Summary of Major Digital Project
For my major digital project for EC&I 831, I completed Option A: to undertake a major digital project that involves the integration/development of open educational resources related to my practice.Specifically, I worked on creating a parent education initiative on social media.

That advice did not resonate for me, so I shared a post on Facebook about my frustration
The response was overwhelmingly supportive (63 post reactions, and 48 comments). My friends and family encouraged me to share the knowledge that I have as a practitioner and social media educator and apply it to help parents.
My focus was on speaking at schools, education conferences and for parent groups. I had a business coach who was encouraging me to find ways to "monetize my knowledge" and that there were great opportunities to reach a large audience and profit from this. This advice never resonated with me. It wasn't the reason I was motivated to do this project, nor did the advice align with my values.
So, when our professor Dr. Alec Couros challenged us with creating a major digital project, I thought it was a good opportunity to leverage the work I had done and build out more resources that would be free/open to all.
I used the materials I wrote and researched for my book as the core content for my project.
The digital project would build my website www.socialcitizens.ca and my Facebook page
I shared my project idea with our class in this blogpost on September 24: https://nancysmithgrad.blogspot.com/2019/09/for-my-final-project-eci831.html
It was validating to get feedback from other students that my idea would be valuable as a resource:
Little did I know at the time that this would be the easiest part of the project - coming up with the idea. The hard part would become a reality over the month of October.
A few weeks later, I wrote this blog as an update on my progress:
https://nancysmithgrad.blogspot.com/2019/10/update-on-my-final-project-october-2019.html

1. I would need to learn how to use the website platform Squarespace so I could add pages to my website and build out the content
2. Determine content plan for my website, which I divided into two phases:
Phase 1: build out content for my existing book. I spent over 10 months writing and researching the material, so it is important to leverage this. Specifically, I will:
- record audio version to be uploaded as either an audiobook or podcast (still in research mode to determine which I will do)
I was eager to learn about podcasting, and it was beneficial that this timing coincided with the week in our course where we were reviewing tools & technology that could help build open education content. Several students, including myself, wrote blogs about the app Anchor.fm
I had tried recording using Audacity and Garageband, but found the process to be confusing and overwhelming. I had previously I reached out to a friend who is a podcaster Ernest Barbaric , and who runs an annual Podcasting Conference called Podsummit. He helped me get a professional recording microphone and gave me some great advice on the audio recording process. However, I found being the perfectionist that I am prone to, I was overwhelmed. Instead, I committed to trying the app I had reviewed, Anchor.fm
The actual research and recording process from start to finish took me approximately 20hours. I rehearsed, recorded, re-recorded and finally published the series of podcasts that would act as an audiobook
Here is the audiobook/podcast series https://anchor.fm/socialcitizens
Here is the blog post update after I completed my podcast series:
My November update https://nancysmithgrad.blogspot.com/2019/11/final-project-update-november-4-2019.html
Realizing my goal of learning how to add to my website proved to be more challenging than I anticipated. I found some resources online that I used including on Lynda.com, Youtube and Udemy. And I was successful in building out the framework and content of the site.I have added new pages, and have continued to work on content but must admit this did not get close to my goal for completion.
I guess the good news is, now I know how to do it, and I can continue to make progress and add to it every month.
I am pleased with the efforts I made on my Facebook page - during the timeline of this project I shared 27 facebook posts - and my Facebook analytics show that my content reached over 1,400 people across North America. I am always amazed at how social media can help share your message!
In summary, I am grateful to have had the opportunity to share my ideas/opinions/knowledge with these resources that are open for anyone to access.