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
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
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
Is it a “learning experience” or a “training session”? Are they “goals” or “learning objectives”?
A few days ago, a non-L&D friend of mine was telling me about a company newsletter she had to release and an internal L&D person insisted that she use the term “learning” instead of “training”.
“What does the even mean? People understand ‘training’.”
She was right. This whole idea that we want learning to be a lifelong experience and that “training” represents an event, is a concept that gets a lot of mileage within L&D circles, but there are very few other people who actually care about this. Continue reading
I was talking with a colleague recently who shared with me how much she hates icebreakers. Confession time: If I’m being honest, I hate being a training participant and having to engage in icebreaking activities, too.
So how do we take the sting out of icebreaking activities for our participants? My guiding principle is pretty simple on this point: Continue reading
Over the weekend I walked to the playground with my children and as they charged toward the play structures, I noticed that they suddenly stopped before they could reach the monkey bars and the slides. As I caught up with them, this is what I saw:
They had both found this board with instructions on how to sign each letter of the alphabet using American Sign Language, and they were trying to spell their names.
They had the entire playground to themselves and they stopped to interact with this board. It made me start to wonder: how can we capture our own learners’ curiosity in order to get them to want to interact with our content even before we begin our presentations?
Here are five ideas: Continue reading
“I’m sorry. Can you say that again? You want to use WHAT when we teach the technical aspect of the content?”
“Play-Doh.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought you said. And you want grown adults, some of them in their 60s and 70s, to do this?”
“Yes.”
Such was the conversation I had with my client when I proposed we swap out a technical, PowerPoint-based presentation with a hands-on activity that called for dozens of canisters of Play-Doh. I admit that, after this conversation, I grew a little more nervous. If the activity flopped, my team stood to lose a lot of credibility with this extremely important client. Continue reading
I’ll start this post by simply saying: Mike Taylor knows how to find things. He’s constantly posting articles and resources on Twitter and LinkedIn that, if curated in one place, would probably serve you better than any masters program in instructional design.
This post borrows heavily from one of his sites on which he’s compiled “a collection of the best free design resources on the web.” If you have some time, I encourage you to check out his site.
Sometimes having too many choices can be overwhelming, so I’ve narrowed his resources down into the following list of 19 resources that may be helpful if you’re specifically looking for new places to find stock photos, fonts or icons. Continue reading
It’s back-to-school season here in Seattle and I found myself in Staples last week walking through the bargain bin aisles. It turns out, back-to-school sales aren’t just for k-12 students!
Here are 12 sale items that caught my eye, things you may want to pick up if you’re a training professional looking to stretch your budget a little further this fall: Continue reading
From time to time, I’m asked to go out for coffee with someone who is new to the corporate training field. The one question that always comes up is: How did you learn how to be a trainer?
Following is my list of 26 things I either did or wished I’d done in order to learn how to be the best trainer I could be Continue reading