AS WE START another day-long workshop with Ireland's Youth Media Team, I am burrowing behind the pages and tweaking some code on the Wordpress site. After seeing some of the updated features pushed out by the Wordpress developers, I can see a need to train our young creatives in leveraging some of the text and image widgets.
Here is a summary of things I've set up behind the scenes.
Notification Trigger. I need to see activity on the YMT.fm website whenever it happens and so I've told my Inoreader app to push a hyperlinked notificaton of the new blog titles within 12 minutes of their publication. I'm always amazed that I can activate the app within Facebook. And I'm also surprised at how quickly Alexa finds our "Young and Irish Youth Media Team" audio content after our team members upload their audio episodes.
Airtable. This is the singlemost significant content management tool I have used in 2017. Airtable helps us keep track of every media object the Youth Media Team have created since 2013.
O365. We are backing up our rich media content inside OneDrive and I'm now able to use Office Delve to see activity with those precious items. The Office 365 service is a natural by-product of being associated with Limerick Institute of Technology's O365 campus. We've also received some sponsorship from Microsoft-Ireland during the past four years as we've covered several edtech events throughout Ireland.
There are several changes behind the Wordpress site we use and as another year draws close to the end, I realise that we need to find an enthusiastic web developer who might enjoy taking charge of the YMT.fm website. There are several enhancements in the form of widgets we can start to use right away.
Image Widgets. Adding an image to a WordPress widget is now very simple because you don't need to know how to code. Our YMT crea simply inserts their images right within the widget settings. We're inserting headshots of principal interviewees and watching them appear automatically.
Atavist Workflow. The best of each event covered by the YMT crew will be easily embedded into the Atavist framework on the Pen & Pixel website. This allows us to reimagine YMT content for another audience and potentially we will be able to grow the size of the mailing list we use to support the ICT in Education Conference.
Video Widget. We're looking at producing a welcome video to bring the faces to the voices of the Youth Media Team. Wordpess lets us add any video from our Media Library to a sidebar on the YMT.fm site with the Video widget. We're going to create some short video clips that can also work as intro pieces for the YMT.fm YouTube channel.
Audio Widget. We also plan to upload a welcoming audio file to the Media Media Library then go to the widget settings, select our welcoming message and keep the welcoming message at the top of the Youth Media Team website.
It will take more than a single six hour workshop to cobble together all these features so I'm writing about them here to get the opinion of Pam O'Brien and Sinead Tuohy, two of my colleagues who help bring together young and Irish voices online.
Listen to "YMTfm Workshop November 2017" on Spreaker.
[Bernie Goldbach teaches creative media for business in the Limerick Institute of Technology. He helps co-ordinate the technical side of Ireland's Youth Media Team.]
