Have you ever wished you could reduce the number of hours (or days) it takes to come up with engaging ideas for your training sessions?This morning my company, Endurance Learning, launched an online tool that can help you generate a facilitator guide, a complete set of activities and a PowerPoint deck – all in under five minutes. The tool is called Soapbox. Here is how it works:
Continue readingLesson Plan Design
Lesson plans (or session plans) guide your design and instruction.
Scary moments in Presentations
Happy Halloween. Fun scary days call for spooky stories…
In a dark room, a visage is backlit by a square projected light. Ghost-like and monochromatic the visage speaks, is he speaking directly you? Should you answer his indirect questions? No, the words are abstract and generic, almost as though he is reciting an old childhood adage he has recited over and over before he has brought them before you today. Continue reading
Winging Your Next Presentation
When you are asked to give a presentation or a workshop, it is likely because you are a decent presenter, a content expert, or both. As a person with this skill set, it is likely your only job is not giving presentations on this subject and presentations take time and money to develop. Maybe you should just wing it. Continue reading
A Salesforce Basics Lesson Plan that Gets People Out of their Seats
Systems training can be really hard to design in a way that’s engaging for both the presenter and participants.
On Friday, I had about 5 minutes before I needed to jump on a call, so I decided to see if I could generate something more interesting for a 2-hour Salesforce Basics training session. This is what I came up with:
Continue readingA tool to help design strategic planning workshops
In about a month, my team will be launching a tool we’ve developed to help create better presentations, faster. Our original concept was to dramatically reduce the amount of instructional design time spent on developing training sessions.
I’m currently working with several clients on facilitating strategic planning sessions, which got me to wondering: would our tool be useful in helping to design elements of strategic planning sessions?
After three or four minutes of playing with the tool, here is the lesson plan it generated for me Continue reading
4 Activities for Group Problem Solving
We recently wrapped the first round of beta on our new presentation creation tool, Soapbox. A piece of feedback that we received quite often was that people were excited about all of the fresh activities that Soapbox provides. Beta users were energized at the prospect of trying out new activities suggested by Soapbox to add depth and engagement to their training. Chances are that if you’re tired of your learning activities then your learners are too. Here are four application activities straight out of Soapbox to try as your next problem-solving activity. Continue reading
Four Steps to More Engaging Training Design
A little while back, I was showing a tech industry executive – someone who knows both his way around the C-suite and who knows his way around training design – a lesson plan that was generated by our training design tool, Soapbox.
“Hmmmm. When you first told me about this, I thought I’d see some sort of instructional design model integrated into the way you designed this.”
I pointed out that the lesson plan actually did follow the formula of a 4-step instructional design model. He looked at the lesson plan again and smiled. “Ah, I see it now. Yes, this is good.”
Being intentional about the design of your next training program by using a model rooted in adult learning theory can make the difference between a meandering, ineffective session and an engaging session that leads to change. Following is the model we use Continue reading
Is it possible to design an engaging, effective training session (and accompanying slides) in 5 minutes? Yep.
How much time do you typically spend putting together a good presentation?
Beginning with thinking through your learning outcomes, mapping an outline of activities, putting together the slides and handouts you’ll use – how much time does that typically take? Half a day? Two days? A week?
There’s a new online tool that will soon be available that can get you 80% of the way to a well-designed, engaging presentation in about five minutes.
Soapbox is a tool that the Endurance Learning team has been developing for several years. It is currently in beta and scheduled to launch in November 2019.
What is Soapbox?
Soapbox is a job aid that takes several key factors of your next presentation into consideration and instantly designs a training presentation for you that includes:
- an outline of activities,
- detailed instructions,
- a slide deck, and
- a template for any suggested handouts
How does Soapbox work?
You tell Soapbox a few details about your presentation:
You decide what should happen as a result of your presentation:
Then Soapbox offers you a lesson plan with a series of activities (that you can re-order if you’d like), slides, a materials list and handout templates.
Don’t like an activity? Swap it out.
Want to customize your content? All text and PowerPoint slides are completely editable.
Want to help with our limited beta?
We’re looking for a handful of people who might have a training presentation coming up and who would like to test Soapbox and give us some feedback. If you fit the profile, sign up here and we’ll get in touch with you in the next few weeks.
Coming to Learnapalooza? Hope to see you in our session where we’ll see just how fast you can put together a presentation!
The Baseline, Spaced Practice, and Reward Structure
If you talk to anyone who attends Crossfit for more than a few minutes, they will likely try to convince you to join. Despite the incessant need for its members to recruit everyone they know, Crossfit is not a pyramid scheme or a cult. Yes, I happen to be one of those annoying people, and I have a theory as to why so many of us are evangelists of our sport. Continue reading
Storyboard for PowerPoint: A Template for Your Next Presentation
You’ve been asked to give a presentation and it’s time to begin mapping out your thoughts.
I’ve observed this exact scenario play out with presenters in small nonprofits and enormous Fortune 500 companies, and I’ve noticed a trend that makes my heart sink. Continue reading