Playground Posts – Rich Text Editor

[00:00:00]
Candace:  Good morning, everyone. Thank you for your patience. Just had a, some small technical difficulties there. Welcome to our Rich Text Editor for Posts webinar. So, our recent release, has meant that we can now do more with our Posts. So, this is on both the app and the web, web-based version of Playground. And there’s, it’s going to really enhance the that you are sharing, with your families. So, a quick look, at, what changes have been made.

[00:00:39]
So, I’ll take you into the, Playground, after we’ve been through, just an overview of these changes. But what’s changed now is we now have, as you can see outlined in that little red box there, is the ability to edit, alter and adjust the text to kind of fit our style. Which is exciting. It’s going to make things really pop, they’re going to look much more aesthetically pleasing and you can even brand them according to your centre as well. So, if you have a look at the zoom in there, we’ve got undo and redo buttons, all the usual bold, italics, underline, strikethroughs. We can change the font. We can change the size, the colour, bullet points, dot points, lists, emojis as well. So, it’s really exciting. It’s going to look really, really good. As we go along, please feel free to pop any questions that you might have in that Q&A box. Should be at the top of, the screen. And then I can jump in, to Playground at the end and we can answer some of those.

[00:01:49]
So it’s going to be the same for, the web-based version, and the app-based version of Posts. They both work exactly the same, same layout and everything. So, you’ll see that bar at the top there. So, as you can see, undo and redo. So, if you make a mistake, you’ve got those two little arrows there that you can, you can click on, if you’ve, you know, if you’ve accidentally deleted something or you need to re put something in there. You can also do this, with your keyboard shortcuts, so you’re holding down Ctrl +Z to undo, is also a good way, but now you’ve got these buttons as well. So, it just means that, you’ve got that insurance there if you make a mistake.

[00:02:43]
So we’ve also got our formatting and alignment. So, you can now add in your bolds, italics, underlines, and strikethroughs. I often find these strikethroughs, you know, if you’re, if you want to add a little bit of humour into your post, those strikethroughs can be, can be a bit of fun to use. And you can also align, your text. So, you can have it to the left centred, right, or you can have it all nice and neat in one block in the middle or justify as it’s called. And then we also have font, and size. Fonts, a big one. I know a lot of it, whether we kind of admit it or not, I feel like everyone kind of has a little bit of a preference for a certain, font, that they like for me, 14-year-old me was really big into copper plate Gothic. I’m not sure. A couple of like Gothic. I can’t remember which one it was, but very dramatic. Or if you’re an Arial person, or even if you’re still sort of, used to writing up those assignments at uni, your Times New Roman, will be there as well. And you can change, your font size. You can make it really big, or you can make it smaller. And this is really going to help you create headings, if you use that in conjunction with your bold, and italics tools as well.

[00:04:06]
We’ve also got colour and highlights. You can change the colour of your text. And you can also add a highlight behind the text as well. So, you’ve got some preset colours there. Or you can pick, if you click on your little palette there, you’ll be able to slide through, that colour picker and choose your own. And we’ll go into a little bit more detail when I jump into the, into Playground in a moment. We’ve also got our lists, which everybody, you know, for a Post lists, you know, your dot points, your numbers, really, really handy if you’re trying to break down some information for families. Like if you’ve got, some requirements for an excursion coming up, or, you know, a list of things that the children might need to pack for a certain day, just having those in dot point or list form can, can go a long way to kind of making it easier to read for families.

[00:05:04]
And of course, we have our emojis. Everybody loves an emoji. We’ve got full access to those. So, you’re not sort of having to type in, you know, you know, your brackets and your, your colons, to make a little smiley face. You can just jump into your emojis and pick one from there. I think most devices, will now read emojis just fine. So that’s going to be a really nice one to have, as well. Just makes it a bit more personal for families.

[00:05:37]
So, previously, I’m just looking at this comparison that we have here. So, this is what Posts used to look like on the left. So, if you were using, you know, a Mac, or if you’re on the iPad, you could put in an emoji, but this was kind of, this was kind of it. You had your title, and even though you could create paragraphs with spaces and that sort of thing, it was just the one font, the one size, and Even though it was readable, it’s not all that exciting.

[00:06:11]
Now, as you can see here, on the right-hand side, we’ve got, you know, our underlines. We’ve got different colours. We’ve got bold. You can see there the italics and different fonts, different sizes, and it’s just going to, and it’s going to be a lot easier to get those emojis in there as well. It’s just going to be a lot more fun and engaging for families to read. So, and it’s going to be, you’re going to be able to brand it as well. So, you know, you might have a specific style, as an educator or a teacher, or you, you know, maybe, your service has, you know, a set sort of style guide. So certain colours that you use for your newsletters and that sort of thing, you can now incorporate those into your Posts.

[00:07:05]
So we can see here, this is how it’s been edited. So, the use, of our bold, italics, underline and strikethrough here. We’ve used colour, we’ve used highlights, there’s that highlight there in the final term of the year. We’ve got, the size, the font. You’ve got your little plus and minus buttons there for the size too. The alignment and some breaks as well. So, it’s just, it’s going to look a lot nicer. And this is what it’s going to look like in Home. So, just keeping in mind when you are creating something, for Home, think about it in terms of that darker background. And even though it’s, it’s so tempting to just go all out with all the different colours and that sort of thing, we still want it to be nice and easy to read, for families. So, this is a picture of sort of what it’s going to look like, in Home for families when they read it.

[00:08:09]
Okay, so I’m going to switch this over into Playground now so you can see me using it live. Don’t forget if you’ve got any questions, you can pop them in the Q&A there. As we go along.

[00:08:28]
All right, so you should see my screen as I’m moving into Posts here. So, this is the view from Playground Web and I’m just going to click on new Post, and you can see just up the top there our Rich Text Editor. So, I’m going to make a Post about playing in the garden.

[00:08:55]
All right, so if we just pop some text in there. We love capitals for emphasis, and we also love a good typo when you’re in front of everybody. So, you’ll type it in as normal as you normally would. And then I’m the kind of person that will go back in and edit it afterwards. So, I’m just going to advertise my sandcastle day.

[00:09:57]
All right. So, I’m going to change everything to, I’m going to use my little drop down there. Got a sense of humour, you can use the Comic Sans. I like Verdana. That’s my favourite font. That’s actually the font that we use, in the Xplor Knowledge Base. If you’ve popped on there and had a look before, Verdana is the font that we use.

[00:10:22]
And I’m going to bold this one, so I’m going to use my little bold up here. And then, oh, I’ve got italics there, but if I don’t want that, I can use my little back button. or redo. So, you can see those italics, undo, no italics. Create that bold as well. Then I’m going to turn this colour and change the colour of it here. So, text colour, usually black. Click on the drop down. I’m going to make it orange for a bit of fun. And I’m going to emphasise this one here, making castles. So, I’m going to highlight that with yellow and I might actually turn that font orange as well. And because I really want to emphasise that I’m going to put a little emoji in as well. So, my favourite emoji is, let’s see if I can find it quickly, you can search for them too if you need to. Sparkle one that might just be an iOS one. I’m using a Windows at the moment. Let’s do, there we go, little castle. This can look very cute. So, you can scroll through, have your pick of emojis, find something that you think is really cute, pop it in there. Got a lot of options. Oh, there are my sparkles. There they are there. And I’m going to unhighlight that bit. There we go. Making castles. We’ll be having a sandcastle day. I’m going to emphasise that one. Actually, I might make it a little bit bigger. I can make it, actually, I’m going to make that big too. If you want to go really wild, you can I think you can actually get pretty, yeah, you can make it huge. I don’t think we’re going to go quite that big. All right, so for argument’s sake, we’re just going to say that the centre that I’m working at doesn’t have any supplies and we need to bring our own miniature shovels. Let’s see if I hit enter, it’s in that text, or that bullet point format now. Okay. And parcel building tools. You can do all sorts of, this is just to demonstrate the list, but you get the idea. It’s just going to make things a lot easier to read for families and emphasise where you need to emphasise, because we know families are busy and they don’t always, you don’t have the time, to, to kind of read every message in a lot of detail. So, if there’s something you really want to emphasise, go ahead, bold it, put some colour on it, make it really loud. I’ve seen it all there. Little seeds. Now if you, if your centre has branding, what you can do is, so I showed you how we can change that colour there. If I click on my drop down next to it, we’ve got that little custom colour. So, you can pick it from here. But if you really want to get super fancy and super clever with it, This little code here, you can put in what’s called a hex code. And a hex code is, a specific code that is associated with a very specific colour and they’re universal. So, anywhere on the Internet, if you see some coloured text, it has a text, it has a hex code. So if you wanted to brand, these Posts according to your centre or if it’s just a colour that you really like you can always ask your web developer or your IT person for the hex codes, that your centre uses on the website or in your newsletters, that kind of thing. And once you have that hex code, you can pop it in here. And when you copy and paste that in, it’s going to change the colour. If I go. When you change those numbers, it changes the colour. There we go. So yeah, you can post those in there, if you’re looking to brand specifically to your centre. So just ask your web developer for those.

[00:15:52]
I want to put a strike through. Now, I’m actually curious to see if anyone knows this reference that I’m about to put in here. Best wishes, warmest regards. If you get that reference, please post in the Q&A. It’s a very funny, it’s a reference from a funny show, very wholesome show. If anyone knows it, it’s a little obscure. Alright.

[00:16:24]
So that is your Rich Text Editor for Posts. Go and have a play around with it. Have a heap of fun. It is, it’s really nice to use. It’s, it’s good to kind of, a bit of a change up where you can emphasise certain things that might be more important in a post for whatever reason. And just for making it more eye catching for families. So, if you have any questions about it, we do still have, 10 minutes left, in the webinar. Please post them, let me know, put it in the Q&A, and that way everyone, everyone can see me, answer. Any questions you might have. Give it a few minutes. See, see if anyone’s got anything.

[00:18:08]
Just got a question there about this being sent by email. We do have on the Xplor knowledge base, full instructions and a guide for the, Rich Text Editor, which I’ll post in our chat. So, everyone can see that. And just have a quick reference, I’ll load that up.

[00:18:34]
Please, if you have any other questions, let me know, just don’t be afraid to pop them in the Q&A if you need? No question is a silly question.

[00:19:30]
Okay, just gonna put the link to our Posts articles there in the chat, but it, it looks like we don’t have any further questions. So, you’ll see these, articles pop up in the chat, but we’ll leave it there for today. Thanks everyone for coming along. Hope you have a heap of fun with it. Go create some really nice-looking Posts and enjoy the rest of your day.

[00:19:56]
Thanks everybody. Take care.