound procedure. There is one more at the bottom here. The last sentence says that we find that students in the peer instruction section score an average of 5.7 percent higher than in standard lecture practices in the final exam. So, the researchers have evaluated their solution, they have evaluated the two different conditions the peer instruction section and the lecture section on the final exam. And from the scores they have done an analysis, they have also told us what sort of analysis they have done. So, this research study has evaluated the solution again in a very sound manner. So, I hope that gives you some idea of what all needs to be present in a research study. And let us look at one more example to make this idea more clear. There are several other examples in this slide. I am only going to show one more example in this session. But the slides will be uploaded in Moodle and part of your homework assignment for this week is to go through the slides that we did not discuss. For example, this is an example that I will not discuss. Computerized Molecular Modeling in Chemistry. It is a very interesting study here because the authors have used three-dimensional simulations and they have looked at what is what kind of learning happens. But instead let us move on to another example and this example is of a slightly different category and that is why I wanted to discuss it here. In your in this workshop or as part of your faculty, I mean as part of your faculty class, one of the things you might be doing is developing instructional material. We saw a few examples so far. Now if there is some innovative component of the instructional material and if the evaluation of it is done in a systematic manner, you can think of considering it as a research study. So let us look at one example. Again I will put the slide up so that you can read and at your end make sure it is full screen and zoomed in and so on. Okay, let us see what is happening in this example. Again if you read the very first sentence, I am going to zoom the sentence so that all of you can read it. The first sentence says mental rotation ability is important in various fields ranging from engineering to architecture to education to technology. Which means right away the authors have established the importance of the problem. The title is the improvement of mental rotation ability using Blender 3D. This was published in T40 2012. So apart from defining the problem precisely, another feature, another aspect that needs to be there in a research study is establishing why it is important. The next point we want to see in this study is something we will come to again in the following session. But this is one place where you can see it very well. Let me read out the sentence. The authors say that most existing techniques to improve mental rotation ability require weeks of training and are based on proprietary software. So the authors have not only looked at related work, they have also analyzed what is missing, what are the gaps in the related work. Which is exactly what you need to be doing for your idea when you are converting it into a research study. First we have to analyze related work. There is a whole session we have on it today afternoon. But this is one quick example where the authors in one paragraph have not only said that there are other existing techniques, but they have clearly pointed out that they are very time consuming. That is one gap and the other gap is that they are based on proprietary software. If you read the next sentence, the authors say that their program is only 3 hours long and they have used open source software. So their solution is directly addressing the gaps. Their solution approach is also novel because they have used Blender which is a 3D game engine. It is mostly used for entertainment and for making 3D movies. But there are not that many studies that have used Blender to create material for education and that is why it is considered as a novel solution approach. Let us look at the last sentence here or towards the end. The authors say that we use Vandenberg's mental rotation test for pre and post test and we see a large effect size. So again this idea of evaluation of solution is very strongly present here. They have used an already existing test, they have done it in a pre and post, they have a sample, they have described who are their participant, who are the subjects, who is the sample. So there is a sound evaluation scheme of their idea. They did not stop at simply saying we develop the material. They also went ahead and used this test as a pre and post test and have evidence to support the solution because they see what is called as a large effect size. So again to put all of this together, some good features in published research papers are analyzing gaps, importance of problem, novel approach, sound evaluation and so on. There are some other examples. I will simply pause at this slide so that you can read it and get an idea of the different types of published research papers, different examples, different ideas that people have tried and all these have been written by faculty members who are also now doing research in educational technology, some by PhD students. The previous example I showed was by a PhD student. There are a few questions on chat asking what is mental rotation and that is a good question because since I did not have much space on the slide, I removed the first sentence which said what was mental rotation and I see that that was something that one should not do because many of you are asking what is mental rotation. So when you write about your own problem, you have to start with the definition of the problem. Mental rotation just to give you a quick answer, mental rotation is a spatial ability is the ability of a person to be able to take a 3D image without having a real life object, rotate it mentally and try to imagine what is there on the back. This is a very difficult ability to do mentally and if one has the physical 3 dimensional object it is easy without it many of us find it difficult. For example, if you have a pyramid and want to see what is on the back of the pyramid or if you have a tetrahedron which is unequal, which is not a regular polyhedron or tetrahedron then one needs to be able to rotate it and see what is on the back. So what is being done in this study is the author, the researcher has developed a 3D model of the object so that students can see what is, can rotate this object in the virtual software and see what is going on. Okay, let us move on. So here is an activity which we will now move to an assignment because we lost two hours so some of the activities we will have to move towards an assignment but let me just describe to you what the activity is. You recall this idea that you had that we had seen earlier and we said that this was not yet a research paper. The researcher was trying to create interactive multimedia content and animated videos and they wanted to upload it on Moodle so that the concept could be understandable by the students. What the assignment is going to be, what is required for this idea to be considered as an acceptable research paper. So instead of doing it as an in workshop in class activity right now, we are running slightly out of time. Let us move this, I want all of you, I would like all of you to think about this and we will post it as a Moodle activity. The question is quite simple, somebody gives you a partial idea and the, what you have to do is how do you move this into the category of an acceptable research paper. Another slide that I would like you to recall what is not a research paper, we said this is quite important that is why we are putting it over and over again. Just take a moment to read this. So we will also now summarize what is a research paper based on the examples that we saw. So what should a research paper contain or what should be there in a research paper? When you are doing a research study and subsequently when you are writing a research paper, you must explain the precise and detailed description of the problem you are working on. You have to explain why the problem is important, you have to describe how you have solved the problem, what is your solution. You have to convince the reader and the referee as to why your solution is innovative and for this you have to talk about what has been done earlier in order to establish that your work is indeed innovative. And then you also have to evaluate your solution. When you think of the answers to these five questions, a lot of the good features of a strong research paper are in place. So you start with an idea which looks more like a report of what you have done and then you see whether you have written what is the problem I have worked on, you have tried to establish that the solution is innovative and so on and you are halfway there to thinking about a research study. In addition, the person who is going to be reading your research paper is the referee, the first person and before others can read it, the referee has to be convinced that the solution is indeed innovative, the procedure is sound and the evaluation claims are valid just like we saw in the examples so far. We will do a few more examples today to get all these ideas more crystallized, but this is the first time you are seeing a list, you may have seen it earlier, but first time you are seeing examples and seeing how each of these can be implemented. So, that is really our next question. We have a list of the criteria or the features that we want to implement in a research study, but how do you do so? How does one do so? We saw examples, we saw examples of abstracts and of summaries, but how do you actually do it in the entire paper? So, what we will do in the next session and we are going to start the next session in about 2 or 3 minutes. Let me just describe to you what this session is before that. It is the same session, it is a part P of the same session. What you will do is analyze 2 papers. One is called paper A and one is called paper B, there is no, we are not going to say that this is a completely different session, we will just seamlessly move through the sessions right now. We will take a break at 3.30, 14.


People suffering from psychosis have increased risks of cardiovascular disease, obesity, and type 2 diabetes, as well as reduced life expectancy. Limited data exists on the dietary habits of people with first episode psychosis compared to the general population. This study evaluated the diets of 143 patients with first episode psychosis and found significant differences in total energy intake, total fat consumption, and protein consumption when compared to the national sample. Additionally, men with first episode psychosis had significantly lower intakes of folate, iron, selenium, vitamin D, and zinc, while women had significantly lower intakes of iron and vitamin D. These findings suggest that further investigation into dietary habits among those with first episode psychosis is necessary to ensure adequate nutrition and reduce the risk of chronic diseases.


All right, so we're here to talk about must have blogging tools and again, this is Frank's presentation I'm gonna go with his slides and his recommendations, but I'm gonna because I'm here and I got to you know horn in I'm gonna voice a couple of my own opinions at the same time so This is about who's Frank and so we can skip it All right So what he was saying what he was talking about today, but I'm gonna talk about the same thing So what I'm talking about today is idea generation Planning creating and editing and marketing of your blog posts So from idea generation to post-publish, which is what you publish. You're not done, right? I promote that thing doesn't do any good at publishing it. Nobody reads it right We're gonna follow on all of those so his first topic was idea generation coming up with ideas for your post Now if any of you are anything like me I've come up with mine when I'm running or exercising on my iPod for me a song makes me think of it So unfortunately, I have to keep repeating that quote in my head so I can get somewhere to write it down Hopefully you don't have that problem or in the shower But he has some tools if you can't come up with the idea you can't come up with that perfect topic He's got a couple tools here So the first one is buzz sumo and that's I know you can't see it be use easy Sumo like the wrestler.com This is a program that Analyzes and your key search to tell you what kind of topics might work with that So you basically just plug in and remember sometimes you're gonna see keyword you're allowed to use a key phrase But don't forget that you have to sum up your whole idea in one word Don't write a whole sentence into these things because it's gonna get a little wonky But if you're if you're looking it say the topic is content marketing You don't have to just put content or try to make some weird hybrid of content marketing You can just go ahead and put content marketing and it'll be fun and you don't have to do dashes or calm and don't look calm So that's one tool is buzz sumo.com. I I don't specifically use this tool I've used buzz sumo products of different kinds So it's very well spoken of in the industry and you'll be able to get some ideas for your blog code The next one is Google com trends and this is basically just gonna tell you so google.com slash trends And it's basically gonna tell you just what's trending on a specific topic So if you put in something like content marketing, it might give you a bunch of different options like visual content marketing Or what's the buzz at the time is blogging versus blogging versus video blogging So it's gonna tell you just what's with the trending topics are under your main key phrase. Does that make sense? So this isn't necessarily gonna generate something for you. It's gonna let you know what's hot What's popular at the time based on your key phrase that you put in Okay, oh Before I even go on if you have a question while I'm talking go ahead just raise your hand I don't I don't feel like you have to wait till the end because I know sometimes you have a question and you try to remember Till the end and then you get to the end you're like Which is never fun. All right hot spot very long in the industry and they have a topic generator Because this URL is really really long and you can't see it Just wait for the slides, but it's their hot spot.com and if you look for the topic generator You'll be able to find it now it actually does it based on nouns You have to put in now it's you can put in three nouns that have something to do with what you think you want to write about You know, and then it will Help you with the process so you wouldn't want to put in marketing because marketing is probably it's a noun and a verb So it might not do so well, so you might want to put in puppy kitten Okay But don't put in verbs or adverbs or adjectives. It's not gonna work so well, so it's a little bit different I mean you have to kind of think outside the box about what might make it work And that's why it's a little bit different because they're trying to be a little bit different and not just have the same idea Generation of every other tool under the planet This now hot spot as many of you know is actually a fairly expensive product But this part of it is free to you important idea generator I don't know anything about this, but I looked at it real quick So I would not sound like a complete moron when I went through his slide You basically just like many of them you just put a subject in You you hit an arrow to give you some ideas, but it says for the best results Which I know you can't see so I'm going to read those to you. Don't capitalize your keywords Use the singular version of a keyword so don't stick an S on the end. So don't take logs take long don't say videos say video and Revise the result to create your own fantastic results So if you get something that's a little bit off figure out a way to revise that key phrase to get you some Difficult and I would say to do that in any idea generating topic Because sometimes what happens is we are fixated on this has to be what it is but if we just tweak our key phrase a little bit we'll get better ideas because Sometimes we're all too but we're busy people and we go for they had immediate Instead of sitting there and brainstorming and trying to I know I hate the phrase think outside the box But if we do that we're going to come up with stuff that if it doesn't feel so big already been done already been written already been read Already been tweeted. So just take a few minutes to see how you could kind of tweak your key phrases that you're searching And you'll get more results. You'll get different results red Okay, so before I want before I talk about this one just a warning if you go into certain reddits and subreddits It can get a little volatile the conversation. So Consider that you might get into some conversations that maybe aren't 100% appropriate all the time and they also can get a little hostile sometimes So you have to go in knowing that But it is great if you want to hit a topic that's niche driven or a specific a Specific group of people driven because there are so many reddits and subreddits that are really targeted toward a specific people so motorcycle riders who Barbecue after every ride You can really niche down Within reddit because there are so many and they're called reddits like the main categories of content marketing and then subreddits would be blogging Visual marketing all those sorts of things that come under the main topic So you can really niche down But I didn't want to worry while it is a very good tool if you're looking for stuff You can wander into subreddits where you might feel a little uncomfortable. I just wanted to make sure everybody All right, I'm actually gonna pop in with a couple of my own here before we go to the next topic because These are some of the kind of like those more not this tool This is just some things you can do a good RSS speed of other industry and peer sites Can be a great way to come up with ideas You're not gonna copy anybody's content, but you're gonna see what is being written about what is popular at the time And then add your own spin to it Nothing that has been written about in the last five years. It's has truly been it's all been said before It's all been written. It's all been read. It's all been tweeted and any other form of you know Social media is all been shared as Long as you take that topic and don't copy anybody's content verbatim You actually write it yourself and put your own spin on it. You're creating new content You're creating content that is worthy of being shared because you are saying what you think about the topic The other idea which is an internet is not a tool either is look back at your Previously posted articles your previous publishers Look at your analytics see what was popular and is there a way for you to take that topic and Rewrite it or republish it with a new spin on it. Can you update it? Is there a new version of the tool you wrote about and Go ahead switch your feature image so you have something new so you can share it again And it doesn't look like it's already been shared And just modernize it make it new make it fresh and show that topic again It was popular the first time for a reason it'll probably be popular again when you update it There's nothing wrong with revising old content and using it again now if you create a totally brand new post out of it You might want to consider Doing a redirect from the old post to the new you might want to that's really up to you It's how you think it's gonna work if you think it's gonna cause problems with If Google's gonna think it's repeat content and all that and we're not gonna go into all that because that's a topic all of its own But that's your choice to decide, okay Now cleaning and organizing your ideas. I bet you guys are gonna know a lot of these tools already So how many people in here use Evernote store your blog ideas? Okay, right? so If you don't want to just keep a bunch of drafts in WordPress itself And some people don't like to do that I'm gonna admit I have like 325 draft posts in WordPress waiting to be written Some will finally be deleted once I realize the topic is old and boring because I never actually wrote it, but I do that But Evernote is a fantastic place to store your ideas because you can just go in and type an idea if you want to But they also have a thing called the clipping tool So you can clip snippets of another post and say, okay I know I want to write and use my own take on this and you can save it right to Evernote So this would be one of your browser tools the clip it tool and you can do that You can save an image into Evernote You're not stuck to just typing out your thought, you know that that's remembered from the shower, right? You can do all sorts of different things and I'm sure Frank had some very specific things to share about this And I'm sorry that he's not here to share them with you But it's a wonderful tool now He didn't put it in there But if you like Google Drive better than Evernote Same thing you can do the same thing that I when I'm not posting them in post waiting to be published Years down the line and hogging up all my space. I Put them into Google Drive. So it works much the same It doesn't have a clipping tool But you can certainly put images into your files to save for later. You know all different kinds of stuff links You can make spreadsheets actually you can put videos in there You can actually put a presentation full presentation into it if you want to so that's it's a great place So either one of those works about the same Google.com keep this is this is going to be something like this It's sort of like a save it to read for later kind of thing more so than Is it capture what's on your mind? So it's really Explain it because again, I didn't have a whole lot of time for this. I'm so sorry but It says save your thoughts wherever you are. So it's an app for your phone So what you could do is you can put a little snippet like while you're on your run This song title. I thought I could write about this I saw this sign on the road You took a picture of it and keep because you know sometimes you're driving on the road and you get an idea from like a sign on the road Oh, you're like, oh, darn it. Now again, let me just add if you're driving don't take a picture of it Please hopefully somebody else is in the car.  So in a way, it's kind of like a non-visual Pinterest of sorts Trello llo.com And once you get to you can set up these different boards and you can set them up with different topics You can add little subboards under it and they're very brutal. It's very visual even though it's not pictured So this is for the kind of person likes to see everything in front of them They don't have to go back and forth from document up. You can see everything there So you can't really see it, but he's got these different small boards here He's got article ideas Researching on hold those are the ones that you decide. You don't want to write about that right now Maybe that topic is a little too volatile right now Writing so he's got like writing article ideas there to put editing and graphics He's got some ideas for some different types of posts I'm just gonna share some of the ones he shared because I'm sure he meant for them to be shared for reason get the gift of Trello Gold Unlimited labels these are all these are all things about Trello So he's letting you know that Trello Gold is the premium version unlimited labels. You can have as many labels as you want No, that's a bike shop case study. No, no, no Road mapping with the public Trello board again is a public board So it's kind of like a reddit of sorts of something we can see what other people are doing How do you use Trello like a pro and introducing powerups calendar card aging? That's part of Trello G You can actually have where your your cards at a certain age that we get moved So see kind of have like an in progress, but it doesn't ever get to the next step It'll move to like a archived folder and so it's kind of nice that it automatically does that for you So if it's been sitting there for six months, whatever your time frame is and you haven't updated it It moves it so you don't have to like worry that you'll have so many in that in that boost that you can't get around So it's pretty nice Again, it's for something like sit all in front of them at once While an every note or something kind of have to move around from note to note and see and here's all in front of you You're that kind of planner and you know, we all plan and we all learn differently So it's if you like it all in front of you. This is really good for that Am I talking too fast? Now it's a little bit different because this is actually sort of like a plug-in and also a social media tool at the same time So you have to eat in it. You get a free trial, but this is a paid. This is a premium. It's not a freemium program So co-schedule actually kind of works with Co-schedule it's a tool and it has it has a lot of different features It can help you with your social sharing that's part of what it does But it can also store ideas for later use and you can it will put them into into a calendar within WordPress so Within WordPress itself you can use a lot of different calendar planner tools like editorial calendars Co-schedule has its own, but the reason why it's unique is it also has the functionality of once you publish it You can tell it that you want to automatically go to Facebook or you want to automatically go to Twitter or one of those others at the same time This is a multi-purpose tool. It's not just for like Editorial calendar use or storing ideas But the reason you use it why he's put it in here is that you get an idea for a blog post You can put it in there and you can put it on a specific day Like I'm going to write about this on this day and it sort of gives you reminders And then you can flesh it out from there and then we'll do all the other steps with it Does that make sense? So it's kind of a multi-purpose tool so you can actually use it for more than just the idea sharing But because it's in this part and again, I don't know for sure I think that's why he put it here It is paid it's a pain from you get like I think you get a 10-day free trial and then it is it is a premium Now wordpress itself has it's you know really simple not a lot of bells and whistles editorial calendar plugin And that's strictly a calendar So it's gonna just give you a little window and you can put in the idea I'm gonna write this on this day You can drag and drop them to different dates because we know what we all do we say we're gonna write about this topic on Thursday we get to Thursday. We're like, I don't read about that. Please drag it down to the next Tuesday or six months away If you're feeling not feeling like it is that I do that all the time That's why I have eight million written drafts. I can just pick and choose what I feel are writing about that day But it lets you get the drag and drop simple calendar where you just you basically just move the title And you still have to go in and write a blog post in the normal way that you would know post You have to set up a new post, but this is just a simple drag and drop calendar. I think it has reminders I think it'll send reminders to you, but it's very very simple and it's free flow plug-in is another one of those now This one actually gives you progress reports. So as the WordPress itself one is just a title. You're just gonna see the title. This one tells you the progress. It's a draft This one's pending review. It'll tell you when it's published Scheduled means that it's ready to go, but you're not doing it for you know, you're gonna publish it next week So it's not really all that different, but that it gives you the the status so you can see it right there Instead of having to click through to see the status I don't really you know, I don't understand why it tells you it's published. You're gonna know if you published it already, but I Didn't know. Now we get to a little bit more fun part. So you've got the idea generated You've got a great title You've got an idea of when you're gonna publish it now We're actually gonna write the thing and make it sound and look right. So we're creating an editing So we got the co-stable headline analyzer because if they don't like the headline, they're not gonna click through and read it, right? So this is a really simple tool That's gonna give you a score and the higher the score the better it is. So this one is not good It's only 26 percent. Let me tell you what that title is. Let's go to word camp That's not a good title Problem and here's why I can actually think why that's not a good title because word camp would be the featured phrase Right of the event. It's not at the front It's not at the front. It's the last word and that alone is not you know You can put a word you don't have to put your keyword in the front of it You can get around with other things, but it's pretty vague other than that. It's pretty vague just in general. Let's go Yeah, it's a call to action, but it's not Call to action so this one got 26 and it says it's a B plus because it's you know, it says it It says it's you know uncommon, but the word balance isn't all that great and that word balance is where's that case phrase That's really important in the title. So it's a great tool If you don't think your headlines are really drawing the kind of click-throughs that you need You might want to use a tool like this.  I'm to your content. They're not coming back This one is very popular It's the Hemingway editor and Basically, you put in your text and it tells you are you too wordy are you taking too long to get to the point? Are you using to are your words too long? Are you using 25 cent words when a nipple word with subites? and Are you using adverb? Okay? Here's one people who use a lot of adverbs sometimes if they don't need to use which turns it into passive voice when you stick adverbs in So you always want to be writing an active voice you've heard that a lot I'm guessing so this will tell you if you're doing all that, but I have a caveat to this one okay, if your native writing style is not short and Terse and to the point like Hemingway's was Don't take this with a grain of salt. Don't completely lose your own voice because the tool tells you to Okay, I rambled in my blog post idea. I obviously I ramble when I speak So so I ramble when I write my audience likes it because it's me You have to write so that you like it and so that your audience likes it Certain kind of blogs shouldn't be short terse Without any colorful language so This is gonna tell you if your sentences are too long if you speak in long sentences write along sentences I'm not saying you run on sentences with no punctuation by all means please use commas Please use periods in the right place But if you're not a very short if it's not technical writing point It's not if it's not an article to go out immediately on the newspaper That's a different kind of writing okay, if you're telling a story and it makes good sense in the story to have a pre Preliminary at the scene for your writing with the right kind of writing so I'm not saying to not use this But if it completely like told you everything about your writing is wrong If it helps you by maybe maybe it's better to make this two sentences instead of one That's different than it telling you you get an M. Everything is highlighted in a different color You you can put any yes, it doesn't have to be just people bloggers This is for any writing you can put any you could take the funny thing Is you can actually take like passages out of the book and see what Hemingway thinks about us? You're like what does Hemingway think of you know proofs I'm supposed to repeat the question when they ask it, but I think we got the point yes No, Hemingway is free. I mean if you want to know if it Hemingway was a paid for tool to free Just so you know, so I don't like a complete door. I'm supposed to repeat the question for the video All right, this tool is not so much an editing tool in the sense of like the writing itself This is to make sure your blog post is SEO friendly and yay for everybody in here This is the SEO tool I use so I can give it a roaring thumbs up and say way to go Frank way to go Frank This is Yoast SEO plug-in the great thing about this plug-in is it's easy to use because It gives you lights so you get a green light if you've done a good job You get a yellow caution light if there's a few things that you might want to look at you get a big red light Hey, don't publish this yet. It's not ready for SEO So you pick in it now you can't see this, but I want you to know it says focus keyword Same thing you can put a key phrase in don't put in a 10 word sentence But if your key phrase is three words here SEO plug-ins that's okay to use that can be a focus keyword What you don't want to do is try to put a bunch of key phrases in there No comms one so every blog post and this is really hard for people sometimes has to have one main focus You can't be talking about SEO and content marketing and Twitter all in the same post and say they're all equally important as keywords It can't do that This light makes it so easy to use you're gonna focus on that keyword and it's gonna tell you different things He only did the the very main screen Which is you put in that focus keyword And it tells me immediately is it in your heading? Is it in your page title? Is it in the page URL? Is it in your content? Yes, and how many times is in your content this time? Apparently it was 11 times really like that keyword and is it in your meta description? Yes Underneath this screen which you can barely see there's another screen which you can't see at all. It's not here It actually will give you specific details How many is your keyword in the first paragraph? People usually do that they think that they don't want to dive into the topic quite that quick But even if you're rambling like I do at the beginning make sure that keyword isn't the first the first paragraph Another thing is that you don't have any links out to other sites If there's no pertinent link to link out to don't do it. You don't have to you can get a main Okay, I want to say to you'll be in your screen See how you can tell exactly what I'm talking about by this In your blog post There's the yo's will be at the bottom underneath your post all the really expansive stuff But up in the top right corner you'll get an immediate is it a green light you can get a green light Even if you have some caution lights on specific parts It's a balance. It's a ratio if you've mostly got green lights I'll give you an overall green light at the top and Because you guys earlier guess you can use this on your pages to not just for your blog post And I'm going to tell you it's easier to get a full green light Everything green on a blog post because that page will be very specific and it's content driven if your homepage doesn't have a lot of content on it It's more like calls to action and links other places It's gonna be hard to get a green light. Don't freak out if your home page has a yellow light It has a red light. You got some work to do, but if your homepage has a yellow light, it's okay Just wanted to say that because it does have a you have to have so many words to get a green light And some home pages don't have that much coffee You're not going to be able to have that much coffee You don't feel like you have to kind of stuff content in places on your home page to get the to get the green light Any questions about Yoast? I really like Yoast so I could actually answer them All right now This is not something I've ever actually used but this is for you to find an image that is suitable for your content It's called the image inject plug-in. I'm a graphic designer So I have no problem having images of the first thing that's done in my before I even write that I've got the image in mind So I'm good there This will help you find an image that suits your keyword So you'll put your keyword in and search and it's going to give you some ideas for image images You can use and of course These are not going to be Google images. You're not going to just copy somebody's Google image, right? Because that's bad. We don't do that. This is I don't know a hundred percent I'm thinking this is in a link you to resources that are free for you to use or at least possibly with attribution again I couldn't test every tool that was in this before I gave the talk because I only found out about it like an hour So Pablo now this I actually know about because it's a buffer tool to get to it is buffer comm slash Pablo It's kind of their answer to canva if anybody uses canva or knows about canva, but it's simpler It's not quite as robust as canva and I don't think canva is robust because I'm a photoshop user But it's even a lower level. It's pretty simple. It's basically just putting a picture in and Optimizing it for your use. So if you're not a graphic designer or if you you know, you only feel comfortable with canva This might be a tool for you and I love buffer buffer is a fantastic Service we're gonna talk about buffer later when we talk about the promotion part It's a fantastic service that I absolutely love and they have great customer service You have any questions about using Pablo? They will answer quickly and and they're just I can't say nice No, thanks about them. They're very transparent. Anything goes wrong. They fix it You're good to go. Now here's canva What happens with canvas you can create images and they have templates for different sizes of your images So if you want a Pinterest image for pinning you can pick that template You can have a featured image for the top of the blog post use your featured image And it's it's a little more robust than popular You can actually layer like your logo in the corner to use of the watermark if you want to you can do some overlays and stuff like that Because I'm a graphic designer. I know Nikki's gonna laugh.   So there's those things the images are really big that come out of canva So I just want to warn you about that JPG Oh, I have no problem with the other one I think they do a fun job because if it's one leg any call any any optimization that happened from one leg is is a bonus But yes, if you have the tools to do that But the you can do it in here and you can't see them It's got some happy Easter pictures they also have you can use their stock photos that are free But they also will let you buy images for a dollar, but I do warn you even the ones that are a dollar They've all been used a lot.  I want you like That happens when you use tools like this because Because we're doing it because it's quick because we don't want to take the time and you You don't search all the way down. You just pick the first one that matches and that's why you get repeats So that's me being a graphic designer. I'm stopping I'm shutting up now This is the tool crack and IO. It's an image optimizer. So it's a like the other ones. I mentioned If you think it's cool just because of the name release the crackin Then if you want to use this one, I didn't get a chance to look at it But image optimizers are pretty much the same They're gonna take your image and you'll need to read in the in the comments about the image How it doesn't if it does it lossy or not lossy because there's different ways to compress an image Some of them will lose some of your the vibrancy because it the way it compresses. It'll kind of minimize the look of your stuff I don't want to go into a whole thing about what lossy means. That is not again another entire talk But so this is one it's k r a k e n sometimes crackin has two ks. This one only has one And here's what I was thinking of it. I think it's you it might be e triple w image optimizer Or e w w w image optimizer and if this is word presses image optimizer, so the W's probably stand for word But again, it's just another There are lots of optimizers out there by all means use the one that you like But the only reason we're bringing this up is because can be enemies are so large and sometimes even if you're using Photoshop yourself And you don't know how to optimize it within Photoshop It's easier to make the image there and then optimize it elsewhere You don't know how to use because there's a lot of different ways to optimize inside a true graphic program And if you don't feel comfortable, you just kind of want to have somebody else do it for you There's nothing wrong with that Here's his pre-published post checklist wordpress.org This is just gonna ask you questions. Are you really ready to publish this post? Have you checked the post title for your SEO? Have you made sure to put a feature dimension there and there's gonna be more. This is just the short list There's a drop-down menu, but in his slide I can't see the rest of it because it doesn't actually drop down Or up to see the next step underneath. So this isn't as easy to ask you very basic questions Is it optimized for SEO is your title there? Do you have a featured image? You know, have you checked it for? writing and that kind of stuff I'm sorry. I actually missed something. I'm gonna go back a little bit. I'm sorry to do this But we're talking about editing like using And why something like that when it comes to editing for like action with grammar and stuff like that There is Grammarly and things like that But as I I already knew that pointed out to me that it doesn't always do contextual grammar as well It doesn't get certain things the best way to best ways that are low techie techie to get your stuff edited Read it out loud If you hear strange pauses or even just a pause Or rewrite it But it also look how you know if your phrasing is a little off it when you read it You kind of stop and figure out what you're saying when you're reading it That's a sign to rewrite something and the second is give a second set of eyes No, no even grammar Nazis, and I'll call myself one don't need to publish their stuff without somebody else looking at it They're gonna see things just with anything when we're putting on our makeup in the morning We think it looks great We don't see the big fluck of mascara that we miss over the top right because we're focused on it's the same thing when We're writing we see what we think is there because we were so invested in it So we see what we think it should look like not necessarily what it actually looks like We don't see those missing commas or the accidental There's a real trend lately a very random capitalization going on don't do that Cities yes countries yes social media manager does not need to be capitalized. We're not that special Doesn't get all cats Content marketer doesn't deserve the capital C and the M in the middle of a sentence the sea can be capitalized It was at the start of a sentence These aren't I'm gonna do a horridic. We're not bad Okay, any of us So I go back to back to the pre-published checklist so And you can make your own checklist because we all have our own things that we want to do before we publish So make your own checklist You don't have to have a tool to do this you can have a little your whiteboard next to your desk when you publish They did I put is my title is my key word in my title at the front Is it close to the phrase it close to the front of the titles? I can get it to make your own checklist and just you make sure Publish with intent. I think is the main goal. We're kind of come up with here Marketing the fun part Well, what I'm taking questions in the middle, too, so I think we're okay We'll run through this fairly quick click-to-tweet he suggests better click-to-tweet, but there are several ways to click But click-to-tweet is fantastic. You want your stuff to get sharing more Don't make them think about what to write if they don't want to just tweet your title Do it for them put a provocative phrase in the middle there and have say click-to-tweet When you when I use click-to-tweet sometimes I put four or five in there I'm always shocked at how many more shares I get and I I love Twitter, so I tend to get decent shares I'm not you know, I'm no rock star or anything. I'm not David Lee Roth out there But You know use these they're a great tool all these quick click-to-tweets are free most of the plugins And they're really easy to set up and use some of them allow you to change the graphics You can add your own colors to them and stuff I actually use one that's through a social sharing plug-in called social warfare. It's my favorite plug-in ever So thumbs up to them in case you want to check it out social warfare It's made by warfare plugins and it incorporates the sharing buttons and the click-to-tweet and it allows you to put A pinnable image in that when they click the pin button it pulls up the pinnable image Not the horizontal one, which is great. I'm getting on getting off track there Yes, you don't have to put it in as your feature So and it's a very lean plug-in just that why it doesn't take up a lot of resources WordPress resource So click-to-tweet is fantastic choose whichever tool you want There's a lot of them out there. You can just look at you just check your plugins put in click-to-tweet They're all click-to-tweet of some sort or another Revive old post This is a very popular plugin that you can set to schedule your old posts to be shared Very important on Twitter Twitter is the only place to repeatedly repeat sharing. Okay, because it's the only feed that's fast enough That you're not gonna get people really mad the thing you only like yourself and you're only posting your own stuff If you posted the same blog post seven times to Facebook somebody's probably gonna say something to you Okay Same thing on like Google plus or something and Pinterest you can do it But you have to kind of time yourself to do it, but on Twitter I'm telling you repost repost your old articles when you publish it the first time don't share it once and think that's good Share it six or seven times over the week do it a different times a day But revival post is a plug-in that will allow you to set that up so you don't have to think about it I don't actually like this tool because I think it's kind of inorganic I just scheduled it myself into buffer, but if this is the kind of you won't remember to share all posts This is a great tool for you to use and you can give it parameters You can actually customize a little bit and let it know like don't do these posts ever Or do these posts in this order based on you know what was published or by category or topic you can do that So and there's a there's a free version and there's a pro version And I use buffer and I'm gonna bring a buffer in a minute because he he uses Hootsuite And I know a lot of you that I'm a buffer kind of gals. We'll talk about those There's absolutely nothing wrong with scheduling the sharing of your blog posts So we always hear about automation is a bad thing. There's nothing wrong about automating the share of your post But you can't automate the interaction once you've already shared it that you got to go in and do yourself So that's my little You know public service announcement about social media Hootsuite is a very popular tool It has free versions and there's all different sorts of add-ons and you can schedule and monitor your social media at the same time So a buffer is only a schedule or just a heads up, but it doesn't allow you to monitor So what you can do is you can set up your sharing column You know of where you're going to schedule things you can actually set up like hashtags to watch you get to big Basically make columns very teeny so if anybody used to use tweet deck, it's kind of the same thing But it's not just Twitter you get to do it for what Facebook? They all have different ones some do Pinterest some do Instagram some do see it to pick and choose But the big ones are in there Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Google plus are in pretty much every one Now and we get into snapchat and all the rest of those I have stopped I said shiny on an object syndrome. I'm only gonna use the big five. So I don't even pay attention to those But there is a free version But it is going to be limited into how many you can publish or if you did if you schedule publishers for more than one company You're limited to how much you can do. So it's the same thing for buffer So I use buffer, which is basically the same thing, but it's scheduling only I like to do my monitoring natively So I actually schedule in buffer But then I actually sit in my mentions tab in Twitter or whatever program You can set up you can set up mentions to get pinged when something happens, but I just like to do those natively But that's me. We're all different. So if you like it all in one place, Val means you sweet for me I don't tend to like the all-in-one solutions, but that's a personal thing. Some people really like all-in-one solutions I don't want an all-in-one solution. I want to pick what works best for me each each part Any questions? We're almost there now convert kit is About sharing your content, but it's really about gathering email addresses So this is a lot like you've heard of MailChimp. You've heard of Was it constant contact? I've never liked constant contact. So I have to make my force myself to say MailChimp, there's Emma now. There are so many email programs now and there's so many stuff I actually use convert kits I was really thrilled to see this because it actually allows you to make different campaigns So you can set up on different pages To people to go to different mailing lists to possibly sign up for so you can actually set up a different one for every blog post If you wanted to I wouldn't do that. That's an awful lot of lists to try to manage But if you have like say you write regularly about five different topics You can actually say you write about content marketing social media graphics blah blah You can set one for content meetings Content marketing social media graphics and blah blah you can set up a different sign up form for each one And just with a quick short code you can put that at the bottom of every blog post or there's a plug-in You can pull into Wordpress will actually let you just do a little drag-and-drop menu at the bottom and put it at the bottom of that post Just depends on if you feel like you're if you feel like you're plug-in heavy You don't want to lose anything else you can just use the short code if that makes sense Some people don't like to add plug-ins they get some people have like this rule like 10 plug-ins only And if I go to 11, I have to lose somebody else You don't have to necessarily do that But if you are like that then go ahead if I owe me do you can just use the short code Do you have a question about convert kid? I know I did real short with it So I had a client who's a vegan consultant so that she sells Magnetics water filters vitamin say sure so if you if she posted things about Magnetics sure and she could use this to direct them to a link to a list to mention No, not now this actually does the email marketing to it's a full email service, so it's not MailChimp No, you don't tie this to another one. This is its own hole It's a full email system. It can do drip campaigns can do everything. It is not free There's no forever free like MailChimp. Okay, it's out of them all. I think it is very affordable But no, it's the full system. That was a great question Yes And then she can have another one on filters But again, even when you're still supposed to have everybody double-optim so just be sure your list is recent and that they do So want to hear from you when you do that. Yes, you can You can But as with anything if you're pulling emails that you got five years ago, don't do it Please tweet to me. No to Frank at FpCorso or if you want to tweet to me if you thought I did an okay job or you know passable passable, right? You can tweet to me and I'm go tweets go So is there are there any other questions about other things you can ask me about other blogging tools that there's one You want to ask about I'm happy to answer. I'll let you know if I've used it or never used it And yeah, that's just what is your name? Mally Hart Mally Mally Hart And I'm really sorry about the slides that I will I'm gonna run I've been doing this social media So people have seen me I've been in the happiness bar pretty much the whole conference except when I'm speaking So I'll be there. I will upload the slides immediately since we have this problem so that you can actually scroll through them And that's excellent sure and what you have to do to base this over time You have the base on how many followers you have already to so yeah And they're all different because you know Twitter tends to be faster. You'll get more shares Wait, they won't necessarily have read it Okay, really important because that's true. Yeah, so you have to sit different goals for yourself So it's kind of like you know when you go to the gym, you're like, okay I did three push-ups today. I got three shares today So then you have your goal for four push-ups or four shares tomorrow. So it's that kind of thing It's personalized, but you can actually set up in your Google Analytics You can set up custom things for social sharing too So you can if you want like the real you know the specifics And you want to check on yourself like buffer has simple analytics So you can see which one's the most popular so you can see like what the topic was that got shared more than others And on hoots. We don't have that kind of stuff too Okay, but you can't actually set up serious specific on each post itself You can set up an audience but that post itself and we're talking about some serious Google Analytics stuff there You probably need somebody who's a Google Analytics pro to help you set it up perfectly But you can set up specific things to watch for it Increasing traffic, I would say social media is a grateful for increasing traffic But you have to be on a social media channel that you enjoy being Don't try to put yourself on all of them thinking you're gonna increase traffic and do a Excuse my language half-assed job on every one of them. You have to go in a whole heart in so pick one you like If you have great visuals on your site Pinterest I know everybody thinks it's a site for ladies, but it gets great conversion for articles with good images Doesn't matter what the topic is really we had a legal firm just had these like kind of Blame but really provocative statements, and they've got their great biggest refer was Pinterest so other things that would be Here's some other ways you can do stuff go and Comment on other blogs it tends to cause people to go and want to comment on yours is kind of a super cool thing It seems silly, but it works now you have to pick and choose you want to comment on your Main competitor sites, maybe not the peers here's an issue that can be a great way to increase traffic In taking part in conversations on social even if you don't have a lot of stuff to share People will want to check you out if they see your handle showing up in social media They'll go and click your link want to check you out, so other than that We can talk later if you want to we can talk Yes, ma'am. I could ask that just be yourself. That's absolutely true. That was my talk yesterday Yeah, be true to yourself don't pretend to be anybody else Anybody else? They get the blogging He has a toolkit his blogging toolkit PDF is Frank Corso not me Slash pull kid. I'm sorry. I didn't realize there's another slide. I thought that I thought that sort of thank you for saying that Frank Corso You