I have been wanting to develop a quick, attractive, to the point newsletter to send from the LLC for years. The audience is intended to be the staff at Roosevelt. How great is it to be forced to finally work on this idea! Thanks Nicole!
I chose Smore — because I had heard of it. “Smore makes it easy to design beautiful and effective online flyers and newsletters. Smore has over 1 Million users creating over 100,000 flyers and newsletters each month.” (from their website). By the way, Smore is headquartered in Tel Aviv. See, not all tech is in Northern California. Why did I check on the headquarters? Well, I actually checked on the Jobs link of the Smore website. Only another mother of four young adult children would understand — that compulsion to check on job opportunities on EVERY SINGLE WEB SITE she ever visits! Anyway, back to newsletter creating.
Smore was simple to find, simple to sign up for and simple to use. It is attractive. I love using templates and they have plenty to choose from. Embedding was easy — something other tools could learn from.
Students could easily create the newsletters they desire from this product. I can see Smore replacing the “create a brochure” assignments in many classes.
But . . . yes, for me there is a but. My main desire is to share new materials — books, magazines, suggested websites — with the teaching staff. I envisioned a slide show of new books, maybe 6 - 8 titles, featured in each edition of the newsletter. But the slideshow will only show images horizontally. Books tend to layout vertically. I could try to create my own montage and upload as a single vertical image (available layout on Smore) but that defeats my ease of use desire.
I am going to explore other newsletter products for my use, but here is my attempt on Smore.
Thanks for your honest and not giving up on the tool even if it didn't quite fit your needs. Maybe you'll find a purpose for it someplace else!
ReplyDelete