Innovation Inspiration — #1

The Inaugural Issue of Our Newsletter

Let me re-introduce myself! My name is Lucy Gray, and I’m a long-time educator and aficionado of social media and innovation.

Recently, I’ve re-entered the world of education consulting and am presently exploring new methods of communicating, including Substack, Crowdcast, and a few other tools. In addition, I’m thinking about the most efficient and productive way to share information with friends and colleagues and perhaps get paid for my work.

For the last several years, as a service to the education community, I’ve been auto-publishing two newsletters in Paper.li, a great tool that curates content for me and posts it to social media. The Global Education Report pulls content from my Global Education list on Twitter and speakers at my previous Global Education Conferences; the other has been the High Expectations Daily, which pulls content from my favorite sources on Twitter. I have personally really loved these curated papers as they provide fresh, up-to-date content in one place so that I can stay on top of topics that interest me.

I pay over $100 every year for each of these publications, however. Paying for an upgrade allows me to customize the news sources for these daily publications completely. With a little more elbow grease, I think I can curate content myself from my newsreader, Feed.ly, Refind (an intriguing news tool I found via Revue by Twitter), and social media accounts. Now that I’m back in a consulting role, I think I have time to fit more curation and writing into my daily routine.

So I am letting go of one of my Paper.li papers, the High Expectations Daily. The Global Education Report will continue as usual, but my innovation-focused daily publication will be put to bed in August. Perhaps if the price had been more reasonable or if I had found out that I could publish a Paper.li paper to a revenue-generating source, I would have kept this paper.

For right now, it seems to make sense to try publishing in one of the many free tools that exist and tie into existing social media platforms. For example, this edition is published via Revue by Twitter. By the way, one of my most favorite resources for learning about fabulous productivity tools is Jeremy Caplan’s Wonder Tools on Substack. Jeremy needs to do an issue just devoted to newsletter tools! I’d love to see someone dissect the pros and cons of Substack, Medium, and newsletters created for Twitter and LinkedIn, for example.

At any rate, my goal is to publish something simple every few days that points to intriguing resources related to innovation, particularly in education. So let’s see how that goes! Today’s edition focuses on what I am reading on Twitter this week. Follow me at @elemenous on Twitter, too, while you’re at it!

For more information

Learn more about my work and how I can help you, your school, or your organization become more innovative. Click here to visit my website and LinkedIn profile.