Common Sense Media Review
By Erin Brereton
,
based on child development research. How do we rate?
Design hip virtual flyers with reasonably easy-to-use site.
Parents Need to Know
Why Age 13+?
Any Positive Content?
What's It About?
Choose a theme -- event, business, for sale, news bulletin, class, or anything else you need to promote -- and fill in a template to create a newsletter or flyer. Prompts offer some simple tips, such as, \"Titles are a must for all flyers.\" You can add text, photos, and audio from aural platform SoundCloud; YouTube, Vimeo, and Viddler videos; or a form. Once the design is complete, you can distribute designs to Craiglist or an email list, make them private, promote them on social media, or print them. Analytics help track reader response. Basic Smore is free; paid monthly subscriptions range from $19 to $99.
Is It Any Good?
According to Smore, more than 30,000 users access the promotional flyer-creation site daily. Most seem to be logging on to make flyers and newsletters for the products and services they offer. Flyers can be printed out and distributed, emailed, and shared on certain sites. Smore makes document design, creation, and distribution simple; its tool guides you through the process, and you can add some nifty extras, like videos and audio. Graphic and font options are modern and charming, which works well for kid-created flyers. However, without a paid subscription, flyers will contain Smore's logo, which can be a drawback for some users. Parents also may have concerns about kids' ability to connect with other users on the site. To comment on other flyers, kids need to first log in to their Yahoo, Facebook, AOL, or Hotmail account, which means other users can easily learn more about their identity and potentially contact them. Parents can alter kids' profile settings to make their flyers private; this will remove the analytics option and prevent kids from seeing which promotional efforts resonate best with viewers -- but it should make their experience safer.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can talk about PR and marketing and how companies promote products and services to potential buyers. Ask your child for some examples of commercials or ads. How did they influence your child's interest in a toy or other product?
Discuss some issues that can arise from logging into a website using your Facebook account. How could strangers contact you if they can see your profile?
Users can make their flyers public or private. Ask kids what privacy issues they could face if everyone could see their work. Should everything that kids create on sites like Smore be for-their-eyes-only?
Website Details
- Subjects : Language & Reading : presenting to others , writing , Arts : drawing , photography
- Skills : Creativity : imagination , producing new content , Self-Direction : initiative , set objectives , Communication : conveying messages effectively , presenting
- Genre : Creating
- Pricing structure : Free to try
- Last updated : November 12, 2021
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