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Congrats CTYI!!!! Graduation 2day!!!
Congrats CTYI!!!! Graduation 2day!!!
Who gives a Hoot???
This could very possibly be the very last blog post I ever write! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh 😦
But today we set up a twitter account. Twitter is a s a website, owned and operated by Twitter Inc., which offers a social networking and microblogging service, enabling its users to send and read messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the user’s profile page.
he website is based in San Francisco. Twitter also has servers and offices in San Antonio and Boston. Twitter, Inc. was originally incorporated in California, but as of 2011 is incorporated in Delaware.
Twitter was produced in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched in July. Since then Twitter has gained popularity worldwide and is estimated to have 200 million users, generating 200 million tweets a day and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. It is sometimes described as the “SMS of the Internet“.
We also set up a Hootsuite account. HootSuite is a social media communications dashboard often used for online brand management. It publishes to websites such asFacebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, MySpace, and WordPress. It is also a Twitter client. But I didn’t really get the point of it.
Please Pay Ad-tencion
The Ad puns are Back!!!!!!!!! and worse than ever!!!!!! Today was our second last day at CTYI. Today we spent most of the Day putting out Google ads and Facebook ads for the helix . We worked as a group and the ads came out great!!! I hope The Helix gets a lot of new traffic to their website, and for their conferences!!!!!
By the way , if you need to hold a conference in the Dublin area with full catering services, and various venues, from the spacious Mahony Hall or the intimate Gallery for smaller gatherings, call the Helix. Unique conferences, no drama.
Yaaaaay for accidental/intentional advertising!!!!
Augmented reality
We did a slide show on augmented reality… here it is.
Facebook… turns out it can be counted as work!!!
Today we went on the second field trip in the course. Today’s destination: Facebook headquarters!!!! And no, Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t there! The headquarters are very close to the grand canal theatre, about 5 mins walk. We took a bus from DCU to the grand canal theatre and walked the rest of the way to the the Facebook headquarters. For those of you who have been living under a rock for the past few years, Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004. Facebook has more than 600 million active users. If Facebook was a country it would be the third biggest countries (in terms of population in the world). Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college room mates. They even made a film about Facebook called “the Social Network”. Anyway, when we got to the FB HQ we were all given name tags. (again, very official.) We then headed into one of the offices and we received a talk on how Facebook can be used for marketing. The talk was focused on how to use ads on Facebook. Later we had a competition to see who could design the best ad for the Helix on Facebook Ads. Our team won so we got a laptop case each filled with goodies like sweets, earphones and Hilighters. All in all it was a very good trip and I really enjoyed it.
Our field trip to PayPal.
Today in CTYI was a very exciting day. Our first field trip!! We went to PayPal, which, as I’m sure you know is an online payment service, which is extremely popular. We went in the morning and when we got there we each got name tags (very official!) After that we were given a power point presentation by a PayPal worker, a man called Jonathan, who was in charge of helping companies in selling products or services online with PayPal. He gave a very funny and interesting presentation on what PayPal is and how it works. Then we had a break for lunch. I had several plans for lunch, including a chicken tikka sandwich, a banana and a bottle of water, but my plans were halted due to a complimentary lunch of Pizzas and soft drinks provided by PayPal. (I’m not complaining though, it was delicious!!) After that we had another presentation, this time about mobile technology, apps and how PayPal fits into all that. Afterwards we had a competition to see who designed the best app that used PayPal. Our group designed an app that located the nearest taxi to your location and gave information about it. I personally thought it was a brilliant idea but unfortunately we didn’t win. A team that made an app that if you play a game you get free ice cream won.(I know, that didn’t make sense to me either!) And to make it even worse the prize was digital cameras for every one on the winning teams. The runners up did however, get a consolation. We received a PayPal goodies bag filled with PayPal pens, sticky notes, pens, pencils, markers and more pens. So as I went home feeling very happy having enjoyed my time in PayPal immensely, aswell as learning allot that day. Thanks PayPal!!!
Webinars…. Teaching through the Internaet
Now on to my second post of the day. Today I had my first experience of Webinars. Webinars are basically a service that allows conferencing events to be shared with remote locations. They can also be called web conferences. We had a webinar with a guy called Padraig. During the Webinar he took a quiz to see what type of learners we are. He wanted to see if we learned through sight hearing or touch. I apparently learn through touching and hearing primarily. It was a very interesting experience for me and I would enjoy doing it again some time, by myself or with my school.
No more Dog-Eared web pages
Today I’m feeling in a particularly productive mood so I’m going to post 2 blogs today. The first one is about Social Bookmarking. Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren’t shared, merely bookmarks that reference them. We signed up on sites such as Digg and Reddit. In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.I posted a post about the helix on both Digg and Reddit. Descriptions may be added to these bookmarks in the form of metadata, so users may understand the content of the resource without first needing to download it for themselves. Social bookmarking revolutionized the way we share data with people. And this blog might be DUGG some time soon!
Going once, Going twice….
And as another day dawns in DCU, the 21st century technology CTYI students learned about the extensive department of buying and selling on Ebay. We had a presentation on how to use Ebay for buying and selling items for personal use, and for business purposes. We also were taught how to manage our Ebay accounts by using a system called Ebay Pulse, which works roughly the same as Google In sight, (see previous post) except for Ebay. Unfortunately we cant use Ebay until we are 18 so our knowledge can only be used in years time.
That was what we did in the morning. After that we had lunch. In the morning I passed by a bakery and bought a loaf of Cheese and Onion bread, and I then carried it around, occasionaly during the day ripping out a piece and munching on it. I continued eating it at lunch, but I still didn’t finish it. After Lunch we went down to the computer labs to work on a system called “Scratch” which is used to design games. Honestly, I have to say that this was probably my favourite part of the course so far. I’m currently trying to make a game similar to stick wars except slightly different, due to the fact that its much better! 🙂 Hopefully I’ll have that finished soon, and when I am finished I’ll try to post it to this blog as soon as possible.
After all of that confusion, there was a lecture down at the Helix about how technology can impact education. We heard 2 speakers, Ciaran McGuiness and Michel Wesch. The lectures were very interesting and the presentation was clearly very hardly worked on. The lecture went on for 1 hour and a half. I reaaly enjoyed going.
Till the next post.
An Ad-venture
Today, Tuesday June 28th in CTYI history we learned about Ads.( Hence the title.) 2 people came in to teach us about Google Ad Sense and Internet ads in general, Conor Barron and Alan Harrison. In the first half of the morning they introduced the concept of Internet ads and Google Ad Sense. They used a power point presentation on how SEM (Search Engine Marketing) isn’t just SEO (Search Engine Optimization, which was covered in an earlier blog) but it can also be SEA (Search Engine Advertising.). The next time you go on Google pay attention to the bar at the side of the screen. That is an advertising spot (SEA), which is what we were studying.
In the second half of the morning we had another power point presentation on how to use Google In sight, a program that lets you view who clicked on your ad, calculate the demographics, see how the time of day and the the seasons affect the amount of clicks your ad gets.
And finally, after a nice lunch, we headed to the computer lab to face yet another power point presentation, this time focusing on how to use keywords to optimize your website to search engines (SEO) and we put that in to practice by examining the helix’s keywords and comparing them to its competitors on the conference market.
Well, today was full of Ad-renaline and I think I’m Ad-dicted now.
Ad-ios.
dannyferreira 