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Acquisition of Key Competences for Economic and Social Sustainability
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Unit 1: Key Facts to Help You Boost Your Creative Use of ICT Tools So What About Creativity?
 Creativity is often seen as a special trait of a privileged category of people. That’s…questionable. Indeed, there are some inherited traits related to creativity, but, beyond that, it can, and has to be cultivated in order to reach its full potential. Creativity is a habit. If you encourage and cultivate it on a consistent basis, it will flourish. Creativity can be learned. The Facts
# 1 Knowledge Research shows that “knowledge is of substantial importance to trigger a creative outcome”. Why? Let’s take a practical example. You’re an artist and you intend to promote your work online (in order to sell or just to make yourself/your work known). Why do you want to promote it online? Because you know that online marketing tools do exist. If you wouldn’t have heard about them, you’d never have thought of promoting your business online. Knowledge is crucial. If you want to be able to creatively use digital tools, than you have to be up-to-date. You have to get informed. Of course, nobody knows everything – get an overview of a few tools and study more in-depth those you consider relevant to your purpose.
# 2 Perspective Shift –Proactivity This field of digital tools is extremely dynamic. Things are changing very fast. You need to be open to novelty and not only embrace change, but search for it yourself. Avoid ‘getting used’ to some software or another and refusing to use new ones – this is not only killing your creativity, but may also lead to outdated looking results. The cure? •Search the web periodically for the newest tools and trends.
•Read reviews.
•Be among the first ones to hear about new software and adopt new tools.
•Don’t wait until everybody is using some tool or another. Don’t wait until you are told about it. That means you’re already too late – it could be already out of fashion.
#3 Skills Development Yes, you do need them in order to be creative. Creativity it’s not just something abstract. The ability to think of new things – that may or may not exist – IMAGINATION The ability to make new things – CREATIVITY This means that it’s not enough only to know that some tools or others do exist. You need to be able to actually use them. But the news are good! Nowadays, a lot of very intuitive and user-friendly tools are available, for which you need very little previous knowledge or technical skills. How to put it into practice: •Choose a tool appropriate for your purpose: if you need to build something basic, then you don’t need a program meant for professional use, which could be resource consuming, and takes long to learn. READ REVIEWS (Tip: search on google ‘the best free software to create XYZ ’ or ‘the best free alternative to XYZ’)
•Check the requirements and install the program (make sure it’s from a secure source). Also, using cloud-based tools is an excellent option.
•Start playing with the menu and trying the functions. Most often you’ll find a lot of similarities between different software.
•Search on web for menu items/functions that you don’t know or don’t understand. Most probably you’ll find plenty of video tutorials that will make everything clear.
•Get to work!
# 4 Inspiration •You don’t need to re-invent the wheel in order to be creative. You can creatively combine tools, ideas and elements that already exist.
•Make connections across different areas of knowledge.
•Get inspiration – from the best in the field. For example, if you want to build a website for your small business or classroom, you can search online for ‘best design/consulting (whatever your field is) websites in (year)’.
•Of course, you may not have access to the tools the expert use. But you definitely can adopt some design elements you like and re-create them with the tools that are available to you.
# 5 Your Role into the Process •Remember that everything is up to you. Your level of success is strongly correlated to your level of commitment. You have to be willing to learn, invest your time and psychological resources.
•Practice, practice, practice.
•Extremely important: don’t get discouraged when the results are not as expected. Please mind that nobody is 100% original every single time, you cannot be creative on command. And this is totally fine and normal.
•Replace your limiting beliefs with new, empowering ones. There’s no such things like ‘I’m no good with computers’. You’ve just had some negative experience sometime, now it’s time to get rid of it.
•Independent learning and research is crucial into this field. Everything is so dynamic and moving so fast that this is the only way to keep really up to date.
Unit 2: Basic Tools to Create a Website and Other Materials Graphic Design Basics
Graphic Design (also known as communication design) is the activity and art of using visual and text content in order to communicate ideas, making use of specific principles and tools. Leaflets, posters, infographics, advertisements are all examples of graphic design. Here are the main principles and elements to be taken into consideration: Design Principles: Balance, Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, Proximity, Space Design Elements: Line, Shape, Direction, Value, Color, Texture, Size CLICK HERE FOR AN OVERVIEW OF DESIGN ELEMENTS AND PRINCIPLES Introduction to Google Tools
This section of the course will require your active involvement. We highly recommend not only reading and watching the resources but also repeating the activities yourself. HERE ARE THE MAIN INTRODUCTORY STEPS •Log In or Sign Up to Your Google Account (Here’s how to create a Google Account – video). See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIEWR95aaoI
Basic Tools to Create Logos
•Characteristics of a good logo:
Simple – do not use too many details, it should look as good no matter if it’s printed in a large or small size, and easy to remember. Do some research and observe the logos of the most successful companies – most of all respect those conditions. Versatile – should look good in any context, choose colours that work well on most backgrounds. Targeted – do not forget your audience; Memorable – does it create a lasting impression? •It can be image-based, text only or a combination of both, and, depending on the situation it may or may not include a slogan. Remember graphic design principles and elements when designing your logo.
•Examples of free applications you can get started with:
Online: LogoMaker Offline: Jeta Free Logo Maker (you can download it here) Creating a basic website using Google Sites
•Why do I need to know how to create an website? And why Google Sites? Well, maybe you’ve got some business, craft or skill you’d like to promote or knowledge you’d like to share but you can’t afford professional services yet. Or just to improve and expand your creativity. Google Sites is a great starting point because you have everything in one place and it provides most of the features a beginner might need, in a very intuitive format. Check below some examples of what you can do with this simple site builder and some quick tips to get you started.
•Best Practices Examples (HERE)
Dos and Don’ts •Do: stick with the predefine colour theme, use colours from the logo, use images accordingly; Remember that less is more. Don’t: use too many colors
•Don’t: use poor quality images/video Do: use stock photos/video instead
Steps to Creating a Basic Website with New Google Sites
Other useful stuff
•Word Clouds (HOW TO VIDEO)
You can use any word cloud generator you like best. The video above is an exemplification on WordClouds.com (free). The usual steps to create a word cloud (shape made of words, size of each word emphasizing importance): •Search for an online generator
•Upload and paste your text (about 200 words works nicely)
•Choose shape, colors, fonts
•Choose word ranking (the higher the value, the larger the word)
•Choose format (PNG has transparent background), download and use it
•QR Codes (HOW TO VIDEO)
•They’re a type of 2D bar codes which can be read using a mobile phone’s camera and a specific application
•Simple and free to use: search online for a free generator, choose type, enter information, set aspect, download and use it
Unit 3: Online Marketing Insights What is it about? Overview and main tools
•Online marketing is the activity of making use of digital distribution channels and tools/techniques in order to reach your audience/market and promote/sell your brand, service or product.
•Advantages of online marketing vs. traditional marketing: low cost, flexible, plenty of tools available, demographic targeting, statistics.
•Main limitation: lack of tangibility, in case of selling physical products.
•Examples of tools/techniques & channels: Websites, SEO, Copy Writing, Blogs, Publications, Email Marketing, Social Media (Social Media Marketing LinkedIn - see Groups, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Google+, Many Other)
How to get started? Quick tips.
Make a simple plan, starting from which you are already familiar with, e.g.: •Decide and clearly define what product/service/knowledge you want to share, whether it is for profit or not, and if it’s a long term or short term activity;
•Understand your audience (in terms of interests, age, gender, location, proximity, education, number of people to be reached etc.). Having a clear idea of whom you’re addressing will help you a lot when choosing the channels and methods. Be as specific as possible.
•Create a simple presentation website (depending on the complexity of the service you may consider creating other promotional materials);
•For the beginning choose one or two social networks according to the characteristics of the target group you just defined. The users of different social networks have different profiles (age, education, interests) – do your research first.
•Make sure you’ve familiarized with the functions of any tool you may want to use before actually launching anything officially.
•Never ever post anything online that you think you could regret later. Better think twice. Online reputation is difficult to create and extremely easy to ruin. Even if you delete an unfortunate post from your account, chances are that a lot of people have already seen it.
•If you consider starting a serious online business, involving online payments and other more advanced features, there are 2 options: either get really well documented and understand everything in detail or consider professional services. Never use anything you don’t understand and/or are not sure about, especially when security concerns may arise.
•Mind the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) – see more details HERE.
It is highly important if you operate with personal data of your customers |
Keywords
Digital technologies, creativity, web design, google tools, online marketing
DescriptionThis module is meant to help you develop a new mind set so you can boost your inner creator and equip you with a set of basic hands on tools to start with and build on. The first module provides information on the key aspects that influence success in creatively using ICT tools. The second module is bringing into the light a few tools you can start with to bring your ideas to reality. Finally, the third module provides insights on the most important aspects of online marketing.
