Is been a rainy, dreary week here but that isn’t going to stop us from brightening your week with the best things I’ve found this week from the intersection of learning, technology, and social media.
Training Tips Weekly by Chris Mattia
Whether you’re a corporate trainer or a teacher, Chris Mattia can help you make enhancements to your instructional materials, and connect with your learners in a more meaningful way. Each week, Chris offers a new and actionable tip for creating high-quality instructional materials on any budget. He discusses designing effective lessons, creating assets for those lessons, leveraging mobile devices for instructional design, tackling instructional video production, and more. Tune in every Monday for a new tip.
Be sure to check with your local library accessing Lynda.com for free!
https://www.lynda.com/Education-Elearning-tutorials/Training-Tips-Weekly/587664-2.html
Noun Project now for MS Office
The Noun Project now has an add-in for PowerPoint that lets you use their icons on your slides without having to do the download/insert dance. You’ll get a limited set of basic icons for free or for $40/year you’ll get access to over a million. Pair this with the Pexels PowerPoint add-in and there will be no stopping you!
https://thenounproject.com/for-office/
Hack Design lessons
Hack Design is a great example of an alternative delivery method for learning. Sign-up for free to get a design lesson in your inbox each week, hand crafted by a design pro. Learn at your own pace, and apply it to your work – we are all designers!
PowerPoint Presentation Translator
Microsoft now has a PowerPoint add-in that adds real-time captions to a live presentation and automatically translate them to wide variety of languages, using the power of machine learning. As you speak, the Microsoft Translator live feature, displays subtitles directly on your PowerPoint slides in any one of more than 60 supported languages. Up to 500 audience members in the room can follow along with the presentation in their own language, including the speaker’s language, on their phone, tablet or computer. This is also a great option for audiences who are deaf or hard of hearing. You can try it yourself if you’re running PowerPoint 2013 or 2016 on Windows.
https://translator.microsoft.com/help/presentation-translator/
Gamification Research
Donald Clark highlights a key research finding on the effectiveness of gamification (Lumosity) versus other alternatives. Here is the gist of it.
Three groups were tested:
1. Gamified quizzes (Lumosity)
2. Simple computer games
3. Simple practice
All three were found to have the ‘same’ level of improvement in tasks, showing that brain games and gamification had no special effect.
You can find the study “No Effect of Commercial Cognitive Training on Neural Activity During Decision-Making” in the Journal of Neuroscience.
http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/new-evidence-that-gamification-does-not.html
Mike Taylor 