Saturday, 25 October 2014

Creating Content

By Lisa Dillon-Roberts, Principal, Merrin School
principal@merrin.school.nz

It is no longer news to anyone that Technology has and continues to transform our lives.  It seems that as one great device or piece of software is launched into our worlds, another falls off into the abyss of non-popularity.

But one thing remains constant, our need to create, present and curate content.

Our personal and professional content is everywhere.  It’s on our phones, on our laptops, and more than ever it is now in the cloud – blogs, Facebook, twitter, YouTube, the list is endless.

How long before our content is accessed via accessories we wear e.g. watches and glasses and by standard home appliances e.g. TVs and fridges?  Will you be able to access your content from the passenger seat of your car in the coming years?

So what are the ‘real’ issues surrounding working with content?
From my personal perspective, both professionally and personally I simply do not have the time to put valuable, high quality content on a number of different platforms.

At school we find it increasingly frustrating to create content over and over again.  For example, we create content on our classroom blogs, but then require similar content for our school newsletter, we then want the same content to be part of our leaver’s magazine and again on an individual basis via CD for leavers, all the time spending hours recreating it.

At home, I create content on Facebook for family to view, I then require the same content to make a photo book or to place on our family blog for family members who don’t Facebook.  All the time spending hours creating; ultimately recreating this content.

At school we have been thinking about this issue for some time.  Recently, we have launched ‘Hail’ (www.hail.to) into our school.  This system allows us, via ‘tags’, to manipulate the same content as many times as we wish and publish it to a number of different locations.  We now create high quality content once and publish it everywhere. The presentation quality is high-end and at this early stage we are sold.  Please feel free to check out our firstpublished school newsletter here...

At home, my nine-year-old daughter is producing small publications as a way of recording her adventures.  I see this as a priceless vehicle for recording the history of her childhood, at the same time encouraging purposeful writing by giving her the opportunity to story tell online.

Whatever you decide to do with content in your professional and personal lives I wish you well.  Revolution by definition means ‘a fundamental change in organisational structures that take place in a relatively short period of time’ so, where will you move to with content management?

Lisa Dillon-Roberts
Principal
Christchurch 

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