Technology Tuesdays: Digital Vision Boards
That's right. Okay, let's do it. I'll stay on until I and then I'll go away. record. Yes, please. Thank you. Hi everyone, we're just going to wait for people to filter on in here thanks for joining us today. All right. Well hello hello and welcome to the first technology Tuesday's of 2022. My name is Larry and again I'm really excited to bring you our first presentation of the year, all about digital vision boards.
Now, you all are muted and have your cameras turned off by default, but please don't let that stop you from engaging with us in the chat and asking questions about today's presentation in the q amp a box down below, everyone who registered for this program will receive a link to a recording and a follow up email in the next few days, so no need to take any extensive notes or anything like that. Now, since we've been on break for a few months and there may be some new patients out there that we haven't gotten to know through the chat box I just wanted to take some time and introduce myself. So as I mentioned, my name is Lydia and I'm the adult librarian at the typical new branch of the Milwaukee Public Library. And one of my passions and programming and in life in general if we're being honest is digital literacy. So a lot of the programs, I do are focused around that field, and I still enjoy doing tech Tuesday's. I think we've done about 40 so far, and I hope to do many many more as long as you all have me, I'm down to do them in general I also have my esteemed colleague Beth Gabriel, Beth, would you mind introducing yourself to the folks out there. No problem. Thanks for having me again Lydia. It's been my pleasure to be doing the secondary on all these awesome Tuesday programs for most of the time we've been doing them as lady said I'm Beth, I am the adult reference assistant at the East branch going on almost 10 years, or 10 years now, which is wild to me.
And I love hearing about all this awesome stuff that Lydia tells me about my work passion is more on the books in arts and culture side of things. So I learned something. Every time I'm here, but I'm going to be hanging out in the background so don't be afraid to ask questions or put them in the chat and I will ask them to Lydia is. Have a good program, everyone. Thanks fast. That is amazing. And her and I work together very hard to give you the best presentation, we possibly can on any given subject. At the conclusion of each tech Tuesday's, you'll find a survey that asks you about what you learned about things you'd like to see other tech today's presentation stand on. And a bit more information.
If you have the time and could fill that out, it really helps me to better tailor the time we have together to be the most value to you. This is your all's program, I just facilitate it. So I appreciate anyone who takes the time to fill that out. It's going to appear every single time. So if you want to fill it out every time or every third time or whatever the case may be, just know I really appreciate that. Now that you know who we are. I can jump in and talk about some of the main concepts will be covering today. So we're going to talk about digital vision boards, I figured it's important to talk about vision boards as a whole, by themselves. So we'll talk about what exactly they are and why lots of people do them, at least at the beginning of the year. We're going to talk about resources for images that you can find online.
And then we'll talk about two different options for making your digital vision board. It's going to be a relatively short presentation today, and a lot more on the demonstration side will be doing demonstrations in Canada, and Google jam boards and going through some of those features that you can use to make your vision board. So vision boards are a visual representation of your goals, they are part of a practice called manifestation. According to Psychology Today, mental practices like visualization can increase motivation, confidence, and even motor performance. The point of vision boards is really that once you, you know, have an image of something you're looking at on a regular basis to drive you to succeed, it's more in your subconscious that you'll be aiming for that goal, even if you're not, you know, having it dead in your sights, you're still, you know, having it in the back of your mind that that is something you hope to achieve in the future, a distinction I will make is that a vision board is not the same as a mood board, which is more of a practical tool for decorating and design, even though they might look similar at first glance, a vision board is more is less concrete effect.
So, here are a couple of examples of physical vision boards. And essentially what you do in this case is you get a stack of magazines or a stack of photos, some markers some glitter poster board, you'll cut things out that you want to inspire you, going forward in your life, and paste them onto your poster board. So with all that I've mentioned, there are quite a fair amount of supplies you might need to create a physical vision board. So I figured if we can create a digital version, why not.
Let's do that at the beginning of the year. And with a digital board we can pretty much replicate exactly the kind of look and feel we have with a collage more traditional vision board, without the need for all the supplies. So let's move on to talking about our digital vision boards and finding images for them. So depending on what you're planning to do with your vision board and where you want to share it if you want to share it at all. You might have to take a slightly different route for sourcing your images. One great resource that I can recommend is Creative Commons going to Creative Commons dot o RG.
The great thing about them is that they have a really great high quality images that are part of share and share alike licensing, meaning that you can take the image and use it for whatever you like. As long as anyone who sees that image can take and use it for whatever they like as well. So, share and share alike. Public Domain images are pretty similar, and you'll have to search for public domain image of whatever subject you're looking for because there are many, many, many of them. So these are images that have been owned but are now released to the public domain. So you may have some difficulty if you ever tried to sell the image of your vision board for whatever reason but you can usually use public domain images and a wide variety of circumstances and, of course, probably one of the best sources for images is the photos that you take you own your photos, so you can use them however you'd like, you could monetize them you can sell them, whatever the case may be.
Those are your photos to do with as you please. If for example, you used to travel a lot, you have tons of beautiful travel photography but you haven't been in the habit of it in the last few years. You can use photos that you have taken in your vision board to inspire you to travel again. Now of course there are many other sources that you can use for online images, but use those sort of at your own risk because generally when you're just doing a Google image search for example, there is an owner of those images.
And if that owner is not you. they don't want that image to be there. That's perfectly within their right. So you have a little bit less freedom and a lot of cases. And in order to be a good digital citizen of course you would probably want to respect the owners wishes and take that image down. So you might have to come up with a whole new vision board or what have you, just something to be aware of.
If you plan to just keep it for yourself. It's unlikely that they would know, or you know care that you just have it for your own, you know, edification. So, let's start off our discussion by talking about Canada. Canada is a freemium graphic design platform, and freemium just means that the platform is free to use but some of the more advanced features come at a cost so free and premium put together makes freemium. We've actually done a tech Tuesday's on canvas. In the past, and that's on our MPL YouTube playlist so if you're curious about using Canvas for other applications. I highly recommend you can check that out if you reach out to me, my email address will be at a later slide I'll be happy to send you a link.
The one great thing about Canada is that it has its own host of images for you to use. And all of the images you find in Canada. Are you know allowed to be used for your intended purposes. Additionally, camera comes with things like backgrounds and elements, essentially things like shapes lines and simple graphics that you can use to further customize your vision board. And it's all in one place. So it's very useful in that respect.
So let's go ahead and take a look at what Campbell looks like for creating digital vision boards. Alright, So here we are in Canada. And we just go to Canvas da nba.com and our browser, and you will have to log in to be able to, you know, interact with the site and save your designs. And you'll just do that with an email address, regular account creation stuff and once you're all logged in you'll see a screen that looks something like that. You can make a vision board in a variety of different sizes. So if you want to make a full size poster vision board, you can do that.
But what I like to do with Canada. I'm going to turn off my video to make sure you can see the whole screen is just search for vision board in the search bar on the main page. And you will see a bunch of different templates. So this is a really simple and quick way to go about making a vision board. Not that it has to be the most efficient or quick process, but sometimes staring at a blank piece of paper can be daunting. Right. So starting with something starting with a prompt can often be helpful and getting out what you actually want to see in the next year or however long you're doing your vision board for.
So as we look around the search results, we can see that some of them. Some of these thumbnail images here have a little crown in the lower left hand corner, and when we hover over it, it says Pro. That means that this template, in particular is only available when you have the pro version of Canada, meaning you're paying for our Canvas account, and others of them have a little dollar side and say, paid. That means you have to purchase a license to use that image so separate have the pro account, you have to purchase a license for this image. And there are still others that have nothing in that lower right hand corner so that means they are free to use. We're going to use my lows. But I just want to scroll down and give you kind of an overview of what is available. Alright so let's use this one here.
Now, everything you see in this main section of the screen right here is editable. Anything that has that teal circle around it, you can change from the text to the images, and the words around you can change all of that. So if I wanted to change this from saying my vision board to just the vision board or Lydia's vision board. I can easily do that.
I can change the shape of these boxes. And I can change the placement of these images that come with the template. Now, over on the left hand side here is where your navigation, to the different elements within Canvas is. So we're going to go ahead down to photos to find some images to put in our vision board, and we're pretty much just got a plug and play here. This is a, you know, really subjective so I'm just providing you with general examples. So, for health. I was gonna hopefully focus on meditation.
This year, we'll see if there's any good images of that. And a lot of these images, you'll see the images as well. Some of them are pro only images. So I'm just going to pick this one, and resize it a little bit, and put it into the health box. Next, on this little prompt is family. Now I could change this to be a different category that's more important to me but I'm pretty happy with the template, the way it is. So, now, one of my goals is to spend more time with my nephews. And I could actually put an image of my nephews, in this spot.
I'm not going to put an image of my nephews there right now but if I was making this for my own purposes I would probably put a actual image I have of my nephews, but for now we're just going to search, boys. And put an image of some cute little kid there again. Once you have a photo selected these handles will pop up so that you can resize your image appropriately. And you can drag and drop your image to. Oh.
Oh no. You can drag and drop your image to where you want it to be. Sorry guys technical difficulties. But if you ever make a mistake in Canada, the good thing about it is that there is a Undo button. So you can undo. Pretty much as far back as you want to make your image just perfect.
Now, in placing that image I find that I'm covering one image and I'm also covering this cool word here. So to fix that and make it look, you know, like it belongs there, I can click on that little cool that word, and I can go up to the upper right corner and change its position. So I want to click on that and move it to the front. So it appears over the image. And that kind of gives that cool, you know, collage look for relationships, I want to spend a little bit more time with my sisters as well. So I'm just going to search sisters. Of course, I would probably put an image of me and my actual sisters here, but this is close enough and super cute and could very well have been me 20 years or so ago with my little sister's and put that into that slot.
And for career, um, I am a librarian, so I'm just going to put a picture of some books and resize and drag and drop around how under personal. I would love to show you all how to upload an image from your device. So, let's go on the left hand side here up to uploads. And we're going to click Upload Media. And this is the image we're going to use. And we see that the image is being uploaded here. Now once you upload an image into Canada, you can use it on multiple different projects.
I'm going to click to insert that image into our vision board, and again resize it. So it looks like it blogs there. Okay.
I do also want to change out this image. I like the plants, I like plants in general, but this image, I don't really feel a connection to. So I'm going to go ahead and push Delete on my keyboard, and now we have a placeholder image. So what that means is that I can put any image I want there now. So for example, if I want to put this image of my dog. I don't even have to resize it if I just pulled it over the placeholder image by dragging it over there, and left go, it'll automatically resize it to fit in that image spot on this template. Pretty cool. And if we wanted to make this look more Lydia ish. we can go into elements and look for some other design features to add in.
So we have a bunch of categories along the top here. Let's look at adding some flowers and. So maybe we want to click it at this flower. And we can resize it to be smaller. And maybe we want to add some plants, some more plants.
We can go ahead and add that image in and resize it as well. I think that's a pretty good, pretty good vision board. Now, if anyone has any questions about vision boards in Canvas specifically.
And if not, you might be asking. Okay, we're done making a vision board. Now what do I do, I said, Well, there are a couple options. You can go up to the menu in the upper right hand corner of Canada. Click that three dot menu and download the image. You can share a link to the image. And the other options you see here but we're going to go ahead and download this image.
It recommends Canada recommends you download it as a ping. So we'll go ahead and do that. Okay, now we have our vision board downloaded. We can upload it to social media, we can make it a wallpaper on our Facebook page we can just print it out and frame it and have it on a wall, you know, by where we get ready in the morning to see it every day. We can make the wallpaper on our phone. There's a lot of options you can pretty much upload it anywhere you would upload a regular picture, and do whatever you would do with a regular picture. Okay. Any questions before we jump back into our presentation. Yeah, I see a couple of Lydia, um, the number one question is, how would they change the background color, so I'm assuming the white. Yeah, absolutely. So, on the background, you actually have a setting. Over on the left hand side of Canada, that you can select, and you can change this background to so many different options.
Let's see what goes with kind of what we got going on we can click that one, and kind of see how it looks at don't really like that. But, and you can have just a neutral colored background if that's something you'd prefer. So that is how you change the background, thank you for the question. All right, and then somebody would like to know how would you delete your uploaded photos from your upload, if you prefer privacy. Oh, absolutely. So, when you go to uploads.
If you don't want the photos to be there anymore you can just select as many as you want, you can select them all I have a few in here, and then down at the bottom this option appears for you to either manage your images put them into folders and things like that, or delete them. So you just push delete and wants to make sure you push delete again and it will delete those two items. And you can do that every time you upload an image. That's a great question. Thank you so much. That looks to me about it for right now. Okay, wonderful. So, let's jump back into our presentation to talk a little bit about Google jam board for creating vision boards. Google jam board is a collaborative digital whiteboard. That makes it easy to create without boundaries and share ideas in real time.
So, there are some instances where you might want your vision board to be a living thing, instead of a relatively stagnant series of images. I think jam board is the best route for that. People often want to create vision boards for their companies with their employees or colleagues or their department. And that gives you the ability for multiple people to be working on it at the same time so you can see the ideas, others have, and kind of build from them as a unit, instead of as a solo process. There are some vision boards that are very important for one person to, you know, maintain and be working on because it's all about self development. But when you're creating a vision for something larger than yourself. You may want that collaborative aspect,
you will access Google jam board, just like how you access other Google Drive application. If you have any questions about Google Drive, Google Docs or other Google products in that realm. We've done a bunch of tech Tuesday's on them, where we go over what you need to get started. But, essentially, all you need to use Google jam board is your Google account. And you'll access it just by heading over to your Google Drive. So let's go back and head on over to Google Drive. So this is just drive that Google. com, and looks pretty standard will go up to new and go down to more. And then at the very bottom of the more menu, there is Google jam board and will click on that. So, unlike Canada where you can use all of your templates and things of that nature.
Google dashboard is really a clean slate. it's going to be a much simpler vision board. But that might be what you prefer and that might be what you need for your purposes. Because it's a clean slate, you kind of have to drive the bus yourself so to speak, there's no prompts there's nothing to kind of get you started. So, that's all up to you, you can let your imagination go as far as you'd like. So will rename this jam. To vision, or 2022, and push. Okay.
Now, over on the left here is where we'll do all of our customization, and this is our toolbar. We have a pen for writing. We also have our eraser. Very important to erase things.
We have our cursor. We have sticky notes, add images. A circle function, as well as an ability to add a text box. And a laser pointer. So Google jam board isn't specifically for creating vision boards. That's just one use case for it. Lots of people do it, use it for a lot of other collaborative work this is just a use case, I found for it. So because you're driving yourself and creating this vision board.
Here's a simple way to go about it. and this is a way you could use if you're doing a physical digital vision board or what have you. So we're going to start by inserting a sticky note, and we're going to start with one overarching goal, we'd like to hit in the year. For me, and best I think it's traveling. So I'm going to put try Yes, absolutely. So, to close this window out we just have to hit cancel.
Now that we have our overarching goal we can resize that sticky note, make it bigger or smaller, and also tilted. If we want it to be, you know, off center. Now, you want to think about which keywords would mean you reach that goal. For me that's just destinations right for for travel. For this example. So let's insert more sticky notes, but in a different color, unless some destinations I would love to go to. So, this is just not super well thought out or anything because I don't super want to go any of these places. Okay. And then, well click Cancel to close that window again.
Now we can just drag and drop these images, wherever. When doing this myself. I prefer to put the more reach goals, if that makes sense. The things that are harder to achieve on the top left on the top, and the top left specifically. So whatever's, the hardest is going to go over on this side, just because of how I read it in English, that's the area eyes go to first for words. There's no science behind that that's just my own preference. It's going to be much harder for me to go travel internationally to places where I don't speak the language. And to places that, you know, require passport and long flights to get to.
It'll be a lot easier for me to go to Toronto, even though it is still international travel, it's only a few hours flight away, and San Francisco is a domestic flight so it'll be much easier for me to go to those. So I put my reach goals at the top, and then from there we can really start adding our images and. So we'll go to the ad Image button on the left side here.
And there are so many different ways to add images and Google job board. You can upload from your computer, kind of like how we did before. You can upload by a URL.
This is a little tricky as it says right here, under the place to paste the URL. You should only select images that you have confirmed that you have the license to use. So, kind of like I mentioned earlier, you can take a picture from your actual camera. And that'll just tears me up here there. You can do a google image search which is what we're going to be doing for today just for examples. You can go into your Google Drive and use images that you have stored there.
Or you can use your Google Photos, and if you use Google Photos for Google, or for photo management, all of your photos they're going to be there so you can use them all to create your vision board. For our purposes we're just going to use Google Image today. And, and I'll go ahead and start plugging images in. I'm just going to search the destination name and pick a pretty picture, something that, you know, screams of that destination to me, and pick a few more. If y'all have any questions while I'm typing, feel free to ask. not seen any questions yet, but loving your travel goals.
Awesome. So now that I have a general image of the destination, I'm just going to go in and add some like activities that I associate with those places. So some things I hope to do while I'm there.
Kind of slot them in the space here I'll make it look better. After I put in all the pictures. Oh my. Okay.
Now that we have most of our images and we can go ahead and resize them and tell them a little bit to give them a little more flair. We can always move those posts around. And I think I want the posters to be above the images so again we have to change the positioning and how you do that is by selecting the part of your vision board you want to change the position of selecting the three dot menu that appears on the upper right hand corner of that item. And you have some other menu options here. But I also want to bring it to the front.
So I want to do that for each of these. All right, look in more collage he already. And we'll put our images. And that is it. That's a really simple vision board, instead of having a centralized goal and several, you know. Examples of achieving that goal you could have an overarching, you know, goal that is not very concrete travel is a very concrete goal, it's easy to, you know, put into one word, but it could be something like, improving yourself confidence or switching careers. So your goals all around could be networking, you know, fixing your resume or, you know, filling out job applications that can be more specific be less specific it's all up to you. Vision morning is a very subjective experience.
Now that we have done that, again, you may ask, What are we going to do with this. Well, what we can do is we can go up to as a share button. And we can share this with multiple people if it's something, a group is working on together, you can share the link with them so that they can edit it and add to it as well. Or you can go to the menu, right next to the share button and save frame as image. And that gives you the power to treat it just like you would any other image, same as when I mentioned with Canada, you can upload it to wherever you would like to make it your wallpaper on your phone or your tablet, lots of options for what you can do with it once it's just a regular image.
Now, if there are no questions on Google jam board. Oh, I didn't show you all how to set the background. You can also change the background to a bunch of different colors or to an image itself. Now, Jumping back into our presentation.
Going through Canada and going through Google jam board you may be thinking, why would I do any of this on a computer, and that's perfectly valid. If you're not a general fan or if you're not interested in going and doing something like this. You can definitely still use physical magazines and printed images paper is great. Some even say that it's the preferred method for vision boards, because there's something about like actually getting your hands on the images and cutting them out and cutting the words out and putting them together to make a vision where one did not exist, but you may not find the exact right images so you may still have to look online and print it out.
If you are dead set on going to Toronto and you can't find an image in a magazine you like of the Toronto skyline. You might just have to go online and find an image like I did, and print that image out. And there are still ways for you to, you know, make a physical vision board, an image. That's a JPG or PNG image that you can upload places uses a wallpaper on your phone and things like that. You can take a picture with your mobile device, of your vision board once it's all done.
And do it that way you can also scan it. The library has free high quality scanners that you can use to scan a wide variety of things. So there are multiple ways to get even a physical vision board and to a digital format, if that's something you're interested in. All right. Are there any final questions about making vision boards online. Um, let's see, and then the q&a I did notice in the chat. Somebody asked for Google jam board where you just copy and pasting to move those images around. Yeah, let me hop back and show you.
So all I'm doing to add the image to move the images around is clicking and dragging them. And to get them into the dashboard. All I'm doing is going to add image. searching whatever image I want to add, and clicking on it. And then at the bottom, this little insert ribbon shows up. And once you press insert it pretty much automatically populates in your jam board. Thank you for the question.
Yep, and then the only other one I noticed was how to change the background color which you showed everybody so looks like that's all the questions for right now. Cool beans. So I just wanted to show you something an example of what you can do with those vision boards, you can toss them in a PowerPoint and talk about them to your library patrons if you're me. So these are some vision boards I created an earlier example, you can really put them anywhere you would put a regular image. If you have any other questions, feel free to reach out after the fact, I am available. Now this is the one of the shortest presentations, I'll give during tech Tuesday's. So while I have you all I kind of wanted to give everyone an overview of what we're going to be going over in this season sec Tuesdays.
So, no more about digital vision boards, but I figured if you have any specific things you want me to cover in regards to any of these subjects, you can let me know now and I can be sure to make sure it gets included in the presentation or demonstration portions. So first up next week we're going to be talking about video calls specifically we're going to be talking about FaceTime Facebook and Google. And I know most of us have been video calling left and right over the past couple of years but I do want to take time to talk about fact how we can stay connected with our loved ones from near and far, especially in instances where you are on phones, where you're like an iPhone and an Android trying to talk to one another, which can sometimes be a little tricky. Then we're going to move on to talking about cutting the cord. Now we have done a cutting the cord tech Tuesday's before but this one is going to be updated to include some additional information about new streaming platforms and new services that the library offers like canopy. Next, I'm really excited about our presentation on making connections are going to be talking about things like HDMI connections airplay and casting. All of the kind of different ways you can screen mirror and connect one of your devices to another. So I'm really stoked about that one. Then we're going to be talking about some tech tools for cooking slightly different arena, but we'll be talking about some websites and tools and applications at home chefs can use to take their food prep to the next
level will also be discussing Facebook pages, and groups. We have talked in the past about gentle Facebook used, and we've talked about connecting to your neighbors online, but we haven't specifically spoken about creating your own Facebook pages for your business or entity and creating Facebook groups for your hobbies or connections you want to make with people and specific field, so we'll be going over that and a lot more depth. Then, we'll talk about Apple Car Play and Android Auto which again we have discussed in the past but it's just going to be slightly updated for 2022.
Then we'll be talking about tech tools for the gardener, so different hardware and software that can help you take care of your plants and manage your indoor and outdoor cartons. After that we'll be doing a tech Tuesday's all about Twitter that was originally supposed to take place in the fall of 2021. I'll finally be getting that done. And that should be very fun. After that we'll take a dive into Google Maps and Google Earth, and how you can use Google Maps to enhance your navigation processes and how you can use Google Earth to have fun, and increase your knowledge about the world. Then we'll have a very light Tech Tuesday is all about fandom and learning how to participate in them online learning to find folks who are interested in the same musical groups TV shows, movies and books, as you.
Then we'll head off into what I'm unofficially dubbing as Microsoft May. And during this month will explore outlook for email and Outlook calendar will also dive into Microsoft Word for creating and sharing documents, as well as Excel for organizing and analyzing all manner of data. And finally, PowerPoint for creating engaging presentations. And then in our last tech Tuesday's of the spring season will learn about listening to digital music so where to find digital music, and how you can sync it up so you can listen to it on all your devices.
So it should be a good time. If you know there's something you really want to like you really want me to talk about Spotify and digital music, are you really want me to talk about formatting for APA or something in the word portion of Microsoft may feel free to reach out again my email is LCNMDM malachy.gov. You will be receiving a follow up email from me and the next few days with the link to today's recording.
2022-02-25 20:45
