Hi everybody, so we are going to talk a little bit about different virtual tools that you can use to engage your students, your classrooms, and any organizations that you may be the advisor of. So my name is Maya Tillman, I’m the persistence specialist in the Office of Student Success which is over in Hodis.

All right, so the agenda for today — looking at the why, so why should you be using virtual tools, the tools themselves, some different topic ideas that you can use, and then key takeaways. So are you ready to play? I’m going with our Ready Player One theme.

Why Are Virtual Tools Important

All right, so the why — why are using virtual tools important? So for the accessibility of information — students are young and they know how to use online tools, so just being able to get that information to them as quickly as possible instead of having to print things out and they have to come get it in person or those sorts of things. So just being able to pull it right up online, especially on their phones, and get that information as easily and quickly as possible.

Engaging ways to communicate — so definitely want to bring more excitement or engagement to your classroom or to whatever sort of setting that you’re in. You want to make things fun. So everything doesn’t have to be fun, but if you’re able to create a fun way to do something or a more creative way to do something, I definitely would encourage everyone to try some things out.

Gen Z has short attention spans — so I think we all know this by now, but they will be there for a second and then the next second you’ve lost them. So you definitely have to make sure you have some engaging information for them that they will want to pay attention to.

And then that’s just the way it is now. I think just going into the future, obviously especially with COVID having to shift to everything online for a whole year, and now we’re kind of trying to go back to quote-unquote normal. So that’s just how things are going to go — you just have to think of more ways to use online tools to engage not only students but also other faculty and staff and just people in general as well.

All right, so these are some different tools for you to make your life a little bit easier when you’re doing your own thing — Canva, Mailchimp, Later, Navigate, Microsoft Teams, Linktree, and Trello, which we will get into here in a sec. And then tools for them — so they are for you but they’re for you to use for your students. So social media, Microsoft Canvas, Nearpod, Flipgrid, QR codes, Kahoot, and Padlet.

All right, so the virtual tools — what are they, what do they do, which of those things does what — and I also will pull up some examples and show you what some of those things look like.

Canva

All right, so Canva. Canva is a really great website for you to create pretty much anything. So you don’t need any sort of graphic design skills. You can make anything — presentations, social media posts, YouTube covers, Instagram posts, resumes — pretty much anything. Logos, stickers. You can customize the templates to your liking with different colors and designs. So this template that I’m using right now was originally blue and I changed it to purple because, you know, I have those colors of purple. So I will exit out of the presentation — so I made this presentation in Canva. So this is what it looks like. Over here you can choose the different templates that you’re wanting to use. There’s elements, so if there are some shapes or some other things that you’d like to add you can add that. You can upload your own pictures for things, you can get stock photos if you’re needing stock photos, and of course you can change the text to different fonts and sizes that you’re wanting.

So just as an example, here’s some different things that I’ve created — different presentations, social media posts. I made this for like a binder just to have so my binder wouldn’t be naked when I took it around campus with me. Logos, pretty much anything, handouts with QR codes on them. So you can make anything on Canva. Highly would recommend. You can use it — there’s a free version and there’s the premium paid version which you can use either or depending on how much money you’re able to pay and how much money your department might pay for you to get the service.

Mailchimp

All right, next — Mailchimp. So Mailchimp is a really great way to schedule newsletters in advance. You can save your audience emails and then you can track engagement with your audience. So this is a really great tool. I’d say maybe if you are constantly sending out messages, or maybe you are the advisor of an organization and you want to have just consistent messaging, you can send out really great Mailchimp newsletters with pictures, links — you can do columns and different headers for each column depending on what sort of content you’re adding in there. And then you can track how many people open the emails and then how many people click on the links in the email that you send to them for the newsletter. So it’s a really really great tool.

Later

All right, and Later — Later is a social media scheduling tool. So you can schedule your posts in advance that way you’re not scrambling like, “Oh it’s Tuesday, I need to hurry up and send something out today.” So you can just have it already scheduled in advance. You can manage multiple social media accounts — so if you have Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn or Tumblr or whatever other sort of thing, you can manage multiple accounts in the account. Then you can access analytics so if you’re interested in seeing like how many people are looking at your posts and how many people are engaging with your posts, you can do that there as well. And then you may have heard of Hootsuite — Hootsuite is a similar tool that does the same thing. So just depending on like what your price range is and what you’re wanting to pay and what you’re wanting to do, each of them does the same things and they have their own perks as well.

So I’ll show you an example of Later as well. So this is this week — December 5th through 11th. So I scheduled these posts to go out on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and then they are all there and ready to go. You can look at it by the week or you can look at it by the month. So next week is a little scarce because we’re going into finals week, but last month for example there were different posts that were scheduled all throughout the month. So that way if you know that you want to post something in advance, you don’t have to wait until the day of to post it. And then you’re able to just upload all the different things that you’re wanting to post into your media library, that way it’s easier for you to drag it and drop it in the calendar, add your caption, add what time you want it to go out that day, and then boom it’s there. So that’s how you will use Later if you are interested in scheduling out your social media in advance.

Navigate

Back to the presentation. Next we have Navigate — my personal favorite. So Navigate allows you to share your personal availability link with students. So if you are meeting with students throughout the year and you’re like, “Oh man, I hate all this back and forth with what time works for you on Tuesday — oh Tuesday doesn’t work, what about Wednesday?” — you can just send them your personal availability link and they can click on that and get access to the times and days on your calendar that you are available for meetings. You can record your meeting notes in Navigate, you can see grades and progress over time on the student’s profile if you’re interested, and then you can also use Navigate to communicate with students via email or via text message.

And I’ll show you just a little bit about what Navigate looks like. So you have your home page here — if I was an advisor my assigned advisees would go here in this chart, but I’m not so I don’t have any appointments. You can see your upcoming and you can see your recent appointments that you’ve had, what time they were, what the students wanted, all of that. Your availability — so that’s where you can set up like I’m in the office available for meetings from 9:30 to 4, Monday through Friday. Here are the things that students can set up meetings with me for and then here is my link that I can send them so they can just go ahead and pick a day and time on my calendar that I’m open. And then a nice thing about Navigate is that you can sync your Outlook calendar so that way if you want students to set up meetings with you, it’ll say that you’re busy at times that you have other things on your calendar. So I’m only busy at 11 a.m. and then at 2 p.m. today, so then students can really schedule any time around those time frames that I have something on my calendar on Outlook. So really great tool. Just a quick shout out there — had to make sure I mentioned that as one of our virtual tools.

Microsoft Office 365

All right, moving on — Microsoft Office 365. So Avila as a university, we have the Microsoft suite that is available to all faculty, staff, and students on campus. So that includes your OneDrive, Word, Excel — you can have all your resources in one place, all your documents and those things saved there. You can create forms and send surveys or sign up forms to students using Microsoft Forms. OneNote is a really great way to keep information in one spot, so you can create a notebook that functions as an online binder. So you can create different pages, different sections, and add different links to things, and you can upload documents within the OneNote notebook — really really cool tool.

And something that I do like about this is that you can see it all in one spot. So up here you can see if anyone sends you documents via email you can find those all in one place. And then over here you can find the quick way to get to Word, Excel, your Outlook, your OneDrive, your OneNote notebooks. Microsoft Teams is included in your Outlook package. SharePoint is there. So lots of cool things that are here for everyone to use as part of our Office 365 package. So definitely encourage everyone to use that since we have it and Avila’s kind of already paid for it, so why not use it.

Microsoft Teams

All right, and then Microsoft Teams is a really cool way to quickly chat with faculty, staff, and or students on campus. You can share files and documents for collaboration and Microsoft Teams is where you can also schedule and host virtual meetings. So I know we are getting away from using Zoom as a university sometime soon, so Microsoft Teams will probably be the main way that we are scheduling and hosting virtual meetings, which I think is really cool. It’s already connected to your Outlook calendar, it’s already connected to all the other cool things within that Microsoft Office package. So just another thing to use. Plus you can create actual teams on Microsoft Teams.

So you can see I have a few different teams here with different people that I collaborate with on campus and we can share documents and files. You can join or create a new team if you want for something that you’re doing. There’s individual chat messages you can send back and forth to staff on campus or faculty on campus. Then create Microsoft Teams meetings pretty easily and send that link out for people to join. So it works the same way as Zoom — it’s just through Microsoft.

Linktree

All right, moving on to Linktree. I think this is also one of my favorites. So you can share links to important information in one place. So that way if you have a bunch of different things that you have going on in your office or your department, instead of having all these different places with all this information in different spots, you can have one place for all your links to be held. You can place it in your email signature so students or anyone else can easily click on the Linktree and find what they need from that information. You can link it to your social media accounts if you have social media for your area and you can customize it based on different seasons — and seasons as in throughout the school year, what’s relevant right now in December may not be the same thing that was relevant in August or in May or whenever. So you’re able to really customize it and add whatever information and change information based on what you’re needing.

So this is our Center for Student Excellence Linktree — you can find it at linktr.ee/avilasuccess, which I don’t know why they chose to put the period there but that’s not my thing. Anywho, so you can see the different social media accounts up here — this will go right to our Twitter, right to our Instagram and Facebook if you click on it. Different events — we use these first couple tabs here as like ongoing things that are going to be changing depending on the season, and then down here is going to be information that stays consistent. So you can learn more about the Center for Student Excellence, all the different offices. You click on these and it just goes to the Avila website for that office so that way students can find them easier. What is Navigate, you can learn about Navigate, you can learn about some other ways to stay connected with the campus community. So this is what a Linktree looks like. It’s free and you can change the backgrounds and change the way the buttons look and all of that if you want to customize your Linktree. So highly recommend.

Trello

All right, Trello. Trello is also a great tool. So you can organize your tasks using lists, due dates, color coding, and checklists. So if you are one of those Type A people who needs lists, needs deadlines and dates, needs to check it off when you get it done — that’s how I operate so I definitely understand it. You can add images, links, or files in your Trello. You can collaborate with other people — you can create like a Trello team where if you’re working on a big project that involves multiple people, you can put in so-and-so, here’s a checklist for the things they need to do for this project, here’s a checklist for this other person, and go from there. And you can sync Trello with your calendar — so if you are adding due dates and deadlines in there for yourself, you can sync it with your Outlook, your Gmail, your iPhone iCal calendar, whatever you want to use there.

So Trello is something I’ve been using for quite some time now. I used it for personal things. So I have my Avila work Trello boards up here and then I have my personal teams — moving, when I was in grad school, a future nonprofit that I would love to start if I get some money to do that, personal goals, professional goals. So I’ll show you my grad school one for an example. So these are all my classes that I had for grad school and I was able to just create one big old thing here for all my grad school classes. And then something nice — you can add in those dates there. So the checklist — you can see these were different things and you can check it, uncheck it, and then once it’s done it’ll show you like you’ve 100% completed your checklist. Add people to your team, add members to the team. You can add labels — so that’s when the color coding comes into play. You can add a purpose or meaning for each color and color code it. You can add in the due date — you just pick the time, the date, and then that’ll send you a reminder when it’s due. You can add an attachment. And then a cover — if you wanted it to be a certain color. So let’s say we want this to have a blue cover, let’s make it blue. So now it’s blue.

So that is just a very very short and quick overview of using Trello. If you want to learn more about it, there is another YouTube video on our channel that does a more deep dive, so feel free to go check that out if you want to learn more. But that is a quick overview of what it looks like.

Google Suite

All right, last but not least — a bonus tool. So the Google Suite of course. We’ve all used Google at some point for something. So you got the Drive, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, which you can easily share links to view or edit any of those things that you have in Google. You can create a Google Form for surveys or like a signup form if you’re having an event or a workshop of some sort. And then Google Sites is probably my favorite. So you can create a micro site for pretty much anything. So another example here — the Avila Navigate Faculty and Staff Training site I made using Google Sites. So you can have pages, you can have buttons, you can do drop-down menus for different tabs on the website, you can embed YouTube videos, you can embed presentations and PDF documents. So I really enjoy using Google Sites. It’s a really fun and easy drag-and-drop way to create your own website. And then if you wanted to pay for a customized link I believe you can pay for it or it might be free — I’m not sure. But it comes with a link you can easily send and share with people, whoever you want to have access to your micro site. So love that.

Moving on. All right, so let’s get to the tools for them — for the students.

Social Media

All right, so social media. Great way to engage students — you can reach a wide audience. There’s different ways to engage like doing live events, sharing to your stories on Instagram and on Facebook, having highlights, Instagram TV, there’s hashtags you can create and join. Young people are on it. Social media is a big thing and I think a lot of people are missing out if you’re not using it for whatever your organization or department is doing.

Then Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are some examples of social medias and those are probably going to be the most popular ones that students are using. Obviously Facebook is not mentioned here because young people are not on Facebook. I think my generation was probably the last generation to really use Facebook, and this younger group of people that we’re working with right now — they are not on Facebook. So that is not the way to go if you want to interact with them. Just throwing that out there.

So this is our Instagram page. These are highlights — so this is where you can share information in your Instagram story and then it saves to your page forever until you want to delete it. Our Linktree is in the bio so that way students can just quickly click on that as soon as they go to our Instagram to find more information. And then you can have posts, you can make reels which are kind of like TikToks, you can upload video — so we’ve uploaded some of our workshops and short videos that we’ve done on our Instagram. So really great way to engage with students and they’re already on it, so you might as well get on it too and share the information that you need to.

YouTube works the same way. YouTube’s been around forever but I think it’s always been a consistent way to share information and get things out there. So this is our YouTube page — you can have however many videos you want, you can create playlists. So here you can see we have Navigate for Students, our First Gen Week workshops, information about advising and registration, Navigate for Faculty and Staff has lots of videos in there. So really great way — I don’t think YouTube will ever die out, so I would honestly if you’re not on YouTube, definitely get on YouTube at some point.

Microsoft Office 365 for Students

All right, and then Microsoft Office 365. So from a student standpoint, you can use it to edit documents for them — so if you are on the English side of things or if they’re wanting you to edit a resume or some sort of document, you can share it with the students. You can share files and then SharePoint is very similar to a Google Site just through Microsoft. And that’s where if you wanted to create like a little mini site for information for your students, you can create that through Microsoft as well.

Canvas

Canvas — our learning management system that we use. So students already use it for class here at Avila, but if you were interested in creating a Canvas course for whatever organization or department, or whatever way you interact with students, I think a Canvas course would be great just because they already know how to use it. They have to use it for class anyway — it’s just one more thing for them to have on their dashboards. You can send announcements to groups of students, create modules, you can create a syllabus if you want, assignments, discussion boards. And there’s an app for that, so I think that’s probably the best thing about Canvas — there’s an app. And if you haven’t already, students will pull their app up and show you their grades and whatever they need to tell you about Canvas. So they are on it and they do have the app. So I would highly recommend using that as a virtual tool even if you’re not a professor.

So we have a Student Success Canvas course that students can enroll in — it’s a self-enroll course. So we have different modules that are based on things that the students would need and relevant information about. So let’s collapse them all — we have your academics, finances, getting involved, staying healthy and safe, planning for the future, second year stuff, transfer stuff, first generation stuff, tools for success, and then some of those workshops that I mentioned on our YouTube channel. So just lots of great information and links that students can follow, videos they can watch — different just different things. So I’d highly recommend, if you have the capacity to do that or if it makes sense for you to have one, creating a Canvas course is a great way to just have another space where they already are and just add your information there.

Nearpod

All right, and then Nearpod is a really great tool as well. So you can create interactive presentations. So instead of just a plain boring presentation, you can add quizzes, you can add polls, videos they can watch, there’s collaboration boards where students can put their opinions up on the board. Then there’s voiceovers — so if this was something you wanted to do asynchronously, you can make a presentation and add voiceovers of you going through each slide and then send that to students. That way you don’t have to always record yourself and then send it out later — you can just do voiceovers for each slide and go from there. And then there’s reports and analytics so once you do create a Nearpod you can see how many students watched it, what their answers were if you created polls or quizzes in there, and how many slides they clicked through and all those sorts of cool things.

So obviously I’ll show you a little bit about that. So this is a Nearpod that I made for first year seminar. Towards the end we just had some discussion-based courses that students could participate in. So I did an icebreaker and then I had students — the icebreaker was them telling me if Avila could have a million dollars to do a music festival, who would they want to see perform. And then there were some other things that related to our common reading book. And they were able to just share their thoughts and say exactly what they wanted. And then each student could see what other students said. So I think it’s nice — just a nice way to collaborate and get them to, you know, they won’t talk to you out loud but if you have them talk to you through an online screen, then they definitely will participate. So always nice to just throw something different into the classroom setting.

Flipgrid

All right, next we have Flipgrid. Flipgrid is a really great way to engage students for any kind of topic. So Flipgrid is where you can upload short videos pertaining to a question or a statement that was proposed. So if you say like, “Hey seniors, what are you all doing after graduation? Tell us your job plans or tell us if you’re going to grad school or something like that.” Then you can create that as a Flipgrid and then all your seniors, if you send them the link to it, they can add on there. They can create a short video that says like, “Oh yeah, I’m going to grad school at Stanford to study business management” or “Oh, I got a job at Cerner.” So whatever you want to do there — it’s really just a fun way to engage students and get information from them or have them answer questions throughout class instead of a traditional discussion board or something like that. A Flipgrid would be a nice alternative.

QR Codes

Okay, QR codes. QR codes are great. They’re everywhere. So you can scan it with your phone or a lot of students do have Snapchat — you can also scan with Snapchat. It’s very very quick, much quicker than typing in a link. So if you send students a super long link that they have to type in themselves versus copying and pasting — no one’s going to do that because it’s not fun. But if you can just scan it real quick on your phone with a QR code, that works. You can use it for any kind of handouts that you’re doing — so if you’re having a workshop and you want to make sure students go back to your website, or maybe you have a link to the workshop that they can view as you’re doing it, then you can put that on a handout. And then you can use it for any link — literally anything that you want people to link to, you can do that. We have little handouts for our Center for Student Excellence — there’s sticky notes, there’s bookmarks, and a ton of other things that have a QR code that goes to our website. So those are great tools.

Kahoot

Next we have Kahoot. Kahoot is a really fun way to gamify stuff and engage with your students. You can create quizzes, polls, you can do true or false things, you can make word clouds. And you can do this on pretty much anything. So I made a Kahoot for the football team — I did a presentation during their football camp back in August and I was like, “Oh yeah, you know we’re gonna do a Kahoot,” and they’re like, “Oh my god, I love Kahoot!” So they got super hyped about that. But we talked about time management and then I had them do like a quiz — there’s true and false, I threw in some football references because you know why not. And there were 56 players in the room. So we talked about first year seminar, we talked about tools to set up meetings with students, what’s on MyAU. So it’s just a really great way to get your information across. And the likelihood of, you know, raising their hand and giving you an answer when you ask them a question — very slim. But if you put it on a Kahoot, that exact same question you want answers to, they’re probably going to be more likely to do it because it’s fun.

Padlet

All right, and then Padlet. Padlet is a nice tool where you can have like a wall layout that other people can share information on, or you can make it to where you’re just sharing information. You can ask questions, you can do polls, you can share links, videos, images, and different files or documents on Padlet as well.

So I’ll show you an example — Shauna over in career services has a career resource board that she uses through Padlet. It’s really cool. So you can find different job websites, you can do different assessments for career things, how to put together a portfolio, where you can find internships. Different career books, other career websites, where to get information. Super cool. So that’s another cool tool if you’re just needing somewhere to put some stuff and you want students to click on it — Padlet is another one of those places where you can do that as well.

Topic Ideas

I think we’re almost at the end. All right, so some topic ideas — what do you talk about with all these tools, what the heck are you saying on all these things? So here are some different things that are like important. Maybe some deadlines, scholarship opportunities or additional grants or something that your department or somebody is hosting, professional development opportunities, any events that you have going on, workshops that you’re hosting. So those are some important things that you can definitely include.

As far as fun things — you can do theme days, so like Motivation Monday or like we do Tips Tuesday so we share different tips for the students on Tuesdays. You can do student spotlights, giveaways, facts about yourself or your office. So Avila is a small campus but not everybody knows everybody — you know despite how small we think we are, everyone does not know everyone on this campus. So always nice to include facts about yourself, your face, what you look like, those sorts of things. And then staff interviews — so of course if you’re in a department with multiple people, feel free to just say hey, you know, this is Susan and she went to this college and this is what she does here at the university and go talk to her about whatever. So lots of fun stuff.

Key Takeaways

And then the big things to remember — so our key takeaways. Creating a plan ahead of time — so me and Paige put together before the school year started a very large spreadsheet of what we wanted to be posted and what information was going out for every month and every week of the school year. So we really always did the fall and we need to go back and look at that now for spring semester. But just creating a plan ahead of time — what type of things do you want to post, what sort of information are you wanting to put out.

Creating goals for the tools — do you want to have a bunch of followers, do you want to just make your information accessible, like what is your goal using the tool.

And then just make things simple and cute. I love Canva — Canva is a great way to just get your message across, say what you need to say, add in whatever colors you want, and then boom you’re done. You can download it and post it wherever you need to.

So those are our key takeaways for that. And then that’s it for me. So thanks so much for watching. That’s my email if you ever have any questions or need help with creating something or how to use one of the tools that I mentioned. And then of course go to our Linktree to find out what’s going on with the Center for Student Excellence this week. And that’s all I got — thanks so much for watching. Bye.