JB

J. Briganti

Thanks to advanced technology, you know longer need to be a professional photographer to capture a unique moment in time.  Although it is true that photography is an art, even those of us just snapping away as a hobby can achieve exceptional photographs with the right camera in hand.

The Olympus SP-59OUZ will provide you with photographic pleasure.  It is an affordable camera appropriate for someone taking up photography as a hobby and can also be easily enjoyed by all members of the family.  It comes complete with lots of valuable shooting features such as optical zoom, shadow ADJ for brightening the subject against backlight, exposure compensation for adjusting the brightness and macro shooting for taking great close ups.   And let’s not forget the self timer so that all of your family or friends can be in the picture.

Taking a good photo is not really as difficult as you may think.  You don’t need years of experience or the most expensive camera.  What you do need is inspiration.  Where to find it?  It’s all around.  Take time out to notice your natural surroundings including your own garden, local parks or distant landscapes.  Family pets or small animals like birds, squirrels and rabbits make wonderful photos too.   Zoom in on your own family members when they’re not looking for photos with a natural complexion.

Here are some simple steps that you can follow and you’ll be on your way to photographic bliss.

• Get up close and personal to your subject, when possible.
• When shooting animals get down low on their level.
• Hold your camera in a vertical position for a change.
• Look for a simple, uncluttered background.
• Shoot with the sun behind you.
• If your outdoor subject is in the shade, turn on the flash.
• Use a tripod for extra steadiness.
• Make use of macro shooting for great close ups.

In addition to these simple tips, take the time to read your camera’s manual; by doing so you will learn how to operate the different camera modes available.

Have fun and enjoy your photographic journey!

I’d like to introduce Jane, GIT Athens’ latest blogger. We are happy to have another brave soul come on board here in Athens.  One by one we are getting women into tech!

Technology Trekking by J. Briganti

It doesn’t require special clothing or special shoes but if you’re 40 something and haven’t been doing much technology trekking then it can be a bit perplexing.  I recently was invited to preview Google Wave.  Interesting I thought, so I clicked whereas instructed and hoped for the best.

Not having a Google account I was prompted to create one.  I paused for a few seconds and then thought to myself, why not.  I proceeded to follow the step by step instructions, clicking away here and there and before I knew it, I had myself a Google account.  Hurray, so far so good, I thought.   Feeling inspired, I then decided to download something called Google Chrome, which I would later learn is a web browser aiming to improve security, speed and stability.  What a great tool to have, I thought.

The idea of having real-time communication and collaboration is very exciting and I was eager to send a wave.  So, without further hesitation I clicked on contacts, choosing the only name which was in my box, proceeded to write a brief message in the window provided and then finally clicked on done, located at the bottom of the text window.  I was pretty sure that my wave went but was not totally convinced.  The absence of a confirmation in the form of sent left me with a little uncertainty.

Randomly clicking away at the various options available in the navigation, inbox and text windows, I soon realized how important it is to be able to utilize all of these different tools in order to endure all that Google Wave has to offer.  So, I decided to browse through the Google Wave Help and am I glad I did.  It was very user friendly and I found a “how to” explanation for every transaction that I would soon be interested in using.  Needless to say, I am ardently waiting to fill my contact box with fellow wavers.

My accomplishments may seem trivial to some, I’m sure, but for me it was exhilarating.  Technology and I are still a union in the making and I am excited about venturing into new territories.  I personally plan to hike over one small hill at a time, enjoying the scenery as I go.  Many thanks to Google Wave Help for supplying the answers to questions that I hadn’t yet thought to ask.

Just before the Christmas holiday commenced, I attended a monthly event called Open Coffee. Open Coffee was started in England and now has several global chapters, but having a chapter in Athens is particularly noteworthy as there seems to be relatively few gatherings of tech entrepreneurs and potential investors.

In the packed Benaki Museum hall, attendees were able to listen to the processes and milestones of recent startups and garner advice from the most senior successful of businesses in Greece, such as Liberis Publications.  However, the most impressive in the area of technology was AthensBook.

AthensBook was started by two young entrepreneurs who have a vision of bringing Greeks online via mobile devices. Greece, as an emerging market economy, finds itself in an advantageous position in that much of the hardware infrastructure that often hinders technological changes is not engrained here. Therefore, getting the masses to depend on information dissemination and retrieval via wireless hand-held devices will not be hard to achieve. Therefore, AthensBook has positioned itself well for future success in the area of monetization via mobile advertising. So, when coming to Greece, download the AthensBook app to keep abreast of latest exchange rates, best gas station prices, local shop hours of operation and much more.

Another company to keep an eye on is Niobium Labs.  They are an R&D company that specializes in creating innovative solutions for mobile and geolocation technologies.

The format of Open Coffee was well organized, the presentations were professional and the speakers held the audience’s attention quite well. See the Open Coffee link to attend their next event or if you have a start up in the Athens’ area, get yourself out there and present your products!

In my last post, I posed a question concerning the future of our girls: How do we create a guaranteed platform and successfully develop their genius? Ironically, since that posting two weeks ago, the first part of the question was answered for me. The Girls in Tech Athens Chapter has drawn the attention of Cisco’s Gender Initiative program—a positive and proven technology platform for young women and girls.

Though the program starts with the bare minimal Windows application skills, given the sluggish evolution of technology in many Greek schools (even schools with international students), this is a magnificent opportunity to track the progress of young women in this area.

My current employer, the International School of Athens, has volunteered the physical platform for GIT and Cisco to introduce the Gender Initiative program. This opportunity could provide a critical measuring tool for GIT; in that, GIT will be able to directly monitor how many women have entered this program and via Facebook or other social media we may be able to directly track the progress of the participants over the years. This metric would add value to Girls in Tech and its contribution to enhancing technology-based opportunities for the global female population.

Additionally, given Cisco’s current market position, this collaborative effort may provide young women with an incentive to look towards technology careers as their bread and butter.

For me, becoming trained as a Cisco Gender Initiative facilitator and heading up GIT Athens are two large feats, but they are literally, two large feet planted for the advancement of women in technology!

Hello everyone,

It’s great to have come on board here in Athens. I am excited to join the GIT blogging community as well. Just a heads up: I come to you with a background in International Relations and Education; so, I tend to look at the social impacts of technology on societies. Nonetheless, that is quite appropriate here in Athens as technology and computer usage in schools is about ten years behind the US. Additionally, I have an interesting spin on improving the learning process in education. Ultimately, I believe that learning could be advanced through the incorporation of advertising and marketing techniques as pointed out in my first blog entry below.

Balancing Social Marketing Techniques and Education
School leaders often espouse their desires to become 21st Century learning centers; however, given the rigid infrastructures that have existed in education for more than a century, overcoming the past is often more difficult to achieve than they imagined. One way to circumvent this engrained tradition is to use the rapidly morphing avenues of social networking that are at hand—primarily meeting places like Facebook, MySpace and Hi5. However, the key to successfully marketing education in those forums is balance, balance, balance—particularly of content.

Unfortunately, the field of education is chock-full of content, content, content. Therein lies much of the problem with creating “educational” scaffolding tools that are designed for modernity and not tradition. In developing learning content, educators often maintain the same sterile “keep-safe” mindset, resulting in traditional education simply being repackaged instead of redesigned.
As a middle and high school educator, I decided to use some of the same techniques for teaching that are employed when designing an effective social marketing initiative. I have shared them below.
21st Century Teaching Initiative:

1. Meet your clients (students) where they socialize—here in Greece, it’s Facebook. Facebook allows for postings to be presented in a laid-back setting. It is a place where the clients are comfortable and connected.

2. Be interpersonal, humorous, entertaining and fun—relate to your clients, but avoid judging their posts too harshly. Let them know that you have a life too. Students can learn from normal and positive adult interaction, show them that you have friends too. The goal is to build a learning community without them having to trade their lifestyles to learn.

3. That said, combine business and classroom ethics. In essence, be professional and use common sense etiquette. You would not invite your students or business clients to your most personal aspects of life…so keep your profile just above the line and clean, but not so prudish that you fail to achieve your goal of successfully marketing educational content.

4. Provide quality content. There are very good content-driven videos from sites like TED, BNET, Howstuffworks, and of course YouTube. But, Balance, balance, balance! After almost 20 years in education, I can truly say that part of the problem with many of our schools’ teaching practices is that we educators are in content-overdrive!

5. And finally, take from the marketing principles of the recent past. Remember that marketing is often about the experience. So make sure your students can have a great and memorable experience around the content that you provide…it will make the technological shift in branding education much easier.

Thus, in moving towards the creation of 21st Century classrooms and schools, think of social marketing, balancing content, the experience and learning; because, to effectively move the next generation forward in education, our focus as women, mothers, and educators should be on the end receiver—the student—not the institutions.