Top tips for making great digital content
As we head into Week 5, you should be starting to focus strongly on your assessment tasks. Not every assessment involves writing an essay, report or paper. Some of you might need to make a video, create an image-based presentation or even put together a blog or website.
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The secret to creating great digital content is paying special attention to the planning and design.
Make a plan
Depending on the type of work you’re doing, there are several methods for planning a visual project.
Storyboard
Both the whiteboard tool Miro and the digital workspace MURAL are great for helping teams collaborate on storyboards for their projects. Adobe Creative Cloud also has multiple design apps that could help you develop your storyboard. You can also download our Word template for text-based storyboarding.
Mind map
You can use a variety of online tools for mind mapping exercise. One that is available in the University’s Software Library is XMind. XMind helps you capture and connect ideas while brainstorming, so you don’t lose any of your hard work.
Script
Develop the right text for your project using one of the many word processing tools at your disposal. Microsoft OneDrive, Teams and SharePoint all allow you to draft text and collaborate with multiple project owners. Make sure you save your documents in the Cloud to avoid losing any changes!
Schedule
There are lots of digital tools that have calendar functions, which makes it easy to plan and share tasks and stick to deadlines. Microsoft Teams, Trello, Airtable and more provide simple but great project planning and scheduling functions.
Find the resources you need
Whether you’re using images, video recording, audio clips or other potentially copyrighted resources, make sure that you have the permissions you need and cite your sources properly. There is a host of excellent information on how to do this right available on our copyright webpages, including Module 2 of our Copyright Modules, Using Copyright.
Pro tip: websites like Pexels, Unsplash and Pixabay have thousands of stock images that are free to use without attribution. It is still best practice to cite where you sourced an image by pasting a URL or citing Public Domain (PD) or CC0. You can find other copyright-free resources on the library website.
Choose the right design tool
There are so many tools to choose from. As a Deakin student, you can access PowerPoint, which allows you to create videos or slides for that presentation you need to give. You can explore other common tools for recording videos in our Making a video guide.
An innovative option for building interactive presentations is a digital storytelling tool like Twine. Also, open-source image editors like GIMP can help make sure your imagery is just right for that visual presentation you need to give. Similarly, tools like Audacity let you record and edit audio for podcast-type assessments.
Ask for help
There are a lot of options out there – these are just some of our favourites. As always, we recommend you contact your Liaison Librarian for more advice.