You might not think that facepainting and museums go all that well together. Dogs, butterflies and spiderman in lurid colours on kids' faces are more the realm of birthday parties than museum events, right?
Well, I'm sort of hoping I might change your mind about that in this post.
Here are the top reasons I think facepainting should be included in at least a couple of your events every year. Oh, and it's important that it's your staff doing it too - but I'll get to that in a minute.
1. Kids LOVE it. And I mean LOVE. Most children who would otherwise not sit still to engage with anything remotely museum-y (is there such a thing?) will happily sit quietly for ten minutes and let someone doodle on their face with a paintbrush.
2. Parents love it too. Mostly because of #1 - they love that their kids get to sit quietly for a few minutes. I'm sure they love the animal impressions that come after you've finished just as much, too.
3. Most importantly: it gives you a captive audience. Whilst the child is sitting there, at the mercy of your artistic talent, you can ask them all the questions you wish you could ask every visitor. Are you having a good day? What's your favourite thing you've seen or done? Is there something you're looking forward to later? Have you been here before? Everything you ever wanted to know. And their parents are right there too, ready to be quizzed. Have you ever had a better chance to do some on-the-spot evaluation?
Bearing that in mind, because I'm sure I've just convinced you all to slot some facepainting into your programmes for next year, here's a few things you need to think about before you get out your "facepainting here today" sign.
1. Buy good paints. I can't stress how important it is not to give your visitors an allergic reaction with cheap face paints. Invest in a decent brand, like Snazaroo. It's honestly worth it; not only are good paints easier to paint with than the ones you might pick up from the poundstore, but you'll get some instant respect from any visitors who have painted faces before just for having a good brand on the table.
2. Find someone with some artistic talent to do the painting. It's not fair to say that everyone can be a face painter. Having said that, though, just because you've not done it before doesn't mean you'll be terrible; there are some excellent books out there which have some great simple designs in. If you're only confident doing a tiger, a butterfly and a dog then that's fine. Just make sure you make that clear on the signs that that's what you're offering.
3. Consider your event and your audience. Nature events are a great time to get out the facepaints because it's so easy to find loads of great inspiration for face paint designs in the animal kingdom. But that's not your only option; I've done painting for "princesses" and "fairies" at a magical event before, just by offering small stars or glittery swirls. Small children often won't sit still long enough for a full face so if you know you're going to get a lot of little ones then think about what cheek or arm designs you could do.
4. Facepainting doesn't have to cost the Earth. Parents are very grateful when you can offer it for free, or even for a small charge such as £1 for a full face. If you're not confident in your abilities just yet, offer it for free. You can always start charging at events later in the year when you feel you have improved.
5. Facepainting is time consuming. Make sure you plan enough time into your day for it. If you're expecting a lot of visitors then don't expect your facepainting staff member to have time to do anything else that day.
I've been facepainting for about five or six years now, so if you've got any other questions about it then just ask, as always I'm happy to answer.
Saturday, 3 September 2011
Tuesday, 23 August 2011
Inspiring places
I spotted a post this morning from @museummedia on twitter, pointing at a summary of ten beautiful historic libraries. It's no surprise that I love old buildings really, given my chosen career, but looking through these pictures reminded me just how inspiring a building can be, without any extra effort put into the whizzbang of interpretation.
I started to think about other places that have been inspiring over the years, and soon realised that there are far too many, and of such great diversity, to share them all. Still, here are a few places I've been that really stuck in my memory.
This is Ditherington Flax Mill, in Shrewsbury. It was the first iron-framed building in the world, which makes it the forerunner for the modern skyscraper, and as such it's a Grade I listed building. It's also a building site at the moment, as English Heritage work to turn it into something that will last for the future. When I visited a few years ago there was little there but room upon room of these iron supports, occassionally with holes at the top to allow the belts that drove the machines to run the length of the room. What was most impressive about it, as I remember, was the sheer scale of the place; each room very long, and knowing that there were more floors above you just the same.
This is the chained library at Hereford Cathedral. You can just about make out in the picture that all the books are chained to the shelves with heavy iron chain! A hark back to the days when books really were that valuable. Not that I think you'd be able to slip out unnoticed with most of these tomes; they're rather big and heavy. For anyone who has read the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett, this is rather how I imagine sections of the library at the Unseen University to be!
I started to think about other places that have been inspiring over the years, and soon realised that there are far too many, and of such great diversity, to share them all. Still, here are a few places I've been that really stuck in my memory.
Photo credit: The Guardian
This is Ditherington Flax Mill, in Shrewsbury. It was the first iron-framed building in the world, which makes it the forerunner for the modern skyscraper, and as such it's a Grade I listed building. It's also a building site at the moment, as English Heritage work to turn it into something that will last for the future. When I visited a few years ago there was little there but room upon room of these iron supports, occassionally with holes at the top to allow the belts that drove the machines to run the length of the room. What was most impressive about it, as I remember, was the sheer scale of the place; each room very long, and knowing that there were more floors above you just the same.
If you're interested in the Mill, you can read more about it on English Heritage's website.
Photo credits: English Heritage Prints
There's a lot to find inspiring about Bolsover Castle, in Derbyshire. These two pictures, of the Pillared Parlour and the Star Chamber respectively, are just two of the fantastic interiors that you can find in the Little Castle, a smaller building within the castle grounds. The exteriors are pretty fabulous too, not to mention the views across the surrounding countryside.
Photo credit: TravelerFolio.com
I've already said I love libraries, so it should come as no surprise that the library at Cardiff Castle completely blew me away. The detail in all the carvings on the bookshelves and painted around the room could keep anyone occupied for hours hunting for all of the animals, flowers and so on that are depicted there. They didn't, as far as I could see, run any such sort of hunt for families, but you could easily invent your own!
Photo credit: BBC
This is the chained library at Hereford Cathedral. You can just about make out in the picture that all the books are chained to the shelves with heavy iron chain! A hark back to the days when books really were that valuable. Not that I think you'd be able to slip out unnoticed with most of these tomes; they're rather big and heavy. For anyone who has read the Discworld books by Terry Pratchett, this is rather how I imagine sections of the library at the Unseen University to be!
Photo credit: Shropshire Star
This is the Picture Room at Attingham Park in Shropshire. The room is full of pictures that one of the house's inhabitants collected on an extravagant Grand Tour as is the case in many historic houses, but my favourite thing about the room is the fantastic sky-light in the roof. The panels of glass are held together by a then-innovative ironwork structure; who would expect less from a home so near to the famous ironworks at Coalbrookdale? Unfortunately the roof has a terrible tendency to leak, so today it's protected on the outside by a secondary clear roof, invisible from the inside.
I could go on listing inspirational places all day, but I think I'll leave it there for now. What inspirational places have you got to share? I'd love to see them; I'm always looking for more places to go and see.
Monday, 1 August 2011
Twitter tips
This is the second part of my series of introductions to social media. The first was about facebook and you can find it here.
The idea of these posts isn't to tell you everything there is to know about social media, just to give you an overview of the most important things to know when starting from scratch if you've got little or no experience with the medium.
Today's post is about twitter.
Twitter is perhaps more daunting to approach than facebook, for someone new to social media. It has a lot of technical terms, such as tweet and retweet and url and so on that are used all the time on the website, that can be mystifying if you don't know what they mean. I'll try and explain as many of them as I can on the way through.
Setting up your account
Setting up an account on twitter is very easy. Start by heading to www.twitter.com and clicking on the button that says 'sign up'. The username that you create will be how people find and refer to you on twitter, so make sure that it's something that represents you well and is easy for people to remember. Good examples of twitter names might be PooleMuseum or NationalTrust. Bad usernames might be the name of the member of staff who created the account, or a complicated acronym. You'll also have a chance to write your name; this can include all the characters that your username couldn't, such as spaces. The rest of the sign-up process is quite straightforward; there is very little information to fill in.
Updating your 'look'
You are represented on twitter by five things. Firstly, your username and 'real name', which we've already covered. Next is your 'descriptive text'. Here you get 140 characters to describe yourself to the world at large. This is the only space you get to do this with, so make all those characters count. Usually it's good to summarise your institution with a sentence or two, then say who is tweeting on behalf of you if it's going to be one person. You might want a thesaurus handy to come up with shorter equivalents for things you want to say to get as much information into those 140 characters as possible!
The other two are your avatar and your background. Your avatar is the little square picture that shows next to your username throughout twitter. It will be the visual representation of your institution, so you want to choose something that will stand out and be recognisable as you. You can change your avatar whenever you want, but it's probably best to keep it fairly stable. Museum logos make good icons, as do striking pictures of your notable collections if you have something particularly well known. It's worth knowing that although your avatar shows up as a small square most of the time, twitter users can click on your picture for a full-size version to get a better look at the image if they want to, so you don't have to use a tiny picture, or even a square one. If your picture isn't naturally square, twitter will automatically crop it for you.
Twitter has a wide range of background pictures that you can choose from, but you can also upload your own. If you choose a picture that is smaller than the screen size it is being displayed on then twitter will automatically tile the image unless you tell it not to. Cunning use of background colour and a picture that fades into it will help your page look good on any size monitor. If you're not sure, twitter's default backgrounds or plain colours work well to start.
Short and sweet
You'll know that one of the key characteristics of twitter is that each "tweet" (the messages or status updates that you post) can only be 140 characters long. One of the drawbacks of this used to be that it made including links to things difficult. Luckily, this is less of an issue now as twitter includes an automatic url (the address of a link) shortener. There are still plenty of separate ones out there that you can use; the likes of bit.ly and tiny.cc to name two. Their benefits often include click-through statistics tracking that twitter doesn't give you, but it's nice to know that twitter now offers something automatically so you shouldn't have to worry about links taking up all of your 140 characters.
I had a good suggestion in the comments from John Bibby so I'm adding it in here. If you do use an url shortening service, you are given the option of choosing what your shortened link appears as. Usually the abbreviation you wanted to use has been taken before. However, if you give yourself an acronym to use at the start of each shortened url, you'll probably find you can use whatever you like after it and still be unique. John uses aa42; you could use something that fits with your organisation, for example the V&A might use VnA as the start of all of their addresses, giving them shortened urls such as VnAart or VnAoffr and so on.
Retweet, retweet!
As well as "tweeting" your own posts, you can also "retweet" things that other people have said. Retweeting something is basically a way of saying you like or approve of something, or of raising awareness of something that other people want to be more widely known such as an event or a request for information. In the character-precious environment of twitter, retweet is often abbreviated to RT. To retweet a post, hover over it. You'll see icons for replying to the post, as well as one for retweeting it. The retweet icon looks a bit like a square recycling sign.
Talking to other people
No twitterer is an island; part of what makes twitter valuable is the conversation between people. There are two ways to talk to other people on twitter; by public tweet or by direct message.
A public tweet is something everyone can see. To make sure someone knows it's aimed at them, you put @Theirtwittername at the start of the tweet. This is like having a conversation with someone in a room full of other people; everyone else can hear (see) what you're saying.
A direct message is a private conversation between two people. You can get to your direct messages from the 'messages' tab in twitter. Type in the twitter name of the person you want to send the message to and away you go. Twitter keeps a log of all the people you've messaged in the past on the left hand side of the screen so it's easily accessible in the future. Bear in mind that though your message can't be seen by the public that doesn't mean the other party won't share it; think of it like sending email messages.
And that's it for the basics! I hope it's been useful to people. If people are interested in the more intermediate hints and tips, such as using programmes like TweetDeck and HootSuite to schedule tweets, or statistics tracking, let me know and I'll be happy to write a second post.
I haven't planned any more social media introductions at the moment, but I'm happy to write some up if people are interested in anything in particular. Foursquare, youtube... ask and I'll get writing!
The idea of these posts isn't to tell you everything there is to know about social media, just to give you an overview of the most important things to know when starting from scratch if you've got little or no experience with the medium.
Today's post is about twitter.
Twitter is perhaps more daunting to approach than facebook, for someone new to social media. It has a lot of technical terms, such as tweet and retweet and url and so on that are used all the time on the website, that can be mystifying if you don't know what they mean. I'll try and explain as many of them as I can on the way through.
Setting up your account
Setting up an account on twitter is very easy. Start by heading to www.twitter.com and clicking on the button that says 'sign up'. The username that you create will be how people find and refer to you on twitter, so make sure that it's something that represents you well and is easy for people to remember. Good examples of twitter names might be PooleMuseum or NationalTrust. Bad usernames might be the name of the member of staff who created the account, or a complicated acronym. You'll also have a chance to write your name; this can include all the characters that your username couldn't, such as spaces. The rest of the sign-up process is quite straightforward; there is very little information to fill in.
Updating your 'look'
You are represented on twitter by five things. Firstly, your username and 'real name', which we've already covered. Next is your 'descriptive text'. Here you get 140 characters to describe yourself to the world at large. This is the only space you get to do this with, so make all those characters count. Usually it's good to summarise your institution with a sentence or two, then say who is tweeting on behalf of you if it's going to be one person. You might want a thesaurus handy to come up with shorter equivalents for things you want to say to get as much information into those 140 characters as possible!
The other two are your avatar and your background. Your avatar is the little square picture that shows next to your username throughout twitter. It will be the visual representation of your institution, so you want to choose something that will stand out and be recognisable as you. You can change your avatar whenever you want, but it's probably best to keep it fairly stable. Museum logos make good icons, as do striking pictures of your notable collections if you have something particularly well known. It's worth knowing that although your avatar shows up as a small square most of the time, twitter users can click on your picture for a full-size version to get a better look at the image if they want to, so you don't have to use a tiny picture, or even a square one. If your picture isn't naturally square, twitter will automatically crop it for you.
Twitter has a wide range of background pictures that you can choose from, but you can also upload your own. If you choose a picture that is smaller than the screen size it is being displayed on then twitter will automatically tile the image unless you tell it not to. Cunning use of background colour and a picture that fades into it will help your page look good on any size monitor. If you're not sure, twitter's default backgrounds or plain colours work well to start.
Short and sweet
You'll know that one of the key characteristics of twitter is that each "tweet" (the messages or status updates that you post) can only be 140 characters long. One of the drawbacks of this used to be that it made including links to things difficult. Luckily, this is less of an issue now as twitter includes an automatic url (the address of a link) shortener. There are still plenty of separate ones out there that you can use; the likes of bit.ly and tiny.cc to name two. Their benefits often include click-through statistics tracking that twitter doesn't give you, but it's nice to know that twitter now offers something automatically so you shouldn't have to worry about links taking up all of your 140 characters.
I had a good suggestion in the comments from John Bibby so I'm adding it in here. If you do use an url shortening service, you are given the option of choosing what your shortened link appears as. Usually the abbreviation you wanted to use has been taken before. However, if you give yourself an acronym to use at the start of each shortened url, you'll probably find you can use whatever you like after it and still be unique. John uses aa42; you could use something that fits with your organisation, for example the V&A might use VnA as the start of all of their addresses, giving them shortened urls such as VnAart or VnAoffr and so on.
Retweet, retweet!
As well as "tweeting" your own posts, you can also "retweet" things that other people have said. Retweeting something is basically a way of saying you like or approve of something, or of raising awareness of something that other people want to be more widely known such as an event or a request for information. In the character-precious environment of twitter, retweet is often abbreviated to RT. To retweet a post, hover over it. You'll see icons for replying to the post, as well as one for retweeting it. The retweet icon looks a bit like a square recycling sign.
Talking to other people
No twitterer is an island; part of what makes twitter valuable is the conversation between people. There are two ways to talk to other people on twitter; by public tweet or by direct message.
A public tweet is something everyone can see. To make sure someone knows it's aimed at them, you put @Theirtwittername at the start of the tweet. This is like having a conversation with someone in a room full of other people; everyone else can hear (see) what you're saying.
A direct message is a private conversation between two people. You can get to your direct messages from the 'messages' tab in twitter. Type in the twitter name of the person you want to send the message to and away you go. Twitter keeps a log of all the people you've messaged in the past on the left hand side of the screen so it's easily accessible in the future. Bear in mind that though your message can't be seen by the public that doesn't mean the other party won't share it; think of it like sending email messages.
And that's it for the basics! I hope it's been useful to people. If people are interested in the more intermediate hints and tips, such as using programmes like TweetDeck and HootSuite to schedule tweets, or statistics tracking, let me know and I'll be happy to write a second post.
I haven't planned any more social media introductions at the moment, but I'm happy to write some up if people are interested in anything in particular. Foursquare, youtube... ask and I'll get writing!
When I grow up I want to be... Results!
Well, I promised them and here they are. In total, I surveyed 175 children between the ages of 3 and 16. Really, it's not enough to get any conclusive results (says my GCSE in Statistics) but it's certainly enough to start seeing some interesting things coming out.
To summarise the trends that came out of the data, then...
The most popular careers for girls under the age of 9 are vets, dancers and hairdressers. I also hit upon some of the classics you might expect from the under tens; princesses, queens, famous people and 'just like my Mum'. 10-12 year old girls surprisingly (but pleasantly so) favour being scientists over anything else, including forensic scientists, zoologists and marine biologists. Also popular are artists and fashion designers. 13-16 year olds are more interested in care jobs; social worker, nurse and midwife scored highly, as did physical training jobs such as PE teacher, sports coach and physical therapist.
Popular careers for boys under the age of 9 are soliders, firemen, policemen and footballers. There were some gems here too; pirate, millionaire and Santa were my favourites. The 10-12 age group did well for engineers and mechanics, as well as policemen and firemen. This group seemed to have the widest range of desired careers, with everything from chefs and carpenters to astronauts and archaeologists. 13-16 year old boys were rather under-represented in my sample group, but the ones I did have favoured teachers and soldiers as their preferred careers.
If the results are anything to go by, it seems that the under 12s have the most imaginative ideas about their future careers. By the time they get to 13/14, they've started to think more realistically about their futures, and abandon the princesses and pirates in favour of social workers and soldiers.
If you're interested in this and would like the raw data for anything you're doing please let me know and I'll be happy to share. It's something I'm going to keep working on so if you know any children under 16 and can help out by contributing what they'd like to be when they grow up, please do. All I need is gender, age and career choice. I'm particularly short of boys 13-16, but I'm happy for more data regardless of which category they fit into.
To summarise the trends that came out of the data, then...
The most popular careers for girls under the age of 9 are vets, dancers and hairdressers. I also hit upon some of the classics you might expect from the under tens; princesses, queens, famous people and 'just like my Mum'. 10-12 year old girls surprisingly (but pleasantly so) favour being scientists over anything else, including forensic scientists, zoologists and marine biologists. Also popular are artists and fashion designers. 13-16 year olds are more interested in care jobs; social worker, nurse and midwife scored highly, as did physical training jobs such as PE teacher, sports coach and physical therapist.
Popular careers for boys under the age of 9 are soliders, firemen, policemen and footballers. There were some gems here too; pirate, millionaire and Santa were my favourites. The 10-12 age group did well for engineers and mechanics, as well as policemen and firemen. This group seemed to have the widest range of desired careers, with everything from chefs and carpenters to astronauts and archaeologists. 13-16 year old boys were rather under-represented in my sample group, but the ones I did have favoured teachers and soldiers as their preferred careers.
If the results are anything to go by, it seems that the under 12s have the most imaginative ideas about their future careers. By the time they get to 13/14, they've started to think more realistically about their futures, and abandon the princesses and pirates in favour of social workers and soldiers.
If you're interested in this and would like the raw data for anything you're doing please let me know and I'll be happy to share. It's something I'm going to keep working on so if you know any children under 16 and can help out by contributing what they'd like to be when they grow up, please do. All I need is gender, age and career choice. I'm particularly short of boys 13-16, but I'm happy for more data regardless of which category they fit into.
Tuesday, 28 June 2011
Curators of the Future: Summary
It's been a fun day at the careers fair today. I've done a lot of talking about museums and a lot of teaching kids how to use a hobby horse. And enjoying the looks on their faces when I introduced them to the smell of carbolic soap.
"That's what history smells like, kids."
This is just a short summary whilst it's fresh in my head. If anyone else out there gets asked to do a careers fair for young people, hopefully this will be helpful for you.
Things that went well
We took museum objects to play show-and-tell with, and they went down very well. From the hobby horses to the washboard, the objects were a great talking point for all the kids from the real little ones all the way up to the 14 year olds. Watching 14 year olds ride hobby horses around a sports hall is at once hilarious and slightly terrifying.
Some kids are clearly there to get as many leaflets as they can possibly manage, so I was glad of the shortened version of the events programme that I'd printed out. The small papers on the web resources went down well too.
Things I'd do differently
We took two boxes of craft materials to make things with the younger children and didn't end up using any of it. They came around in groups of eight or ten and only stayed a couple of minutes, so making anything at all was rather impractical.
Some of the other stalls had stickers, badges, bags and other freebies. Big things are obviously not in the budget for small museums, but a few hundred button badges would have gone down a storm and wouldn't have cost all that much.
Things I overheard
Being a museum, I guess we have a lot of stereotypes that people associate with us. I heard one boy say in a rather derisive tone "a museum? What sort of a job would you have at a museum?".
It wasn't all doom and gloom though. We had a few people who specifically wanted to know about museum working; a few historians and a couple of archaeologists and one palaeontologist.
When I grow up I want to be...
I've asked a lot of children today what they want to be when they grow up. When I've got all the data tabulated I'll share (and of course I'm still hoping for more contributions from everyone out there!) but for now here are my favourites from today's fair;
Boy, 13yrs - "I'm not sure. I always used to say I wanted to be a Teletubby."
Girl, 7yrs - "I want to be lots of things. I want to be a dancer and a singer and a film maker and a pilot."
Boy, 12yrs - "I want to be Doctor Who, but I don't think he exists, so I guess a policeman instead."
"That's what history smells like, kids."
This is just a short summary whilst it's fresh in my head. If anyone else out there gets asked to do a careers fair for young people, hopefully this will be helpful for you.
Things that went well
We took museum objects to play show-and-tell with, and they went down very well. From the hobby horses to the washboard, the objects were a great talking point for all the kids from the real little ones all the way up to the 14 year olds. Watching 14 year olds ride hobby horses around a sports hall is at once hilarious and slightly terrifying.
Some kids are clearly there to get as many leaflets as they can possibly manage, so I was glad of the shortened version of the events programme that I'd printed out. The small papers on the web resources went down well too.
Things I'd do differently
We took two boxes of craft materials to make things with the younger children and didn't end up using any of it. They came around in groups of eight or ten and only stayed a couple of minutes, so making anything at all was rather impractical.
Some of the other stalls had stickers, badges, bags and other freebies. Big things are obviously not in the budget for small museums, but a few hundred button badges would have gone down a storm and wouldn't have cost all that much.
Things I overheard
Being a museum, I guess we have a lot of stereotypes that people associate with us. I heard one boy say in a rather derisive tone "a museum? What sort of a job would you have at a museum?".
It wasn't all doom and gloom though. We had a few people who specifically wanted to know about museum working; a few historians and a couple of archaeologists and one palaeontologist.
When I grow up I want to be...
I've asked a lot of children today what they want to be when they grow up. When I've got all the data tabulated I'll share (and of course I'm still hoping for more contributions from everyone out there!) but for now here are my favourites from today's fair;
Boy, 13yrs - "I'm not sure. I always used to say I wanted to be a Teletubby."
Girl, 7yrs - "I want to be lots of things. I want to be a dancer and a singer and a film maker and a pilot."
Boy, 12yrs - "I want to be Doctor Who, but I don't think he exists, so I guess a policeman instead."
Monday, 27 June 2011
When I grow up I want to be...
Tomorrow I'm at the 'inspired to work' careers fair, where I'll be talking to just under 2000 young people about the jobs that they could do in the future. It'll be a great chance to tell kids as young as six and seven about what we do in museums. Hopefully I might even inspire a few towards a career in heritage if I'm really lucky.
But really, that's not what this post is about. I've learnt during my time working with children that one of the things that usually engages children are events and activities that give them the chance to be something they've always dreamed of. Whether it's a spy, a forensic scientist or a pirate, the childhood dream-careers are always a good recipe for a fantastic day out and a really engaging learning experience that they really invest in.
So what are the careers of choice nowadays? I know what I wanted to be when I was younger (an astronaut, thank you very much) but I'm not sure whether today's youth have the same aspirations that I did when I was a child.
I'm hoping to do a bit of research to find out, and I'm hoping that you all can help me. Do you know any children? Anyone aged 16 or younger will do. All you have to do is ask them what they want to be when they grow up. Then let me know what it is, how old they are and whether they're male or female. You can tell me through twitter @Sarah_Fellows or by email at fellows.sarah.m@gmail.com
Easy, yes?
When I've collated all the results I'll share them here. Hopefully we'll all get something really useful out of it.
And of course, I'll try and gather as many responses tomorrow as I can. Surely in two thousand children I'll find some who know what they want to be when they grow up?
Distribute my quest as far and wide as you can and I'll be very grateful. And so will everyone else, when I send the results out.
In advance, I thank you!
But really, that's not what this post is about. I've learnt during my time working with children that one of the things that usually engages children are events and activities that give them the chance to be something they've always dreamed of. Whether it's a spy, a forensic scientist or a pirate, the childhood dream-careers are always a good recipe for a fantastic day out and a really engaging learning experience that they really invest in.
So what are the careers of choice nowadays? I know what I wanted to be when I was younger (an astronaut, thank you very much) but I'm not sure whether today's youth have the same aspirations that I did when I was a child.
I'm hoping to do a bit of research to find out, and I'm hoping that you all can help me. Do you know any children? Anyone aged 16 or younger will do. All you have to do is ask them what they want to be when they grow up. Then let me know what it is, how old they are and whether they're male or female. You can tell me through twitter @Sarah_Fellows or by email at fellows.sarah.m@gmail.com
Easy, yes?
When I've collated all the results I'll share them here. Hopefully we'll all get something really useful out of it.
And of course, I'll try and gather as many responses tomorrow as I can. Surely in two thousand children I'll find some who know what they want to be when they grow up?
Distribute my quest as far and wide as you can and I'll be very grateful. And so will everyone else, when I send the results out.
In advance, I thank you!
Saturday, 25 June 2011
Facebook tips
Today's post is on the subject of social media. There's a good number of courses you can go on to learn everything you need to know about social media and more, but a lot of them do cost a fair bit of money and that's something most people don't have at the moment. So, I thought I'd put together a quick how-to on using facebook and twitter for your venue.
First up is facebook.
Creating your page
There are various different sort of pages and groups and so on that facebook has or might have for your venue. Community pages, groups and a 'page' are the main three; most people will want to have a 'page' because it's best tailored of the three to the sort of thing most venues will want to do with facebook. To create a page for your venue, you'll need to go to http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php
Once you're there, just follow the prompts and enter the information as requested. It's fairly self explanatory. You can have as many page admins as you want. When any admins are on the page, anything they post will come up as being posted by the venue. This applies to photos, links, page status updates and 'likes'.
Creating events
Your venue can advertise 'events' on facebook which it can invite its followers/fans to.
To create an event, click on the events link. You'll find it on the left hand side of the page, under the venue picture, above the 'about your venue' information. The button to create an event is on the far right of the page. From there, just fill in all the information you can about the event; where, when, a picture and so on. You can also select guests to send an invitation to if you want, though you don't have to.
Once your event is live, you can edit the information at any time, as can any other page admins for your venue.
What is a check-in?
Your venue page will say on the left hand side how many check-ins your venue has. A check-in is when a person has tagged themselves in a post at your venue. Keeping tabs on how many people have checked in at your venue will tell you how many people who use facebook a lot are visiting your venue. Geo-location activity, such as checking into a venue, is getting more popular all the time, so it's something worth keeping an eye on in the future.
Sharing photos and collecting photos
A venue can share its official photographs through its venue page. To do this, click on the photos link on the left hand side of your venue page. There, you'll have the option to create new albums and to add new photos to existing albums. Give your albums names that are very descriptive; if it's clear what's in them, people are more likely to browse through them.
Your fans can share their photos of your venue via your venue page too. Whenever they post a picture to your page wall, it'll get collected into the 'photos of your venue' section which you see under your own albums on the photo page.
I hope that was useful! It doesn't include everything that you can do on a facebook page by any means, but it's a good start. If anyone wants hints and tips on anything else by all means ask and I'll be happy to do what I can in a follow-up post.
I'll be looking at twitter in another post.
If you've got questions I didn't answer do comment or drop me a line through twitter @Sarah_Fellows or by email to fellows.sarah.m@gmail.com.
First up is facebook.
Creating your page
There are various different sort of pages and groups and so on that facebook has or might have for your venue. Community pages, groups and a 'page' are the main three; most people will want to have a 'page' because it's best tailored of the three to the sort of thing most venues will want to do with facebook. To create a page for your venue, you'll need to go to http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php
Once you're there, just follow the prompts and enter the information as requested. It's fairly self explanatory. You can have as many page admins as you want. When any admins are on the page, anything they post will come up as being posted by the venue. This applies to photos, links, page status updates and 'likes'.
Creating events
Your venue can advertise 'events' on facebook which it can invite its followers/fans to.
To create an event, click on the events link. You'll find it on the left hand side of the page, under the venue picture, above the 'about your venue' information. The button to create an event is on the far right of the page. From there, just fill in all the information you can about the event; where, when, a picture and so on. You can also select guests to send an invitation to if you want, though you don't have to.
Once your event is live, you can edit the information at any time, as can any other page admins for your venue.
What is a check-in?
Your venue page will say on the left hand side how many check-ins your venue has. A check-in is when a person has tagged themselves in a post at your venue. Keeping tabs on how many people have checked in at your venue will tell you how many people who use facebook a lot are visiting your venue. Geo-location activity, such as checking into a venue, is getting more popular all the time, so it's something worth keeping an eye on in the future.
Sharing photos and collecting photos
A venue can share its official photographs through its venue page. To do this, click on the photos link on the left hand side of your venue page. There, you'll have the option to create new albums and to add new photos to existing albums. Give your albums names that are very descriptive; if it's clear what's in them, people are more likely to browse through them.
Your fans can share their photos of your venue via your venue page too. Whenever they post a picture to your page wall, it'll get collected into the 'photos of your venue' section which you see under your own albums on the photo page.
I hope that was useful! It doesn't include everything that you can do on a facebook page by any means, but it's a good start. If anyone wants hints and tips on anything else by all means ask and I'll be happy to do what I can in a follow-up post.
I'll be looking at twitter in another post.
If you've got questions I didn't answer do comment or drop me a line through twitter @Sarah_Fellows or by email to fellows.sarah.m@gmail.com.
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