Communication Conundrums

With so many ways to communicate these days you would think it was easier to communicate.  But you would be wrong.  It's even harder.  Several years ago almost all my students were on Facebook.  We were literally on the same page with each other in our communication.  Well, those days are over.  Almost half of my students are on Facebook or use their parent's Facebook page.  The other nearly half of my students are now using Instagram.  While there are the other few who have no social media accounts whatsoever.  I can't send out a mass text, because many of them don't have a phone.  We have also recently tried using the app called Remind to send messages, which I like because the user can choose whether to receive the message via e-mail, push notifications, or text; whichever works best for them.  But the app let us down recently when we were trying to use it for some social interaction.  It has some limitations, like the amount of people who can be on one group chat, for instance.  Have you found yourself in the same situation?  What can we do about it?  Well, you can pay a monthly fee for a social media dashboard.  But I don't want to pay a fee so here is what I found.  It requires using three apps:  rss.app, feedly.com, and gmail.

First, turn your Facebook and Instagram feeds into rss (really simple syndication) feeds.  Go to rss.app and link your social accounts.  The free version only allows you to use two so that's why I chose our Facebook page and our Instagram account.

Then, input any of your publicly accessible media into a feedly.com message board.  We have a Facebook page, an Instagram account, a parenting blog on blogger.com, and a Youtube channel.  You don't need to create rss feeds for blogs on blogger.com or Youtube channels since they already have rss integrated into their apps.  If you have a blogger blog, open your blog, and in the URL, add /feeds/posts/default to the end of the url.  Copy and paste it and add it to your feedly.com board.  For Youtube, go to your channel, delete the end of the url all the way to the "?" (including the "?").  Copy and paste what is left into your feedly.com board.  If the people you communicate with are all on feedly.com then you could simply share the link to your board and they would get all the messages you are putting out.  But there is a slim chance that everyone is all on the same page.

The last step is to copy and paste your feedly board into your email message.  There are a few visual options to choose from in feedly:  title only, magazine, cards, and article.  I chose cards because they look good with pictures.  Copy all the cards (or whatever view you chose) with their links that you want to include in your e-mail to your parents.  Paste what you have copied into the message section of your e-mail.  What you have left is a dynamic looking email with clickable links to all your communication with your people.  They can click on the links and respond to you on your social media, or they can simply reply to your email.  Now, you could have just made hyperlinks to all the things you wanted people to see, but they just don't look as good.  It's not perfect, but it's a far cry from where I was three weeks ago before I started researching this.  Happy communicating!