Sometimes the simplest way to bring your content to life is to tell a story. Storytelling is a means of educating people that has been around for millennia.
Just because you have a story to tell, however, doesn’t mean you know how to tell a story in an engaging, effective way. The S.T.O.R.Y. model can help give structure to the way in which you plan for, and ultimately tell, your story. Continue reading
“If we’re running short on time, I’ll typically cut the anchor activities and jump right into the content.”
I was leading a train the trainer workshop and some of the people who were using our curriculum were sharing tips and tricks for how to facilitate a session, especially when the curriculum was so packed and it was so easy to fall behind.
I cringed. Continue reading
A friend of mine was sharing her experiences recently on a dating site. She had met an international man of mystery – Tomas – on a site. He seemed good looking enough and successful. Tomas was Portuguese and apparently made his money by doing something with gold bars and China.
And then on his most recent trip, Tomas got stuck in China and couldn’t get his gold bars out, unless… Continue reading
The year was 2015. I was sitting in a breakout session at a training conference and the speaker was about to discuss ways to easily bring animation into an elearning course. As she introduced her topic, she shared a bit of research that was new to me: Thanks to all of today’s technology and distractions that surround us, the average human attention span had dwindled to under nine seconds, which is shorter than the attention span of a goldfish! She even cited this article in Time magazine as her source.
The problem with this eye popping statistic is Continue reading
Several weeks ago I introduced our presentation design tool — Soapbox — and asked for volunteers willing to test it and provide feedback in our Beta phase. This week we’ll begin Beta testing on this tool intended to save people time in the design of their training programs.
As our Beta testers have waited to get their hands on Soapbox, we’ve asked them to participate in several short surveys about how they’re currently spending their time. Following are some insights from their responses. Continue reading
Several weeks ago I wrote some observations for job seekers after reviewing 50 L&D manager job descriptions. In today’s post, Mary Cropp, Director of Training and Development at Bluetooth SIG, writes this guest post to share some very blunt advice for anyone looking to land their next role on an L&D team.
As the hiring manager and in-house consultant for all things L&D within my organization, I am choosy about who will be on my team and who will be providing contract work for the organization. Choosy? Make that very choosy. If I lift the veil for a moment on hiring practices within the L&D realm, I want to prepare all you facilitators, trainers, and instructional designers out there with a bit of what a hiring manager looks for in a candidate. Continue reading
This morning as my blog post is sent out, I will receive hundreds of automatically-generated Out Of Office responses from people who are traveling. Most of them contain standard language about how long someone will be away from the office and who to contact in their absence. Every once in a while, I’ll stumble across an Out Of Office notification that makes me want to read the whole message.
Out Of Office messages are currently the “lecture” of the email world – lots of people send them out, but few people pay attention to them. With summer vacation season around the corner, why not use your Out Of Office message to bring a smile to others’ faces, give them some fun facts or even equip people with new ideas or knowledge?
Following are five ideas for training professionals to use for their Out Of Office messages: Continue reading
I’ve written in the past about how Haiku (a form of poetry written in three lines, the first having five syllables, the second having seven, the third having five) can serve as a fun, effective icebreaker. You can have people introduce themselves or write about the topic at hand using this structure.
In today’s blog post, I offer some general observations about training, all written in Haiku. Continue reading
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. This Thursday at a Seattle-based conference called Learnapalooza, the world will get the first glimpse of Soapbox in action. Today on Train Like A Champion, you’ll get a sneak peek. If you’re intrigued to learn more, we’re looking for a limited pool of beta users who can help us identify bugs and find gaps in the content.
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:
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.
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!
Each year, Jane Hart and the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies (C4LPT) compile a list of the top 200 (technology-based) tools for learning. This list is compiled by submissions that come in from learning professionals from around the world.
If you’d like to submit your votes for the top learning tools of 2019, you can do so by filling out this form.
Here is the list of the top 10 technology-based tools (listed in no particular order) that I’ve been using for learning and development throughout this year: Continue reading