We understand that if you are new to the Popplet iPad app, you may want to take it for a roadtest first by downloading Popplet Lite.
Try before you buy with Popplet Lite, and share your feedback in an iTunes product review
Of course, after you have had a play around, we are confident that many of our other Lite users, you will want to gain access to more popplets and all our features by buying the full ipad app version! Thanks for your support!
If you have bought our iPad app, we don’t want you to have to spend time recreating your first popplet from the Lite version in your full feature iPad app. Here’s how to move your popplet across from Lite to Paid:
1. Log in to the Popplet Lite app.
2. Choose “Select all” from the gear cog menu in Lite.
3. When all the popples are selected, choose “Copy” from the same menu.
4. Log in to your iPad paid app version.
5. Select paste from the gear cog menu. It’s that easy! Now you can spend that extra time creating more popplets.
What do you like most about our ipad app? Why note take a minute to share your review with us in the iTunes app store. Please login to our Lite or full app pages and share what you think about our app with other iPad users.
For all of our eager iPad users, the wait is finally over! Popplet for the iPad has a new version with more features, bug fixes and faster online access.
You can now download Popplet Lite or our full iPad app from the Apple App Store. Please share what your reactions with us by adding a quick app review.
New versions of Popplet and Popplet Lite for iPad available from the Apple App Store. Try it out and let us know if you think it is one of the best iPad apps around!
The latest iPad version of Popplet includes the following features:
Easier copying, pasting and editing functions for your popplets
Multi-popple selection
Instantly take and add photos to a popplet board
Image and photo rotation
Smoother drawing functions.
The extended gear menu in the latest version of Popplet gives you more flexibility and greater access to features
Help us make a splash as one of the best iPad apps around by sharing your honest review of our update. You can rate our app and add some comments to the App Store page after you have had a chance to play with the new features.
This update also fixes some minor bugs with our previous version and gives you more stability when you access your online popplets.
Current iPad Popplet users know that this release has been a while coming. We wanted to focus first on improving our data storage and server systems so you can rely on Popplet whenever you need to share ideas or compile your notes for more creative visual thinking. We hope you will appreciate the faster and more reliable access to your online popplets with this latest iPad version.
While several users have asked for ways to copy offline popples to their online board, the new version hasn’t been able to incorporate that feature. We will continue to work towards adding this functionality in a future release. For this version, we have made it much easier to copy and paste your popplet work from offline to online. You can now select multiple popples at once and then copy them to a new popplet board.
The new iPad version of Popplet makes it easy to select multiple popples for faster copying, pasting and grouping
As with the previous release, Popplet Lite lets you create one popplet board while the full version gives you an unlimited supply of online and offline popplets.
We are committed to making Popplet one of the best iPad apps available on the iTunes App Store. Download Popplet Lite or buy the Popplet iPad app directly from your iPad. Everyone at team Popplet is eagerly waiting to hear what you think, so please share a product review with us!
Uh-oh! It’s a browser warning! Our programmers have discovered a problem with how Internet Explorer manages Popplet accounts.
To make sure all of your work is being saved, please use a browser alternative other than Internet Explorer until we update this blog post with further details or follow us on Twitter to stay up to date.
We have discovered that Internet Explorer (IE) has a tendency to randomly log Popplet users out of their accounts when using the Popplet web app. When this occurs, there is no warning message to the user that there account has been logged out.
As a result, it is possible to continue creating a Popplet on-screen but this is not being saved to our data servers. When you next log in to Popplet you discover your valuable work has not been saved.
PLEASE! Use Firefox, Chrome or Safari browsers until further notice.
At present, we are installing new alerts to let users know of this problem and we will be introducing error messages to the web app so that you know each step of the way whether your popplet creations are being saved.
If you have any problems with missing popplets, please email us with the following information:
The email address of the account you use when logging in to Popplet
The URL address of any popplets that you need to check
What browser you are using (preferably with details of which version of the browser).
Everyone from Team Popplet sends our apologies for this problem at present. We understand that many schools are only able to use Internet Explorer. We are proud that Popplet is regularly used as one of the most popular classroom apps but recommend that if your school insists on using Internet Explorer, then teachers should avoid lesson plans that rely on our web app for the bulk of classroom activities. We also suggest waiting to use Popplet in assessment tasks until we can resolve this problem. (In the meantime, we encourage you to share your other thoughts about using Popplet at school in our survey.)
We want you to rely on Popplet for your collaboration, education and creative projects and that means alerting you to any problems with our app as we discover them. Please use an alternative browser to Internet Explorer until this problem is resolved. We will update this blog post as soon as we know more.
Is Popplet one of your key classroom apps? Help us learn more about how you use Popplet in education settings
All of us here at Team Popplet are proud to read the daily tweets, support emails, and online education technology blogs that talk about how Popplet is one lof the key classroom apps used by educators all around the world.
Popplet has been used with students of all ages to:
encourage collaboration on team projects
map concepts and create timelines
visually show the connection between information and ideas
assist with remembering new facts and figures.
Teachers use Popplet in lesson planning and encourage students to use Popplet for independent study and note-taking. Some teachers have incorporated using Popplet into assignment tasks.
If you use Popplet in any education setting – from primary school to formal professional development courses – we want to hear from you.
In order to continue to strengthen Popplet’s data storage reliability and capacity, and to extend our web and iPad app features, we are considering a modest subscription plan. Our survey for the education sector aims to make sure that the introduction of any subscription model will not act as a barrier to Popplet’s continued use as one of your top classroom apps.
Popplet has an embed code function that allows you to paste your popplet directly into your webpages. Embedding popplets into your blog posts and web pages is a great way to share ideas.
Many internet readers scan webpages for the content they need. Having a popplet on a webpage can be a good way to help direct your readers to the information you have to share.
You can reinforce your message and show the net of connections between the ideas you are trying to get across, or summarize the text of your blog in a Popplet, to facilitate the reader’s comprehension.
Here’s some examples of how you can use an embed code to share a popplet and reinforce the key message goals of your content:
Use a popplet to describe your skillset and use connector links to share portfolio images of your work for an About Me webpage on your professional blog
For an article on a historical event, create a timeline using Popplet and include that in your writeup
Show how people are connected to each other in a television show or movie (or to show their career filmography) when writing a review
Use Popplet to share maps, points of interest and itineraries in a travel blog article.
(We’ll be using some of these examples over the next few months, but if you have already used the embed code in your blog in a creative way, please share it with us so we can profile your work here!)
Using the embed code also helps you appeal to a wider range of readers with different learning styles and ways of absorbing information. Popplet helps you present information to appeal to both visual and auditory learning styles (for example, by combining text, images and videos). You can use the embed code in online articles and webpages to provide cognitive maps that visualize the flow of information you are discussing. This can help your readers connect the information you are giving them with what they already know. This helps create a deeper learning experience in which people can convert your information into knowledge they can use.
Your blog posts and webpages can appeal to more readers when you use Popplet as a visual thinking tool to represent your content. It is also a great way to break up the text on your page, making readers linger for longer. There is also an aspect of gamification to how they may relate to your webpage when you use the embed code to share your popplet: Readers are motivated to scan your text and look for clues in your popplet that helps them understand your message and link to key points of information you provide through the text on your blog or webpage.
How the embed code works
You can select the embed function from the share button on your popplet board. Click the symbol:
To embed a popplet, your popplet board must be made public. You will be prompted to do so if it is not already:
Doubleclick on the code in the box “embed it” and select copy (Ctrl+V).
Now go to your blog or webpage. Make sure you are in HTML format. Cut and paste the code into the webpage
You can also use a <p align=”center”> before the embed code and </p> afterwards to make sure your popplet is centered between your margins. (We will be exploring more ways to customize your embedded popplet in a future blog post on advanced embed code techniques – subscribe to our blog to make sure you don’t miss out!)
Save your webpage and preview your work. Voila! You have used the embed code to add a great looking popplet to your blog!
Now, when you update your popplet, it will be automatically updated in your blog page as well.
Why doesn’t my embed code work?
Some of the simpler Content Management Systems that allow you to upload blog content do not allow you to embed code on the page. Up until recently, this including Google Sites like Blogger. This was very frustrating for many users who wanted to embed their popplets into their blog. In the last few weeks, we have started to see some embedded popplets working in blogger pages and on Google sites.
Alternatives to using the embed code
If your blog site doesn’t allow you to embed code into the pages, you can save the Popplet as a jpeg image and insert it into your blog as a picture. This means people can still see the content, but they cannot navigate around and zoom in and out of your popplet work, as you can do with the embed code approach.
Please contact us at support@popplet.com if you are having difficulties using the embed codes with your website or blog.
Have you used the embed code to share your popplet in a blog or website? Share the address in our comments or tweet us! We’ll profile examples of your work with our readers in future blog posts.
You can show your popplets in a presentation format offline!
Popplet is more than just a visual thinking tool for managing your information, images and media snippets. It is also a collaboration tool that can help you share ideas and work with team mates on developing concepts, drafting business plans, designing creative projects, and managing workflows.
Popplet presenter is a handy side tool that allows you to share ideas using Popplet, even with people who have never used Popplet before, or in conference rooms and board rooms that don’t have access to the internet.
Making use of the Popplet Presentation Format
1. Download Popplet presenter to the computer you will be using to present and share your ideas. This is an Adobe Air file so it works on both Mac and Windows systems.
2. When you have downloaded the file, unzip it and double click on the Air file to install the app on your computer.
3. You can get a feel for what the app looks like by opening it up. You will see a home page that asks to browse for a .pop file (you don’t have any yet!).
4. Now let’s go back to your web-based Popplet app. Go to the popplet board you have created that you want to use in presentation format.
Select “View” under the gear cog menu and choose “Presentation Mode”.
In the bottom right corner of your screen, you will be offered a chance to record your presentation – this stores the order that you would like individual popples to be shown in your presentation. After clicking the red donut symbol to record, select each popple in the order you want them to appear to your audience. When you have finished, you can save the popplet you plan to use in a presentation format by selecting “save Presenter file” from the “Popplet labs“ option under the gear cog menu symbol.
You will be asked if you want to save a local version of your popplet board – this is the .pop file that you can use offline.
6. Now you can use Popplet offline in presentation format to inspire your audience in the boardroom, at a community group setting, in a conference or other event, or amongst colleagues.
7. When you open the .pop file using Popplet presenter, it will show you the full popplet board. To use the presentation mode, click on the “Present” button in the top right hand corner. (You can also choose to go fullscreen for full impact!)
In presentation format you can choose to show the individual popples from your popplet board as separate slides (“pop” mode), or walk your audience through your popplet with an animation transition effect (“pan” mode).
8. We hope this helps you get more out of Popplet. Enjoy!
Some tips on sharing ideas in presentation format
When you plan your presentation, try to keep your focus on no more than 3 take home messages. What 2 or 3 ideas or key concepts do you want your audience to remember when they are heading home that day?
Consider using an image or video at the start or end of your presentation that helps sum up the vision of your presentation. This will help you implement that old presentation adage:
say what you are going to say,
say it,
say what you just said.
Consider your audience’s preference: will they want a sense of being accompanied through the presentation, as if you were walking next to them and pointing things out (pan mode), or a more traditional lecture style where they can take notes (pop mode)?
Don’t forget you can collaborate with team mates on building your popplet ahead of putting it in presentation format.
You can also save your popplet as a pdf and print it off so you have access to your talking points or share as a handout page.
Benefits of using Popplet Presenter
You don’t need an internet connection when presenting (although if you plan on using video embeds in your presentation, you will need internet access for Popplet to connect with Youtube).
Popplet Presenter helps you think more visually about your presentation format and gives you the capacity to include images and videos within your popplet. This saves you from the dreaded presentation-full-of-dot-point-lists syndrome. (Yes, we realize we have made this point in a dot point list!)
Pop files are small enough to send via email.
While you are creating your popplet you can still use all of the collaboration functions of Popplet to co-create a popplet in presentation format with your colleagues or team mates.
How do you use Popplet Presenter? What additional features would you like to see with Popplet Presenter? Let us know what more you need from Popplet’s presentation format in the comments below.
A buyer persona template is a marketing tool used by businesses to describe target segments of their customer market and online audience. Popplet is an ideal online visual thinking tool to use as a buyer persona template.
How Online Environments are Changing Business
The internet and mobile devices have fundamentally changed consumer patterns around the globe. We research and decide what to buy and which services to use by checking our smartphones, chatting in forum discussions, asking our social media networks, and by reading online blogs and reviews… we know that you know what we mean: because we’re all doing it!
As a result, we’re usually about 70% sure of what we want to buy before we even make first contact with some of the businesses on our list of preferences. For anyone in business, this has changed how to go about connecting with potential customers. Media marketing business experts like Nuria Gimenez, Head of Digital Services at GroupM predicts that “By 2016, we will no longer be buying space. We will be buying audiences”. What she means is that more and more often, businesses won’t get noticed by buying advertising space like internet banners or radio spots, but by buying the time and interest of audiences online, who connect with a business and then go on to share their experiences within their wider networks.
The Buyer Persona Template Technique
Internet marketing leaders, like Adam Singer at the Future Buzz, Barbara Gago on Content Marketing Institute and Lee Odden at TopRank all encourage businesses to enhance the experience of customers by really thinking about what customers want. You can use a buyer persona template in your business planning to describe your potential audience segments. This is a technique that can help you describe how your audience connects to businesses online, and what your customers want from the experience.
Above: Buyer personas: definitions and discussion from the experts
Hopefully, using buyer persona templates will mean your business is better able to respond to customer needs. This creates a deeper connection so that there is a personal, ongoing relationship between your brand and the value people get from it.
Singer, Gago and Odden all suggest asking yourself questions that help to understand your customers, and from the research you uncover, you can create a few profiles of different target market segments and their preferences. The thinking behind this is that you can better provide the type of online content for each audience segment if you have a clear picture in your head about who they are, how they move about online, and what are their common preferences and interests.
The Buyer Persona Template in Practice
Globally, many businesses are looking to connect with new consumers in the emerging markets of China, Russia, Brazil and the Middle East. We have used the internet marketing experts’ techniques to describe one of these new audiences. Here’s our Popplet buyer persona describing Russian consumers.
Above: Buyer persona template for Russian consumers using Popplet
For our buyer persona template, we drew from a combination of data sources and categorized our information by using some of the questions suggested by Adam Singer, Barbara Gago and Lee Odden to understand the audience better.
(Behind the scenes, we also filed all of our source materials (including the funky images we sourced from designcollector) in a delicious stack. Our monthly newsletter to blog subscribers will include links to these background tools and source materials. Our first newsletter edition also includes a step-by-step guide on how to build your own buyer persona template, and access to a blank template so you can start collecting data about your market straight away. Subscribe to our newsletter before December 31 to make sure you don’t miss out on these extra goodies!)
You can use a buyer persona template to dig deeper or step back to a broader level and understand your audience better. Our Russian consumer persona, for example, could be broadened into a category like ‘consumers in emerging markets’ or become more focused, for example, ‘Russian women aged 16 – 35’. Collating your information in a Popplet can give you new insights into your audience that improve your business operations and your customer’s experience with your business.
Work Collaboratively with your Buyer Persona Template
Popplet works as a collaborative tool that lets your business discuss who your customers are and what they want. You can share ideas within your business teams by selecting collaborators who can contribute to the popplet. Use the Popplet labs settings to decide who can add to the popplet and who can edit your existing popples.
How do you use Popplet as a business tool? Share your thoughts in our comments below.
Thanks to our education users, Popplet was nominated this year for an EduBlog Award in the Best web tool category. We are honored to be amongst other great classroom education technology aids. We hope to always be improving and enhancing our app features for classroom use.
We also have a few ideas in the pipeline to provide more resources via this blog and on education sites about how to make the most of using Popplet in the classroom, and we look forward to sharing blogs on:
Lesson plans for various subjects
Classroom activities for different age levels
Study aid techniques using Popplet.
If you would like to contribute or share any examples with us, please contact us. (That’s also the email link to use if you have any concerns or problems regarding Popplet, or you can post a comment or idea on our community feedback pages.)
The EduBlog Awards started in 2004 as a way to demonstrate the value of social media and web 2.0 tools to enhance learning and classroom activity. At the time, many schools and education institutions were introducing blanket bans on using these technologies and Edublog wanted to turn this around and show how they could be used to aid classroom learning and student engagement, rather than be a new source of distraction or interruption. Their goal was to demonstrate the educational value of social media and web 2.0 technologies. Each year, based on nominations and votes from education users, the site awards blogs, web 2.0 media and tools in categories including:
Best individual, class and ed tech blogs,
Best twitter discussion,
Best use of media
Best educational use of a wiki.
This year, the EduBlog Awards team has included a Best web app tool category and Popplet is one of a staggering 60 tools that made it through as a finalist! We have some strong competition and are proud to be nominated. You can see the full list at the EduBlog awards site. It’s a great list of education technology information sources and web 2.0 tools. Like Popplet, some of our fellow nominees – in all categories – offer inspiring knowledge on how to share ideas and great tools for use when organizing information, or encouraging collaborative team management beyond the classroom as well as in it.
What are your favorites from the EduBlog nominees list? Share them in the comments below! Thank you to everyone who nominated Popplet for an EduBlog award.
Popplet lets you share ideas and work collaboratively on projects. We have developed three levels of permission to let you manage your groupwork using Popplet and will continue to improve these capabilities. We get queries every week to our support email and to our online community page asking for clarification on how to use Popplet collaboratively. (Which reminds us – if you have a question or feedback, please share it with us by email or at our community page!)
Share ideas at three permission levels
You can use Popplet to work collaboratively in three ways:
Share ideas: This level allows you to show your popplet to others. You can email the page reference, embed it in your blog, or share it via Twitter or Facebook. When you share the popplet URL page or embed it in your blog, your readers will be able to move around your popplet and zoom in and out, but they will not be able to alter any content. You can see the choices for sharing your popplet board by clicking on the share button in the right hand top corner. First, you will be asked to make your popplet board public, and after that you can email it, embed it, tweet about it or post it to your Facebook page. (Don’t forget, you can also save your popplet as a PDF or JPEG and send it to people as an attachment.)
Collaborate (add): This level of permission allows you to share your popplet and nominate others in your team as collaborators. They will be able to add to your popplet with new popples and connectors. When you work collaboratively, the name tag function comes in handy: you can see who has added popples and expanded on your original work. Your team can also use the comments function to explain the thinking behind their popple content. Click on the peg people symbol and add your team mates. To work collaboratively, your team mates must already have a Popplet account, or you can enter their email addresses and they will be sent an email and invited to join.
Collaborate (edit): This level of permission lets your collaborators make changes to your existing work, as well as add more popple content. Under the gear cog (settings) symbol, choose “Popplet labs” and “Popplet permissions” from the drop-down menu. Select the option to let any collaborator edit your original popplets and click OK to save.
In 2012, we will be adding more features to help you to work collaboratively using Popplet. Please let us know on our Facebook page how you use Popplet to share ideas, and what additional features you need.
We have been excited to see the wonderful reception that Popplet has been receiving lately. Recently, we have been:
Mentioned at a leading educational technology conference
Listed as Apple staff iPad app favorite, and
Featured in blogs on everything from social enterprise development to business productivity!
With so many new users coming on board – as well as our current users finding new ways to make use of Popplet daily – protecting your data and responding to your questions through our app customer service has been our top priority. We keep track of all requests for enhancements to our web and iPad apps, and we will prioritize these ideas for future upgrades, but right now our focus is on fortifying our data servers in the wake of our recent growing pains.
As we launched this blog yesterday, our server systems had a grumpy Monday morning wake up. Thanks to Popplet users (Poppleteers?) for tweeting us the minute you noticed some login problems:
We do realize how frustrating problems are when you can’t access your data. For teachers on a Monday morning, it can impact on how you approach the whole school week, and for productivity and business minded users, it is incredibly annoying and anger-generating to lose an hour or more of your work.
Here’s what happened:
To safeguard your data, Popplet uses a cluster of data storage servers. The cluster is designed so that if any individual server fails, the other servers will step in and allow you to seamlessly access your data without a hitch.
On Monday morning, one of the data storage servers suffered an unexpected outage, but due to a misconfiguration, the cluster did not route around that downed server and instead became unresponsive (it became a bottleneck instead of a detour).
We have since reconfigured the cluster in our Popplet system so that in these cases, it will route your access requests around any server that isn’t working at the time.
For most users, this meant that they could not access their Popplet account for up to three hours on Monday, as when they tried to login, they were sent around in circles. For an unlucky few hardworkers who were already in their Popplet account, this meant the server didn’t save about an hour’s work.
We have since installed further safeguards and during one of our quiet times (when the least number of our users needed to access their Popplet accounts), we ran some tests switching off one server at a time to make sure that accounts are routed correctly to the back up or primary data storage source as necessary. We started testing this overnight and the configuration operates as it should, but we will also be running more robust tests in the very near future.
To let everyone know what was happening, here’s what we did through our app customer service:
Responded to individual tweets by direct message or publicly to acknowledge the problem
Escalated the issue priority to our tech leader to address the server issues immediately
Emailed anyone who asked us what was happening and remained in contact with them until the problem was solved
Tweeted to let our 1,000+ followers know what was going on and when the system was restored.
Is there something more that we can do to alert you in future? In the comment section below, or on our Facebook page, please share your ideas about how to best communicate with you about using Popplet, and about the app customer service standards you expect from us. Don’t forget to subscribe to our blog Poppletrocks! or follow us on twitter to make sure you know everything that is happening with Popplet.
