Training is expected to yield change. How does change make people feel? I don’t know that we can expect everyone to react consistently when they react to change, but there is a tendency for most of us to ask how changes affect our own lives when we are faced with them. Continue reading
Want audience interaction? This is a powerful, flexible (and sometimes free) tool.
I’ve written about PollEverywhere in the past, but after using it during a keynote presentation last Wednesday, I wanted to draw your attention back to this easy-to-use, powerful audience interaction tool.
Here are three different ways that I set up polls for three different purposes during the course of my presentation: Continue reading
The Role of a Co-facilitator
I like to start my day with positive visualization. In this form of meditation, I enjoy picturing what success looks like. That success may be how my day will go, how a client meeting will go, reactions to my work, or any other permutation of a successful day. When I am facilitating a session, I like to visualize and think through the ways I can support my participants, to help them be successful. Recently, I started thinking about how this may change when I am co-facilitating. Continue reading
When PowerPoint and Adult Learning Collide
Recently I’ve facilitated several sessions on more effective ways to use PowerPoint in a training setting. The simple truth is that your PowerPoint slides, like any other element of your presentation design, should align with the fundamental principles of adult learning theory.
Adult learners like to have some sort of control over what they’re being asked to learn. So how can PowerPoint possibly support this principle? Continue reading
13 Scary Moments in L&D
Happy Halloween everyone! Learning and development can throw some scary things your way. I recruited the help of a few L&D professionals to come up with a list of 13 scary things you can face as a trainer. Continue reading
C4LPT’s Top 200 Tools for Learning (2018 Edition)
I don’t know where my mind has been recently, but I seem to have missed two very important release dates: Daredevil Season 3 was apparently released by Netflix a week or two ago. Perhaps more relevant to this blog, Jane Hart’s annual list of the Top 200 Tools for Learning was released in late September. You can find the list with brief descriptions of each tool here.
I get excited to review this list each year for two reasons: 1) I’m curious how the tools I use rank in popularity across the L&D community (the list was compiled after 2,951 votes were cast from 52 different countries), and 2) I love scanning the list to see if there might be some digital tools I could add to my craft in the coming year.
This year, one thing that jumped out at me was the number of “Audience Response Tools” that are available. Continue reading
Style Guide Template
Last week, I briefly touched on style guides. As a followup to that post, I put together an EasyStyleGuide template as an example for those of your unfamiliar with style guides. As you review this document it is important to keep a few things in mind. Continue reading
Making Your LMS More Valuable For Your Employees
If you’re anything like I am, you’ve tried to bring people to your LMS on several occasions, adding courses that your data suggests are needs for your organization. For all the promise that online learning holds – with its 24/7 access, no-need-to-travel-for-training – many organizations continue to struggle to bring their employees to their online learning platform.
Having worked with several organizations that have invested significantly in online learning, there seem to be three letters often missing from resources uploaded to an LMS.
Those three letters are: Continue reading
The Rules of Writing Training
I love math. The square root of 9 is always 3. Prime numbers are only divisible by 1 and themselves, and circumference is equal to 2π r. For similar reasons I love chemistry, music, and various other disciplines that have rules that are consistent and repeatable. Continue reading
How can your storytelling be more effective?
On Saturday, I attended a memorial service for my 101-year-old grandfather. The stories that my aunts and uncles and cousins shared were phenomenal. Storytelling is such a powerful means of communication, especially when you can picture what’s happening in the story.
But what happens when you aren’t quite as familiar with the subject matter or situation in the story?
In his book Brain Rules, John Medina writes: “Vision trumps all other senses… we learn and remember best through pictures, not through written or spoken words.” So how do we add the sense of sight to our storytelling? Continue reading