23 Things

It's been a while since I have posted and thought I had better get the 23Things blog finished! I have had Facebook for many years now and am aware of the privacy settings. I used it a lot however over the years I have stopped posting and using it as much and recently deactivated my account. The cool kids these days say Facebook is for old people....In better terms, there are other platforms more entertaining than Facebook that they use. I was part of many groups on Facebook however I've never thought about having a private group for family members. Maybe this would get me posting again if I return to using the platform! In recent years, I've noticed Facebook has incorporated levels of sharing which allows you to share content with certain people included within lists such as close friends, friends and acquaintances. I think this is a great feature and it has since been integrated into Instagram!  

Todays 'thing' focuses on Twitter. I love using Twitter! I use it every day for work. However, I didn't know you could create lists of specific Twitter users so I had a look... This is a very useful feature for my Twitter account as it meant I could categorise users into two lists. One for work users and one for personal users. As I mostly use Twitter for work, most of my feed is work-related posts. By categorising the users it enables me to choose a list for the means that I am browsing.  Management tools such as TweetDeck and Hootsuite are very beneficial when you are running several Social Media platforms. I have been a user of TweetDeck for a couple of years. I use it to schedule specific posts for certain dates and times. I am recently a new user of Hootsuite and wow it makes my job a whole lot easier! It provides the functionality to view several communication channel streams which you can post directly to, all in the one place! Multiple streams can be added whic

Accessibility is so important and is a major focus of my day to day job as a Creative Learning Assistant as I support staff on their journey of making their learning materials accessible.    I remember learning about the accessibility features on mobile phones, back when I was using the iPhone 4 and my lock button at the top of the phone had broke. (The first and last time I ever had an Apple device - I'm an Android girl at heart!) This proved difficult when I needed to quickly lock my phone or when taking a screenshot. I was shown the option of using "AssistiveTouch" which gives you access to functions that would otherwise be controlled by pressing buttons which made life so much easier with a broken phone! 

Today the topic of focus was diverse representation online through the use of emojis. Until reading the articles I was unaware that there were issues surrounding the new emojis released. However, I completely understand both sides of the argument. In my personal opinion,  I think it's a good idea to have emojis to represent diversity and equality and its excellent to see that companies are trying to include this in the digital world! It seems that some people can interpret positive ideas into negativity, but then again is that not the reality of every idea? Someone will always have something negative to say. But hey, you can't please everyone! Bitimoji is a wonderful tool to interpret a character "selfie" like state of how you are feeling/reacting to something in an image format. There are so many designs to choose from! I was introduced to Bitomoji a while back but I always forget to use it. So while I have the chance here's one I made to say hello to you all. 

This week Digital Security was the topic surrounding "Thing 4". After reading the  Smartphone Security Information provided by the Information Commissioner’s Office, I'd say I'm quite secure when using phones as I use pin protected passwords and o n a regular basis, I would uninstall any applications which I don't need or haven't used in a while. When downloading apps I always read reviews and ensure they are from trusted sources.  I took a look through the permissions of apps on my phone. This was due a clean up, but  I was quite shocked at the amount of apps that had access to my location. I would be worried about what other services have access to my data and what they are doing with it. I did n otice some permissions which I'm not too sure/happy about but  most of them are needed to use the functionality they provide in app, so how do we work around that?  I do admit, there have been occasions when I let apps have access to certain permissions j

Hi everyone, I'm back with Thing 3 to cover Digital Footprint, which is basically described as the print(information) we leave behind in the digital world. Apparently, the first and best place to start is by Googling yourself, so that's what I did!  When I searched for my name, I didn't find too much, but that was expected given most of my social media accounts are private. At least I know that they are doing their job! 👍 My LinkedIn account did appear in the search results though! It's good to know that if employers were to search for my name that my professional profile is displayed to them. However, this got me thinking, why did my Twitter profile not appear in the results? (I have this set to public as I us e it mostly for work) I searched for the username I use for the account "ShannonBoyce036" which showed results from my Twitter feed and blog entries from the ALTNI website. That's all for now, I 'm off to sign up to the Digital Footpri