I take no credit for our latest venture.  After stumbling upon Rachel Reuben’s recent post on .eduGuru just after our Christmas break, we quickly decided it was something we needed to move on for our fall 2009 students.  It was actually something that I had been mulling over since the Innovative Educators’ conference in Cincinnati this past June, but I wasn’t sure we had the resources to make it happen.  Once I had read Rachel’s post, I knew it was something that we could get going quickly. So last Wednesday I began the process of putting a similar site together from Hope. ...

I’ve posted a fair amount about the video content that we’ve been creating for prospective students from the Admissions office at Hope.  Along with creation, I’ve been trying to promote and syndicate like crazy.  In the process I inadvertently learned how to develop and submit a video podcast to iTunes.  Here’s my stress-free process for doing so: 1.  You’ll need to put together some content. Depending on your setup, this can be fairly easy to do.  I’ve outlined our process for putting together our monthly updates in a previous post.  What we end up with is a...

So our first video update was a big success, with about 480 views on Vimeo (and who knows how many on Facebook/YouTube).  This month we’re touching on life around Hope during the holiday season.  The biggest difference this month is that we are bringing in the students’ personal perspectives, which should make the video even more popular than the last. This month’s update also comes on the heels of both Facebook and YouTube integrating HD playback into their video embeds.  Facebook has also recently built video plays into their “insights” reporting mechanism.  Never...

Like many of you, Hope College Admissions has created a “page” in order to have an additional presence on Facebook.  What you begin with is pretty basic, but there are some tricks to get a more interactive experience going, particularly with the page’s profile picture/box.  I realized this after I came across the Facebook page for another institution.  My first thought: What a huge value-add to be able to have students link back to our site… I want this now. The first thing I did was take a look at the source of that other institution’s page.  Somehow they were able...

I’m pretty excited about the latest project we have going.  We recently picked up a Kodak Zi6** (pocket video camera), a cheap ($159) camera that shoots in HD at 720p.  I was initially intrigued at the idea of taking quality video from campus events (traditional events, athletics, arts events, etc.).  I then realized that video could be a great medium for delivering short messages about admissions-related topics. The following video is our first attempt at addressing one of these topics; in this case, a brief reminder to students to apply by our early notification deadline.  We shot the video...