 Welcome to today's AIN big topic webinar. I'm Paul Ze Jackson and it's my pleasure to introduce Bridget Brown who had this wonderful idea of tools that we can share online. We're looking forward to a collaborative discussion in which we can find out what some of those tools are, how we might use them, and add to our collection. So, warm welcome. I think this call will last probably around about an hour. Maybe it goes over a bit. We'll see how it goes. Over to you Bridget. Hi everybody. Thanks for joining me today. Hi June, nice to see you. Actually, what we do for a living before we start talking tech, we would do just a little warm-up exercise to get connected. And so, I made up this exercise that goes like this. I am going to talk in the wake of a computer and introduce myself as Bridget and say, have you Hello Bridget. I too am an artificial intelligence and I would like to greet Sudeer. You're muted Sudeer. Okay, I got it. Thank you. Well, my name is Sudeer and I'm from India and from a city called Hyderabad. And a couple of days ago I've been working out a couple of platforms. So now I would pass on the ball to Mr Richard. I am Richard. I am artificial but not intelligent. I pass on link to Jan. Hello, I am Jean or Jeannie. Both of those names work for me. I pass it on to Sheila. Hello, I am Sheila and I am glad to be here. Back to you Bridget. Thank you. Okay, this idea kind of came up because for those of us who are running total entrepreneurship, small businesses, no matter how small our operation is, we have to have certain systems in place in order to be productive. And I was very lucky. My trajectory, so I worked in the tech instructional design field. I have worked in that field in corporate America for close to 20 years. And when I started using improv to teach public speaking and storytelling as a side gig while I was working a Fortune 500 job. And when I came out on my own, I was lucky to be put in touch with a virtual assistant who worked with a lot of different coaches and trainers. And she was great at teaching me how to kind of set up some of these systems to operate. And so what we're going to do today is I put for you in the chat the document that I'm looking at for you to go ahead and download. And I got in one column a category or sort of a bucket of functions. And then I've got the tools that I use or have used in the past. I've got suggestions that I pulled off the Facebook post from the AIN community and then a place for you to take notes as we go through. And please feel free to stop me and ask questions. So we're going to start with appointments. And so for, is anybody on the line do any individual coaching or small, excuse me, small group coaching, Jeannie? So here are the ones that I have used, Squarespace and Acuity. Squarespace is free. Acuity is only free to a certain point. I use Acuity to sign up usually to for my business coach. And I like Acuity better than I like Squarespace. But on my website, I use Squarespace because did I mention free. And that's one of the things that I will point out here as we go through. Jeannie, what are your views? Quickly though, could you re-share the documents for those of us that got on the call a little later? We're mentioning that, yes. And I've used Acuity, Candly, and then for a while, another platform, the name of which escapes me right now. Because you're picking up, oh, I know you named Acuity and Squarespace, but what you used them for, I did not hear and I'm new to them. So could you just say that again? Sure. And hang on a second. I'm going to open my door because my computer's telling me I've got an additional account. So Acuity, Squarespace, and Calendary are the ones that I have seen, excuse me, used most often. But for what? So on my website, and I'll pull it up for you, you can go to the place to a calendar and sign up for an appointment with me. So it's great for 30-minute, like if you are having a 30-minute conversation with someone, like a free consult, and it's a way for them to come to you to schedule, instead of the two of you get online and say, Sheila, what is your calendar look like? Bridget, what is your calendar look like? Paul, you had a question? Yeah, can you repost the document, please, in the chat? Yeah, I am trying and right at the moment Zoom is not while you do that, I'll share my share of brief experience. Yeah, so can you repost it in the chat as well? Yes, Zoom is not letting me at the moment, so hang on and what's your experience? Someone from within AIM said that we should have a chat and he invited me to use Calendary, which I think you've spelled wrong, by the way. I think it probably did. There's no ER. There we go. And I used it and was really impressed, so I started using it the next week, which was about a month or two months ago, and it's been terrific. It's increased the number of meetings and conversations that I've had, which if you want to do that, it would be a good thing. If you don't want to do that, don't use it. There are a few little provisors, like watch out for meetings running into each other, which in fact this one did for me, but you can probably get more sophisticated in your use of it, but I've found it a fantastic addition and I've got a low paying subscription. I think they're doing some of the things free at the moment that it usually has to pay for, for example, integration with Zoom. Okay, can everybody hear me? Sort of, it's choppy. Okay, is this better? I think I'm having an internet issue. It's a little better. Okay. Let me reshare my screen here. Yeah, I'm still struggling for Zoom to let me to upload the document I tried several times, so if you have, if you were able to download it and you can push it back up into the chat, that would be awesome. I've been trying to do that, but it won't let me either. It won't let you either? No, it's not you. It's clearly not you. We can't copy the chat. I think that's the problem. So let me share my screen again. So for those of you who don't know, this is what it looks like. I, again, use Squarespace, so it's 60 minute coaching or planning, 30 minute coaching or planning, and basically the person clicks on this, they go to Squarespace, and they're able to sign up and get all the information they need for either a phone call or a Zoom call. So that's what those functionalities do. The next category that I have is sort of the general category of collaboration, and the things that I use with regard to collaboration are Slack, WhatsApp, Google Docs, and Share Biles. So Slack and WhatsApp are actual communication that allow you to talk to people, obviously. I use WhatsApp to talk to friends overseas, as my virtual assistant who is located in Italy. I use Slack because I belong to a channel of independent online e-learning designers, and so we have a snare ideas, job opportunities, etc. Before I continue, welcome to Katana and Diane, and then for Google Docs and Share Biles, those are a little bit more obvious. They're a way to put up, you know, different files that are necessary. For those of you who don't know, I do, aside from what you all do, workshops and using applied improvisation, learning design for corporations, and the, and so Share Biles is a place where oftentimes my clients will put documents up there that I need to access to work on, and then I put them back up. Google Docs is, of course, free. Share Biles is not. Yeah, Sheila. Well, what's your, Google Docs versus Share Biles, why do you prefer Share Biles over Google Docs, certain things, or, you know, what's your experience? Share Biles is much more targeted with, and I think a little bit better on the privacy issue, and usually I don't have a Share Biles subscription. I'm usually a user of Share Biles, so for instance, I'm working on a project right now with a veterinary science company, and the woman that I'm subcontracting with, we put, she puts all, she has a Share Biles license, and she puts all of their private documentation up there. I go grab it, I work on it, I put it back up there. Same concept as Google Docs. Yeah, good time. Why didn't you look at Dropbox? So Dropbox is also on the list, and let me share my screen. I don't understand the difference between Share Biles and Dropbox. It sounds similar to me. They are similar. They're the same. It's just, you know, it's Coke versus Pepsi, in some of these cases. Yeah, Paul. I have experience with several of these. Dropbox, we use mostly as storage rather than a live collaborative tool, and it's great for putting loads of documents in files and sharing with a colleague. We're a two-person hardship, and I have experience today with Google Docs, sharing a live Google Doc with a dozen people for the beginning of a conference planning session, and it worked really well with people who are not very familiar with any of these technologies. When we managed to get a shareable link, which is a thing in itself, people were into it, and I think about two-thirds of the 12 were contributing to the doc, and we got all the chats from breakout creeps out of Zoom into that Google Doc, so that's going to be a useful ongoing thing. And I used Miro, Miro for the first time this morning. That's, I think, trickier to get into, but I could see some amazing possibilities for it. It's much more graphic. It's a collaborative live tool where everyone's putting in post-it notes, zooming in and out of different areas that your conversation ranges around, and I enjoyed that for an hour, but I think it would take quite a while to learn to be a slick facilitator with it. Yeah, and so that the Miro EtherPad, Padlet, Team Weaver, Dropbox, and Airtable, those were things that I pulled from the conversation on Facebook. The only one of those that I know is Dropbox. And to Catan's point, I have had issues with Dropbox in the past, and so I only use it if it's a client who requires me to use it. I prefer to use Google Docs because it's free. I don't have to pay for it, but I will say something that Paul said that I have found to be true is sometimes with Google Docs, locking it down so that the people only see what you want them to see is often very cumbersome and a challenge. That's the one nice thing about Sharefile. Sharefile is a version of a corporate version of, what do I want to say? Share... Archive? I'm sorry? Archive? It's a Microsoft product. SharePoint. Thank you. Ready for this? It's a version of that. You have a dedicated place where you have access to files, and there's one person who's managing. Now Dropbox and Google are like that, but Sharefile is to Paul's point for it's a dropping repository. Google Docs does allow you to both get into a document and edit at the same time. Hi, Paul. Welcome, Raymond. Paul, what did you want to add? I wanted to hear what Kevin uses Trello for, specifically why it's good for that sort of project, and Gene is a quick comparison of the Miro and Mural, again with specifics of where the value is in each for the things that you do. Absolutely. Catan? Yeah, sorry, Paul, what's your question on Trello? Yes, you say you use Trello for running agile projects, but what bit of it goes into Trello? Yeah, sure. Well, Trello's just got boards on it, so basically just hands up anybody who does use Trello here. Okay. Trello's also on the list, I put it under a different category, but go ahead, Catan. Yeah, it's fantastic because what I do is I... You can create a Trello board as people might know for any project, right? And within that you can have subprojects within it. And then just like post-it notes, you can move things from one to the other, whether you started or working progress or finished. And the collaborative aspect is that you can share that Trello board with anybody else who can move things around in a very visual and quick way. And then to each board, you can attach documents and pictures and checklists and so on. So, for example, I've got a Trello board at home, which is really interesting, all my repair work, all my little repair jobs are on my Trello board now. So they never go, and members of the family add to them. And when we finish them, we move them to the done box. But the other advantage of Trello is that you can do very small micro-projects on them and get them done. So it means things are always flowing much better than one big document. And then, of course, when it comes to work, it's great in terms of deciding who's doing what and giving them Trello board and moving things around. I probably haven't explained it very well, but it's very intuitive. Once you start using it, you'll just stop using spreadsheets to allocate work. Thank you. And Jeannie, can you talk to us a little bit about Miro and Miro? Well, I'm not as familiar with Miro, but Miro is a virtual online collaboration, mostly like having a whiteboard, but it has some pretty robust functionality in that you can use post-its, images, text. You can make the canvas massive, so you can have multiple groups working at the same time on a whiteboard. And then it also has timing functions. And for some of the more expensive versions, the paid facilitation features are pretty cool, where you can summon everybody to one space on the whiteboard. You can do timed applications. And then there's also a really nice outline feature. So someone can come to the board, and if they look at the outline, it can detail what steps they should take at the board. And so you can have kind of asynchronous opportunities as well. And they have, like most of these, there's free and paid versions. And then for those of you that are working in the education or nonprofit space, they have been offering free versions during COVID. That's great. Thank you. So I want to move on to the next topic to kind of keep us going. And to Katan's point, I have Trello on here, but I, but I'm sort of categorizing things. And Trello is one of those things that falls into a lot of different buckets. It's collaboration, but it's also tasks, right? So I kind of categorized it down below with tasks. So we'll, we'll revisit it briefly when we get down there. For context management, the two, the two applications that I have used, I currently use one called Simplero. And for those of you who just joined the call, as I mentioned at the beginning, I was fortunate enough to be put in touch with a virtuous assistant who does a lot of work with people who are coaches and other folks like that. And so she was able to give me instructions and ideas of some of these items. And she recommended Simplero. And the reason she recommended Simplero was because it was a, it is an application that it is not so much a CRM, but it's an application for newsletters. I teach online courses. It can take payments. It allows you to create a landing page. It allows you to create a space where people can go get their recordings and their downloads of that online course. And one of the reasons she recommended is for those of you who know CRMs at all, CRMs are really incredibly dense, complex pieces of software. And she really felt that Simplero was the easiest of them. And I will tell you this, they have amazing customer service. They will get back to you in usually less than 24 hours. They will get on the phone for you. You can use some of Simplero up to a point for free. I have a year subscription that costs me roughly $99 a month. And I probably, I don't use it to the, to its utmost capacity, but I do find it to be a good program. Mailchimp is very similar. Close, Pipe Drive and less annoying CRM are CRMs that were closed and Pipe Drive were recommended in the Facebook chat. And less annoying CRM, some AIN practitioners that I know use that CRM. And it's pretty easy to navigate around. And it has a free version, which you can get, you can have, I think up to a thousand contacts for free before you have to upgrade and pay. Does anyone use any of these, or do you have a CRM or mail contact management system that you want to recommend? I use Mailchimp. Been happy with it for a few years. And we use it for regular emailing our list. Great. All right. So the next one isn't, isn't so much software as services. I use Vistaprint for all of my, any kind of my posters, my handouts, my business cards. It, if you monitor Vistaprint, you can also find, you often find some good sales now. Full disclosure, Vistaprint is an American company. So for those of you who are in the UK, India, or the EU, please give us a recommendation of something that you like. I also know a couple of people who use Moo, which is a little bit more expensive than Vistaprint. What is your question, Paul? What's better about Sender? If you want to quantify that, Paul, you put that in the chat. If Ketten has done a comparison, yeah. I haven't done, I haven't done a comparison, but I know when I did do a comparison, I haven't got it to hand, Sender had a lot more features at much better value. And it's much more straightforward. However, Mailchimp has something very good. Vistaprint is my tab, which is an opt-in for GDPR. So that's very powerful for people to opt-in and opt-out of getting emails and all. So I don't know whether that applies in the US or not. Probably in the UK and Europe, we have these GDPR rooms, which means that people have the right to opt-in or opt-out of getting mailings. Yes, that's a great point. Thank you, Katan. Sinclair also has GDPR capability. I don't know about Mailchimp. I'm assuming that it does. Paul's using it over in the UK. Events and sign-ups. I use Eventbrite and I hate it. I hate it. I don't like Eventbrite. They change their interface a few months back and it makes it much harder on the back end to find things. But the advantage of Eventbrite is it's the most widely used. And so I've had people sign up for my online improv classes, who I think just kind of searched and found it. And so that's why I kind of stick with Eventbrite. Richard, you had your hand up. It was literature. I was going to put it in the chat. It was back onto the printing. I found a printing thing called the DOX Zoo, D-O-X-Z-O-O in the UK. It's really good. Everything I've printed has come back really quickly. Really good value. Could you put that in the chat for me and I'll copy it in here? I'm in the process of that. Thank you. It's fascinating to hear that people are still using paper. Sometimes you have to. So that's a great point, Paul, but here's the thing. Hold on to second Sheila. I see it. I get a lot of my business from active networking when we're not in a pandemic. So I do go through a lot of business parts. Yeah, Sheila. Oh, I'm sorry. You hate Eventbrite yet you use it. I'm in the States too. What is it you hate and do we have an alternative? So there's two alternatives that I have on here and please give me suggestions for places over not in the US. Ticket leak was just recommended to me by someone. I have not tried it yet, but I've heard good things about it. I am the artistic director of a local arts council in prior to the pandemic. We had a series of one woman shows that we were doing throughout the summer in celebration of 100 years of suffrage and we set up our tickets for those shows on something called on stage. And so that was is another place where you can set up, although it it tends to beard more towards theater events. It is another place. Paul's asking about meetup. Meetup is a really great idea. I have used I have not actually set any. I've been a participant of meetup, not a sponsor. So I haven't set anything up on meetup, but there is a paid version of meetup. And obviously meetup is is global. Okay. Just to further on my question. Basically, I'm trying to find a way where if I'm offering an online class, how can people eat, you know, what can be in the Facebook post or on my website so they can just go right in there. And an event writes all I've seen and yeah. So if anyone has any other solutions. Yeah. So you might want to check out ticket me. I'm going to be looking into it Sheila. But it's the same thing. It's it's again, it's a coke and Pepsi. It's the same thing. But I just think that one of the issues that I have is in the confirmation email that my participants get from event right. So they sign up for my improv class, they get a confirmation email. And in that email, there's no way to attach it to their calendar. And that's a problem. All they have is a link which sends them back to event right. And I wrote to event rights customer service, and they said, Yeah, that's right. What about what about the fees that they charge relative to, you know, for the price, you know, we got right itself. Yeah. So ticket leaves a fees if you're charging something are a little bit lower is what I've heard than event right. I have done sessions when we've done storytelling sessions, storytelling nights prior to the pandemic for the Arts Council. We were using event right. That's another thing to do as a comparison. I think if you Google compare the fees event right ticket leave, there's brown paper bag is another one out there that I've seen might get that information or brown paper tickets. They're belly up financially and people have lost money from them from brown paper tickets. Yeah, watch out for brown paper tickets now. Yeah, Diane. Is the purpose of the of this, you would use this because you wanted visibility for your event or to collect payment for the event? Yes. You can collect payment for events. As I said, it's the beginning part of this category. I have decided so far stick with then right because it is the most popular one. And even though I have issues with it and the customer service, frankly, didn't go very well. I think I have found people for my online courses through event right, who are just searching. And I know personally, I have found various networking events through searching event right. Yeah, Diane. Yeah, I actually find events through event right as well. But I'm thinking that separating those two functions, collecting payment and visibility, I think of it in two different bins for the reason that meet up Selexa specific target market and and event right does as well, I think, you know, so when I think about where I want to advertise something, I think about other other media outlets for that like, well, organizations that are local that I think might be interested or local newspapers, online newspapers and things like that. Great. Thank you. All right. So finances is kind of yashila. Well, Raymond just posted something about PayPal being a place for taking payment. And I'd like to hear a little bit about that. Yeah, so I'm going to talk about that in the next bucket. So finances, this is kind of a big bucket. So this bucket includes your personal finances and accounting. This bucket also includes places and ways for you to get paid for online classes and for you to make payments as well. So my list, the two critical ones that I use and again, these are American centric. So for those of you who are in India, the UK, the EU, please give me other suggestions. But QuickBooks Self-Employed and TurboTax Self-Employed. I just literally finished my taxes yesterday. It cost me $260, which feels like a lot of money until you consider what it would cost me to take it to an accountant. By using QuickBooks Self-Employed, my information gets pulled because they're owned by Intuit, the same company. My information gets pulled from one database into the other. These are both online cloud services. I know some people worry about that from a security standpoint. And we are going to talk about security applications later on. But what I find is that their customer service is incredible on both QuickBooks and TurboTax. In fact, QuickBooks is always looking for suggestions as to how to make the program better in about a year or so ago. They interviewed me. They had a team who called me and said, hey, we were really curious about your idea. Can you explain it? So I got to talk tech with techies, which I've been doing for a long time. TurboTax, if you pay a little extra, they have a service where as you get through the software, if you don't know what something means, you can get a live chat or you can get someone to come on your screen and look at it for you. And the people who come on your screen are CPAs. They are tax experts. And it's worth the extra money. Stripe and PayPal are collection services. So to Sheila's question, the aforementioned virtual assistant that I have who is in Italy, she will bill me through PayPal. I got a PayPal. I have an account set up in PayPal that goes through my business bank and I'm able to pay her the money that I owe. It gets transferred into euros for her over in Italy. Stripe I used through and again, a lot of these pieces of software now are intertwined and interconnected. You could set up Stripe or PayPal through your calendar program so that somebody pays you before they get the meeting with you. That's something you could actually do. In the case of Stripe, Stripe is used on the back end of Simplero. So when I teach an online course that I'm charging for, within Simplero, I have a landing page. People put their credit card information and then they get the information to show up on the site that it's being paid or it's being given. Before I get to harvest, I want to mention Wave and Invoice2Go. Those are two that were left in Facebook. Invoice2Go is an invoicing software and I believe time trapping someone left and Wave is another payment app. Then of course you probably know payment apps like Venmo and the Cash app. Let me talk for just a minute about harvest and I will show it to you and then we'll open this because I think this is probably one that has questions. Harvest is a time sheet app and as I said earlier, I do a lot of instructional e-learning and so I have to keep track of my time. It's a really nice app. It's free. You can put two clients on it for free and keep track of your time. I have to pay for it because I have more than two clients but it gives you not only the time that you spent but it lets you set up clients so that you have a rate for them, a flat rate or an hourly rate and so that it gives you the amount of money that you made at the end of a day, a week, or a month. It also is good if you travel for clients because it will allow you to input expenses so your meals, your hotels, etc. and print on an expense record. You can do invoices from here. I do invoices from QuickBooks because then everything's in one place with my accountant but I use Harvest to keep track of my time. For those of you who do workshops, you might want to try the free version of Harvest because it may give you insight to how much you're charging your clients and how much maybe you should be charging them more because if you turn it on, you turn the clock on to keep track of your time, you can see, oh, the preparation for this workshop, I had it in my head that it was going to take two hours but it actually took three and a half hours but I need to charge four. So that's Harvest and I've used a couple of other time tracking apps and I find this one to be a really good one. What else do you guys use for finances? Paul, do you want to talk about Zotero? Well, certainly what I use for finances is the back of this envelope. Zotero is the app that the AIN resource library is hosted on and I've found that quite tricky to interact with. Jeannie is nodding her head in agreement and she's now standing here. Katara? Bridget, thank you very much, Sophie. It's been really informative. I was just going to say strike because they use PayPal and one of the issues with PayPal is there's just very high fees they charge, you know, on transactions. So particularly when I'm running like pay is you're like in pro events, things of that nature, I just want to send somebody a link and they pay and PayPal works but the fees are high. I'm just wondering how to quickly get strike while you're talking with a strike does that as well, whether you can just send a link and someone pays their local currency and voila. I don't actually know the answer to that question because strike is a back end application with Simplero. But I don't know the percentages to Sheila's point before about, you know, what are the percentages between Eventbrite and something like ticket leave. That might be something you would want to Google is, you know, because it will come up on Google as to what the percentages are for strike or Venmo for all of those, you know, apps and there's a lot of them out there. I will say this for anybody who ever for whatever reason needs to get an actual machine for somebody to put a credit card through for the Arts Council. We did some some a lot of research in PayPal's machine was the least expensive to purchase and the least expensive percentage compared to Square. Oh really? Yes. By far. Wow. Right. Okay. On to the next category of graphics. As an instructional designer who has been doing various types of e-learning for a long time, the first product they cannot live without. It's called Snagit. It cost about $40 and for a license. And it is a product that allows you to capture the screen. It allows you to record what's on the screen and then it allows you to do some simple cropping, editing, recoloring, rejuxtaposing, etc. And it keeps a library of all of your captures going back for a couple of years. So for me who does e-learning and I create these learning modules that are highly graphically well-tuned and so forth, I have to be able to have that capability of being able to capture even the tiniest little thing. One of the features in Snagit is let's say you have a webpage that is this big. You can actually capture the entire webpage. It'll scroll for you. You can record how to. So let me just show you very quickly here. I am going to capture you guys and I'm going to share my screen. I'll make us look better. Yeah. So it just freezes the screen and allows you to capture it and then I can colorize it. I can do a whole bunch of other things. I could actually add call-outs and captions here. So there I turned it red. I can add a caption here of what Richard's thinking. We all want to know. We're dying to know. You can have numbers. You can add circles. It is the best program out there. I know of very few instructional designers who do any kind of graphics, any kind of e-learning who do not use Snagit. It is created by a company here in the United States. They have a couple of other tools that I recommend that you that you investigate. It's called TechSmith and a really great company. They have good customer service. They have good online help. Okay. So is TechSmith is another app or is it in Snagit? TechSmith is the name of the company that produces Snagit. Canva is another company that I know I saw several people in Facebook. Does anybody here use Canva? I've used it only once but I did want to recommend it. Jeannie, tell us about it. So it's a fairly simple graphics program. One of the challenges is that it's less complex than InDesign but to readjust things it doesn't have as many robust features but they just change their the version and so a lot of previous designs just don't work at all. So if you have a design that you created you can't reuse it if you need to edit it at all. So that's a huge problem right now with the new rollout. So I'm in the midst of trying to figure out what to do with that and I think I'm probably just going to move to InDesign because then I'll invest money again or invest time in relearning it but then I won't be stuck with dozens of designs that I can't use. Yeah so the design program that helps you design things like web and help me out here Jeannie. Websites you can design pretty much anything like brochures, newsletters, anything with it. 123REF sometimes for a website or maybe a handout that you're doing and you want a picture. Online picture sites such as Adobe, they have gotten super expensive and 123REF is the one that I found that is still priced fairly reasonably. So if you need that royalty free picture that's the one I recommend. Many, many people in the Facebook post recommended Session Lab. It is a site that helps you design courses. I've been designing courses for so long I don't know how I would use it but does anybody use Session Lab on the call here? Okay I put it under graphics for sort of lack of a better place to put it. It's something you might want to check out. Moving on to social media. My assistant does social media for me. She uses Hootsuite. You get up to something like 40 cents a month to all social media platforms via Hootsuite for free which is more than enough for me and probably the amount I should be doing but I don't. One thing to remember is that when you push something to social media via something like a Hootsuite it gets downgraded in the fee. If you push it out yourself it's like you shared it and this is something that especially Facebook has been doing since about a year and a half to two years ago just because they're trying to make Facebook more personal and less robot. So if I push something out saying hey I had a great session with folks at AIN today thank you everyone for joining me and I pushed that out from Hootsuite. It's going to go down farther in my feed. It's not going to be seen as often by the people who are connecting with me as if I Bridget went into either the AIN feed my regular Facebook feed and hosted it myself. So just something to consider. All right recording and video software so I mentioned that Snagit can record so if it were to I can do a little how-to video so let's say Jeannie and I were working together and she said I'm not sure how to use this I could record my screen with various steps using Snagit. Another one that works really well is Lume which is free to use. Vidyard is someone somebody just told me about I have not tried it yet but it is a recording software where you can record yourself so you know you do that recording of yourself saying hi I'm Bridget from Story Batters have you ever thought right and then that video you can post to your social media platform. Somebody else in here put Zappier who knows Zappier if I can speak to it. I can't speak to it. Zappier is just a bunch of different interactions and it's basically works on an if then so if you have one platform that doesn't have a built-in integration to another you can say for example like if you want Zoom to make if you want your calendar to make an appointment schedule meeting on Zoom you can look on Zappier and see if there's integrations to do X and then Y and there's thousands of integrations on it. I have I'm only experimenting with it now but there's a lot of possibilities but it is still slightly a little more high-touch in terms of the customization of it. Yeah and Zappier comes in in a lot of different categories. I know that my assistant uses it on another website project that I'm involved in to collect database information so I'm going to keep it under recording video software but I feel like we could put it in a lot of different places. Just moving on for the sake of time presentations and real-time polls there were a lot of people who had some real-time poll things like Mentimeter and Trice Tree Sider. I don't even know if that's other pronounce it. I am a PowerPoint diehard. I think PowerPoint is one of the most powerful programs out there that is woefully misused and when it's used well it can be a really terrific program. I have I designed graphics for my instructional design in PowerPoint. I am not a Photoshop person but I can design you a mean graphic inside of PowerPoint. For tasks and notes Kitan mentioned Trello before. I do use Trello in a couple of cases however my choice is MeisterTaps. I just like the interface a little bit better. Can everybody see MeisterTaps on the screen? So this is actually my team. This is my marketing person. Natasha is my assistant again who lives in Italy and what I will do is if I have a task for her I'll press the button and I'll leave her a task. It pops up on her cell phone. When she does the task I get it back on my cell phone that the task has been done. She has a question for the task because she lives in Italy and I'm in Connecticut. I'll get that question in the morning by a MeisterTaps and I'm able to answer her. It is free. She is always good and I just like the way that it it's structured in a way that I don't prefer Trello. And so that is MeisterTaps. All right. Work flowy is another task and notes program that somebody recommended. A couple people also recommended Evernote. I was a big Evernote user in the past. I haven't used it in a while but the thing that Evernote was one of the first programs to say okay you put a note on your iPad and the note will show up on your cell phone even though you may have you know it's an iPad and it may be an Android or then you can get that note by going to Evernote site. So the sharing of it by the cloud is really powerful with Evernote. Thank you cards. I used paperless posts. It's mostly free and it's a program that allows you to go in and design a card that says happy spring Sheila. Thank you so much for the workshop last week. We at Story Matters really enjoyed it. Please let us know if you need anything for the future. Talk to you soon. It's the good way of giving a touch point to your clients in a different way than just regular email. Wix WordPress Squarespace. These are all ways to create websites. I use Wix. This is another program that I don't like. However, what I like about it is that it is modularized so you can choose a template and then you can drag and drop things and move things around fairly effortlessly. That's what I like about it. Their customer service isn't very good. WordPress is much more complex. I have another site that I'm working on that my assistant is helping me on. We are struggling, frankly, with a couple of things. She knows WordPress much better than I do, but we're struggling with some of the spacing and the look and feel and the website just kind of feels a little cludgy. WordPress is much more powerful. The bigger your organization, the more you need a WordPress type site is what I've been told by people who are web designers. Video conferences, of course, Zoom. Let me just say thank you to the Zoom people. I know that they have had struggles. I actually just heard of someone this morning who did get Zoom bombed the other day, which is really too bad. Zoom has worked really hard on their security as David Koff wrote and posted on AIM. It is even though we struggled for a couple minutes here on this call, I have not found anything as stable. Earlier this week, I was teaching a storytelling workshop for a client and we were on Google Hangouts as per the client's request and we all got kicked out. The workshop ended 15 minutes into the start and we tried to get back on and we couldn't. We had to reschedule the whole workshop. We're going to do the workshop the next time on Microsoft Teams. For those of you who don't know, you can actually stream, you can actually use Zoom through Microsoft Teams. Everybody else enters through Teams, but you're actually doing it on Zoom. As many of you know, especially here in our community, the breakout functionality for learning in Zoom is really, really key. I teach a class for the state of Connecticut in diversity and we're about to ramp those classes back up. These were classes that we used to do in person and we know we need the breakout function. We know we need to send people off to have private conversations. Live webinar was another one. Does anybody know this one here on the call? Live webinar was another one that was mentioned a couple of different times in the Facebook stream and then StreamYard is the Facebook postings. StreamYard is one that I just heard about. I haven't checked out yet, but I've heard a lot of people like instability as well as Zoom. Now you will notice that I'm a little bit out of alphabetical order with security, but I want to take a couple of extra minutes to talk about security. And before I do, I know I went through things really quickly. Does anybody have something to add? Oh, yes, please. I was waving goodbye to Richard. He may have some final words to grace us with. I was only just to say, really, thank you very much. It's brilliant. I'm really sorry to lose the security, to miss the security, but I'll probably get punished by some kind of awful breach at some point in the next 24 hours. But thank you, thank you, thank you very much. Be revenge attacked by Paul. I hope to see you again soon. And it's so long to you two, Raymond. This is being recorded so you can catch the end of it in another time. So the reason that I wanted to leave security to the very end is for the last six years of my corporate career, I was in the security well. I was the information security communications lead for a company called Monsanto, which some of you might have heard of. And then I worked for another Fortune 500 company where I built their security awareness initiatives and change from the ground up. It's a global company that's in 26 different countries. And so I learned a lot about security and I got to know security engineers. And if you get to know security engineers, you get to know that they're very trustworthy people. They're people of very high integrity and you want to try to take their suggestions of programs to heart. So the first suggestion I have for all of you is carbonate. You might have seen an AI and heat a couple weeks ago or if you're connected to Amy Angelini, Amy had a virus on her computer. I don't think she'll mind. So she put it on Facebook that I use her as an example. And I called her that night and I said I got one word for you, carbonate. She lost all of her files from her computer. She gets a re-image of the entire computer. I have another friend who just had this issue last week. And what carbonate does is it works in the background. And basically it does an entire image of your computer. So it not only puts up to the cloud your files, but it puts up all of your software programs as well. Who of you here on the call knows what ransomware is? Amy? You would probably explain it much better than me, but go for it. Isn't that just where someone comes and basically steals everything and then you have to pay them to get access to your own material? Very close. They don't steal it. They encrypt it. Yeah. Yeah. So then it's called ransomware. And what they do is they break into your computer. They encrypt all your files. So your files are still sitting on your computer, but you can't access any of them. And they will decrypt your files when you pay them. If anybody does that to me, my answer is goodbye. I take it. I have the whole hard drive wiped off and I download everything from Harvard. Really simple. It's a yearly subscription. It is worth every penny. I was working on an instructional design project about a year and a half ago and I spilled a glass of water across my laptop keyboard and we were on a really super tight deadline. I took it to Best Buy. They said we can't do anything. And I went and bought a box of rice, which works by the way. I put the laptop into the rice. I pulled out an old laptop that's over there in the corner. And for two days because I had everything up on carbon, I pulled those files back down. I worked for two days. I met my deadlines and then my computer dried out and I was ready to go. I really good suggestion for you. Silence by LANCE is a virus software as is a web route that are highly recommended by security engineers. Here's the difference between them. Yes. Thank you, Paul, for that. Don't submerge your computer in water. Good tip. But here's the difference. So I'm a black hacker. I'm the mean guy. Okay. And by the way, these are not guys in their basements. Hacking is a billion dollar industry, multi-billion dollar industry. The countries that do it the most are Russia, China, and the Ukraine. They have businesses and buildings that they go to. They commute to work every day. They sit in cubicles. They have graphic design programs that try to get you to believe that that Bank of America email that came is real so that you can click on the link. These are not kids in basements for the most part, people. Don't believe that. What they do is they download all the virus software out there and they test their viruses against it. Virus software is most of the time a reactive, not a proactive piece of software. It's reacting to what they find that the black cats have already put out there. Silence does it differently. They change the paradigm of it and they use artificial intelligence to look for certain things in on your computer that could potentially be viruses. But they take a more proactive. The last Fortune 500 company that I was with, when they started changed over to silence, they found thousands of bots sitting on individual computers throughout the globe. Bots are usually something that are put on your computer and it sits there for another piece of the virus to come in and give it an instruction. And that's what it does. The last one I want to recommend for you is LastPass. Raise your hand if you struggle to remember your password. And you need to have lots of different ones. So LastPass is an app that goes on your phone. You can put it on your computer as well. It's a great app for also taking notes and the nice thing about having it on your phone is that you can open it with your fingerprint. And so that makes it really super secure because not only if Sheila were trying to break into my to find my password, I don't know why I'm picking on you Sheila, but if she were if she were to try to find my passwords, she would have to either know my password to LastPass or she would have to take my cold dead hand and use my fingerprint to get into LastPass. Apples, I will say that Apple has very great suggestions when I do when I use my iPad for very strong passwords. Please remember the longer the password, the longer it takes to try to hack it. Think of past phrases as opposed to past words. So a past phrase would be the yellow brick road as opposed to Dorothy. So that's what I got for you today. Thank you for joining me. Thanks for the extra seven minutes. Does anybody have any questions? On LastPass, is that a free app or what's the story on that? It is a free app. Okay. And do you think it's better than like Dashlane or any of those ones that are out there? I don't know, but I do know it's one that a security engineer recommended to me and in all honesty, LastPass got hacked. You want to tip, you want to use the company after they get hacked. Why? Because they're trying to recover their reputation. Yeah, because they get better after they find their holes. It sounds kind of intuitive, but it's really true. And when you talked about Carbonite and Silence, etc., is your number one pick Carbonite or are they twofold for security? Like to use either or Carbonite or Silence? Both. Carbonite is your backup system. Silence is the active thing that's constantly protecting your users from viruses. You need both. You don't necessarily need those. Those are my suggestions. And PS, please don't sue me if you use those and get hacked. I take their responsibility. Jean, you were going to say something. And what is Webroot? Webroot is another virus software that I've used in the past that it comes highly recommended by some security engineers I know. And about how much is Silence? No, I don't remember off the top of my head. The nice thing about Silence is they just Webroot has virus for programs for your iPads and your phone. Silence just started having mobile device protection recently. I think it costs just a little bit more. Just as an FYI, folks, how many of you are math users? Raise your hands. What? Okay. Math users. Okay. Here is ethyl. Here's how this goes. I'm a math user. I don't have to worry about viruses. Wrong answer. Okay. Perfect example. Zoom. Zoom didn't plug all of their holes because they were this little tiny company. Compared to the amount of PC users out there, really, Apple is a really tiny company. But guess what hackers do? Over the years, Microsoft has gotten a lot better when it comes to breaches and holes in their product. And so when it became harder for hackers, guess who they turned to? Okay. So don't think that just because you're an Apple user, you don't have to protect yourself. It's not true. All right? Wow. Anybody else? I'm sorry. Wait for anyone else. Kayla has another question. Well, I have a million questions. So my thing is twofold. One is, wouldn't it be nice to have some kind of follow-up extension of what we've just done today where people go off, they try things, find things, and come back and see, you know, that kind of a thing. That interests me. And then I have a couple of specific questions. But I thought perhaps I could have contact with you, Richard, and we could privately. I'll put my email in the chat for you. I'll actually post this list on the Facebook page. And, you know, I hope this was helpful for everyone. And thank you all for not only coming, but for your suggestions. And no, I don't use Yellowbrood for all of my passwords. Just want you to figure out which one it's for. Yeah, Diane. Thank you, Bridget. This was really wonderful. And I especially appreciate the security links. I would just this document that you have the list of is that can I access that? Yeah, we're going to put it, I had put it into the chat and then Zoom stopped letting me. And so I'm going to post it on Facebook and in the thread. And just email me. Let me put my email in the chat for everybody. And email me if you can't find it on Facebook. And I am more than happy to email it to you. Thank you, everybody. Paul, back to you. Thank you, Bridget. You're welcome. Yes, echoing what people are saying. Bridget, that was stuffed with information. We're going to need to go through that, look at bits, decide which one or two things maybe to try as first steps. And both Sheila and Diane and Jeannie looking at where it might go from here. So I don't think this is an end point, but there may be some ways that we can collaboratively support each other because we're all using bits and pieces of technology. We all know more than we shared today that we can find a forum to have this kind of conversation but even more useful by going into detail about one element of it each time or whatever it might be. That's going to be terrific. So thank you so much for suggesting this, starting us off, sharing so much great information. I'll stop the recording now.