So much great stuff this week, it was hard to keep this short. If 2018 continues at this pace it is going to be an amazing year. I think one of the most amazing of all things is the opportunity to meet awesome people like you in person. Fortunately, I’ll be at the ATD TechKnowledge conference the week of January 22 in San Jose. Give me a shout if you’re going to be there and would like to connect in person.
“So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”
-Kurt Vonnegut
#SlideADay Project
Trust me on this one. Anyone who ever builds slides for any reason should definitely not miss this. Julie Terberg (@julieterberg) is doing a slide-a-day project where she is posting one presentation design concept each day. You can learn more about Julie, a Powerpoint MVP, via her website: http://terbergdesign.com/
What do you know about the concept of Working Out Loud? In a nutshell, when you Work Out Loud, you’re more effective because you have access to more people, knowledge, and opportunities that can help you. John Stepper (@johnstepper) has literally written to book on this topic. The best part is how easy and accessible it is to get started. He recently updated his free guide for leading or participating in a Work Out Loud circle which helps you build relationships related to a goal you care about in just an hour a week.
99% of WOL participants surveyed recommend the WOL Method
(and I think the other 1% might’ve been a data entry error)
9 Essential Principles for Modernizing Your Corporate Learning Ecosystem
If you keep up at all with the L&D field you’ve probably heard of JD Dillon (@JD_Dillon). It’s kinda hard to miss him — in a very good way. Take for example his recent e-book “ 9 Essential Principles for Modernizing Your Corporate Learning Ecosystem” which aims to help L&D professionals get started with applying essential modern learning principles TODAY – regardless of organization, resources or circumstances. There’s even an assessment that will help evaluate your organization’s current approach and where it falls on the spectrum between “Stuck in a timewarp” and “Seriously cutting edge”.
My friend Connie Malamed (@elearningcoach) is leading an Elearning Guild webinar on “Crash Course in Information Graphics for Learning” next week. (Wednesday, January 17, 2018 | 10:00 AM Pacific ) Her sessions always have practical, easy to apply insights and since it’s open to everyone so there’s no excuse for you to miss out on this one.
10 Questions To Ask Before Starting Instructional Design
No matter what type of learning project you’re about to embark upon, you’ll want to ask these 10 questions from Marc Rosenberg (@marcjrosenberg) BEFORE you get started. If you like these and are interested in more like them, you can also check out these “21 Questions to ask before Designing Any Training Program”
I looked for a long time and couldn’t find a good, consolidated list of Learning / L&D / Design-related Conferences so I built my own. And because all of us are smarter than any one of us, it is open so anyone can add their favorites that aren’t already included. If you speak at conferences, and you should, it also includes the speaker submission deadlines. (For all the ones I could find.)
As an aside, I’m always curious to learn what is your favorite conference and why? Please drop comment below or tweet me your answer with the hashtag #FavCon — I’m @tmiket on Twitter.
Welcome to the first Friday Finds of 2018. No matter where you are or what holidays you did (or didn’t) celebrate, I hope your new year is off to a fantastic start!! I also hope you’re not doing any first hand learning about what ‘bombogenesis’ is.
Want to Grow Your Network? Stay Home and Write
Andrew Chen (@andrewchen) reflects on his 10+ years of blogging and shares what the lessons he’s learned. This is something that really resonates with me and is well worth a read. You’ll get valuable insights on building your ‘personal bat signal’ and other great stuff. If you like what he has to say, you can subscribe to his newsletter.
Publishing ideas, learnings, opinions, for years & years is a great way to give. And you’ll figure out how to capture value later
Jane Hart has just released a free ebook – “Introduction to Modern Workplace Learning in 2018” This is the first in a 3 e-book series that includes some (updated) content from Jane Hart’s including her popular Top Learning Tools and Modern Workplace Learning Toolkit.
Note: Part 1 is FREE, Parts 2 and 3 can be purchased separately.
3 Scientific Reasons Great Design Makes People Want to Read Your Reports
Visual communication is becoming more and more ubiquitous and for good reason. You may have heard me say that everyone is a designer and this is more evidence of that. The way you design everything from emails and documents to slides and multimedia impact the ability of your audience to “synthesize information quickly and, more importantly, extract meaning and insights that influence their decision-making.” Good design helps you do that. Dive into Katy French’s (@katyifrench) post on the Column Five Media blog for the details.
How to Covert your Google Slides Presentation into an Animated GIF
This post from Amit Agarwal (@labnol) of Digital Inspiration introduces the Tall Tweets app for Google Slides, which helps you convert your presentations into high-quality animated GIFs that you can send via, embed online or share via Twitter and other social platforms.
Here’s an example from an old deck of mine that I shared on Twitter:
Example of converting your slides to an animated GIF. Great if you want an easily sharable version for trailers, social media, etc. Learn how you can make your own at https://t.co/0pSO0cstgUpic.twitter.com/ZvoGB6M6Hi
I read a lot of books and over the years everytime I’ve tried to navigate the process of borrowing digital e-books I’ve always hit hurdles like awful user interfaces, painful search options, etc. I’m hoping those are a thing of the past now that I’ve found Libby. I’m just getting started, but so far this looks like a big improvement. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for this one!
If you’re a trainer, presenter or do any type of public speaking you know there’s a lot more that goes into it than just what people see. Beyond the obvious prep work leading up to an event, there is also a fair amount of work afterward to collect feedback, distribute the supporting resources or handouts (you are creating a separate takeaway document, right?!) and sharing your contact information. Find out how Talkbook can save you time and greatly improve that process.
If you’re a trainer, presenter or do any type of public speaking you know there’s a lot more that goes into it than just what people see. Beyond the obvious prep work leading up to an event, there is also a fair amount of work afterward to collect feedback, distribute the supporting resources or handouts (you are creating a separate takeaway document, right?!) and sharing your contact information.
Fortunately, there’s a simple solution to handle those important post-event tasks with ease while saving you a lot of time in the process. Talkbook is a website that will collect ratings and feedback from your audience and also automate the distribution of any follow-up information and supporting materials you want to provide.
I’ve been using Talkbook for a while now and I’ll never do another event without it. (At least if I can help it.)
So how does it work? That’s the best part. It is quick and easy to get started.
After creating a free account, you’re ready to create your first talk page, which is basically just adding the details about your talk into the forms on the talk page which consist of things like:
Title
A unique keyword that becomes part of the URL you share with your audience
The email incentive — what you’ll be giving to your audience
Handouts: The links, documents, information etc you want to share
Beyond these basics, you can also turn on/off these advanced options :
Collect their first name. (You’ll get email addresses automatically.)
Collect a 1-10 rating.
Collect feedback. (This enables open-ended comments and questions.)
Customize the main text, which shows up in the subject line of the email your audience receives.
Customize the contact info text.
With your talk page in place, you’ll get a unique URL to share with your audience that will make all the magic happen. You can even download a PowerPoint slide to add to your presentation deck if you don’t want to create your own.
That’s it! You’re all set and all you need to do is add the instruction slide at the end of your slide deck to tell your audience what to do and why they should do it. Everything is easy to do right then and there via the mobile devices they’ve got in their pockets. I like to make my own custom slide which looks like this.
When people visit your talk page URL they’ll get a nice easy to use, mobile-friendly form like this:
Ratings & Comments
If you choose to enable it, you can collect ratings and/or comments about your session.
Delivering Handouts & Contact Information
I love the feedback but my favorite feature of Talkbook is the way it distributes all the extra information and supporting materials related to you and your talk.
Instead of collecting business cards, then spending hours entering them as contacts (If you haven’t lost them before you get home!) and manually emailing your handouts, Talkbook automates this process so you’re audience gets everything you want them to have immediately after you wrap-up.
This is what the email that people will receive looks like:
And finally you don’t want to miss this part…the dashboard gives you a nice overview of everything you’ve collected.
Nice huh? So is the information you’ll get about the people from your audience. If they’ve used the same email to get your handouts as they use for their social media accounts Talkbook will connect you to them on LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.
And as if you needed any more reasons to give it a try, you can also export the emails to a .csv file or connect them directly with your MailChimp account.
What do you think? Useful? Worth trying? I’d love to hear your thoughts and how you handle gathering feedback and managing handouts for your events. Leave a comment below.
Next up in this series of recaps from my weekly curated articles, posts, and resources is this collection for designing slides, PowerPoint and presenting.
The most common pitfall when designing presentations is putting too much text on the slides. If you ever have to “fix” slides like this you should know how to convert them into nice visual slides in
If you ever need some design help for applying those presentation tips, one place that could be helpful is Pslides. Pslides is a newish site for sourcing slide designs including a few good free ones.
In a recent update, Microsoft disabled PowerPoint’s ability to edit EPS files due to a security risk. If you create your own EPS files or trust the sources you get them from you can grab this free PowerPoint add-in that will let you continue editing EPS files as you did before.
Microsoft now has a PowerPoint add-in that adds real-time captions to a live presentation and automatically translates them to a 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.
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!
This post by Alexander Salas tells us that if you know PowerPoint, you can quickly learn how to make explainer videos. He also tells you why you should be using these tools and shares a list of options for getting started.
Not Just for Slides: Using PowerPoint for Graphics Design
PowerPoint can handle a lot more than just slides. This year I used PowerPoint to design everything from workbooks and job aids to door hangers and even t-shirts.
Sometimes Lorem Ipsum just doesn’t cut it. There are times when you’re designing before you have the actual content that you need for the final version. If that involves any kind of data, you’ll love this site that generates “real” data for you to work with. Whatever you need from names and addresses to ID numbers and much, much more you’ll find it here.
A couple of other similar options worth checking out include:
Mockaroo: This one lets you generate up to 1000 rows of realistic data. Just choose the type of data you want and download your data.
Generate Data: Similar to Mockaroo, this one lets you pick the type of data and how many records you want to download.
Quick & Easy Software Demos
If you ever need to do any “how-to” training involving software, you’ll definitely want to know this trick for creating quick and easy software demonstrations. All it takes is a couple of standard screenshots, a mouse cursor and some creative animation.
Advanced Eyedropper Tip + 29 More Expert PowerPoint Hacks
Bryan Jones pulled together tips from 29 expert PowerPoint pros and I added one more to make it a nice round number. Check out these 30 tips to level up your slide building game. Watch the video and don’t forget to grab the ebook too!
Access 40 million Free Images Via the New Haiku Deck #Powerpoint Addin
Who doesn’t like free images? This new add-in from Haiku Deck can save you a lot of time when you need great looking images for your projects. Now you can search 40 million images without ever leaving your workflow in PowerPoint. They even give you all the text you need to make the photo credit easy.
If you like this idea of accessing free photos from directly inside PowerPoint, you might also want to check out these other ones too (Pexels, PickIt, & Shutterstock).
If you ever want to pull an Apple Keynote presentation over into PowerPoint you might be surprised just how easy it is. See one quick and easy way to convert Keynote to PowerPoint.
While we’re talking surveys, Dave Paradi just published his results about the most annoying things people do with PowerPoint. Not surprisingly, the top offenders are too much text and information overload.
Nobody wants to be the one creating bad slides that annoy everyone right? After all, PowerPoint isn’t the problem, it’s the people creating these monstrosities who are at fault. Fortunately, these are super easy fixes and here are a few tips that will help you stay off the annoying presenters list:
And if you still have any aversion towards PowerPoint here are two alternatives that are worth checking out.
Slide Magic
Jan Schultink (@janschultink) has created an online presentation app that includes a library of his favorite slide templates that makes it almost impossible to create annoying slides. Check out a non-annoying example here.
Beautiful.ai is a new online tool helps you with the rules of great design so you can build visually appealing slides quickly. Take a peek at this beautiful example.
What do you do when you’ve got a big pile of data and need a way to display it? If you didn’t have an immediate response to that question, you’ll be glad to know about the Data Viz Project. The Data Viz project is a collection of over 150 data visualizations to help you find the right format for displaying your data and give a little inspiration along the way.
Think of it as a “Wikipedia For Data Visualizations”
Virtually everyone needs to build slides at some point. If you want to make the ones you build better, you should definitely tap into this big curated collection that I’ve assembled over on Zeef. From learning resources and tutorials to slide templates and graphic design resources you’ll find anything you need. The best part is you can follow the page and get notified when new items are added or even suggest your own things you think should be part of the collection.
TalkTime: A Free Presentation Time Management Add-in for PowerPoint
If you are someone who speaks or facilitates training of any kind, you’ll want to check out this nifty time management enhancement for PowerPoint. TalkTime is a free and simple add-in from Nolan Haims (@NolanHaims) and Jamie Garroch (@YOUpresentUK ) that adds a small set of tools to the transitions tab. TalkTime helps you keep track of how much time each slide and/or section takes to deliver and my favorite feature is that it enables me to print slides by section without needing to manually select them all. Check it out!
Whenever I speak or facilitate workshops, etc I’m a big proponent of involving the audience as much as possible. Currently, I’m using a combination of PollEverywhere for audience interaction and TalkBook for delivering handouts, contact information and other relevant information. But I’m always on the lookout for new ways of doing that and I recently discovered Hypersay, a new option that takes an interesting approach.
Here’s how it works:
Upload your slides to your free Hypersay account.
Add interactive elements (they call them ‘atoms’) to any or all of your slides. ( Quizzes, Questions, Text (supports links and markdown), YouTube or Vimeo Video)
Connect your audience via a link or access code.
During your session, participants can ask questions and take private notes.
When you’re done participants get a feedback form and you’ll get a session report that includes things like the number of participants and the number of interactions with answers submitted, etc.
Check it out at http://hypersay.com and if you try it, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Presentation & E-learning Starter Kit
As I recently told someone, I may not know much, but I know enough to borrow from the best. That’s exactly what I did to assemble this Starter Kit. If you do any speaking, presenting or slide-based course building these resources will go a long way towards helping you create a killer project.
This starter kit is a collection of my favorite tools and resouces that help with audience analysis, organizing your message, finding the right visual voice and the design assets you need for building it.
In the latest edition of the Mindset Digital (@mindsetdigital) podcast, Pete Brown (@petebrownsays) asked for my top 3 finds of 2017. Of course, I couldn’t limit it to just 3 – nor to just 2017. We touched on TalkBook.co, HyperSay, Canva, TalkTime, Ribbet, Zeef, and Descript
Even with some time out for riding the Hogwarts Express this week, I’ve managed to conjure up some great stuff from the learning, technology, and social media world. No matter where you are or what you’re celebrating, I hope you get some time to enjoy the things most important to you.
Thomas Gilbert’s Behavior Engineering Model on the Learning Innovations Podcast
If you are in a role even remotely related to training and you should know about Thomas Gilbert’s Behavioral Engineering Model. In the latest episode of the Learning Innovations podcast. Doug Bushée (@Doug_Bushee) and Mike Lenz (@MLenzVoice ) talk about Gilbert’s model from his book “Human Competence”
Thomas Gilbert’s Behavior Engineering Model is one that everyone who works in learning and development should know and apply to their work. If that’s not immediately ringing a bell for you, stop what you’re doing and go check it out. Gilbert’s model is a foundational principle for this talk “Getting BETTER Results by Doing LESS Training” that I originally did with Patti Shank ( @pattishank ) at the Elearning Guild’s Learning Solutions Conference.
This article by Chris Messina (@chrismessina) looks at how the conventional seams between disciplines are fraying, and the set of skills necessary to succeed are broader and more nebulous than ever before. He makes the point that to stand out you’ve got to be a “real polymath” or what he calls a full-stack employee.
If you ever need to do any design on your own and aren’t a Photoshop pro, you should know about Easil. (If you know Canva you’ll find it very similar) Donna Moritz (@sociallysorted) has got all the scoop on how you can design like a pro using Easil.
Everyone is a designer, whether they know it or not.
You are a designer! Yes, you. How do I know? Because we all make design decisions every day. From design jobs like multimedia projects all the way down to the common task of sending email, people are interacting with things you design.
Granted you may not be designing them consciously but you are still designing them none the less. Maybe it is time to put some thought into how you craft your emails?
If you’re designing intentionally, you’ll need some things to help you design: photos, fonts, icons, etc. When searching for design assets, it is easy to find plenty of options. The challenge is finding the best ones, without spending all day dealing with frustrating dead ends, broken links, and other hurdles.
To save you time, money, and a bit of your sanity, I’ve collected my favorites into this e-book:
During a recent trail run, it dawned on me that this weekly roundup could be even better if the people reading it could contribute. So if you uncover something you think is worth sharing, send it my way. I’ve added a submission form at the bottom of this post.
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Science of Learning 101: When to Build Performance Support
Which is better? Training or performance support. Patti Shank (@pattishank)shares what the research says about the factors to consider when making your decision. Jump over to her post on the new ATD website and join the discussion of when and why performance support is needed and how performance support and training target different aspects of performance. And this is just part 1 – there’s more great stuff from Patti on the horizon! (as always)
How Lifelong Learning and a Growth Mindset Can Propel Your Career
Since you’re here reading this, you probably aren’t someone who believes that your learning days ended when you got your degree or even if you’re already in your dream job. Especially these days as technologies and business models are changing so fast.
“The pace of change is accelerating, and to succeed in any industry, and to be ready to participate in the next evolution of it, professionals must adopt habits and practices that empower lifelong learning.”
How to not suck at design, a 5-minute guide for the non-designer.
In this post, Mark Hemeon (@hemeon) shares some key design principles that anyone can learn and apply to their work. (Everyone is a designer. Most people just don’t realize it.) Definitely worth a few minutes for a basic knowledge of practical design tips you can start using today (and impress your design friends).
If those 5 minutes of design tips above left you wanting more, dive into these typography tips from Nick Babich (@101babich ) over on the Marvel App blog. If you write emails, you are designing with text and these tips can help you.
Properly using white space between paragraphs has been proven to increase comprehension up to 20%
Whenever I speak or facilitate workshops, etc I’m a big proponent of involving the audience as much as possible. Currently, I’m using a combination of PollEverywhere for audience interaction and TalkBook for delivering handouts, contact information and other relevant information. But I’m always on the lookout for new ways of doing that and I recently discovered Hypersay, a new option that takes an interesting approach.
Here’s how it works:
Upload your slides to your free Hypersay account.
Add interactive elements (they call them ‘atoms’) to any or all of your slides.
Quizzes
Questions
Text (supports links and markdown)
YouTube or Vimeo Video
Connect your audience via a link or access code.
During your session, participants can ask questions and take private notes.
When you’re done participants get a feedback form and you’ll get a session report that includes things like the number of participants and the number of interactions with answers submitted, etc.
Check it out at http://hypersay.com and if you try it, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Presentation & E-learning Starter Kit
As I recently told someone, I may not know much, but I know enough to borrow from the best. That’s exactly what I did to assemble this Starter Kit. If you do any speaking, presenting or slide-based course building these resources will go a long way towards helping you create a killer project.
This starter kit is a collection of my favorite tools and resouces that help with audience analysis, organizing your message, finding the right visual voice and the design assets you need for building it.
Peek in on the happenings of Computer Science Education Week (CSEdWeek) which is an annual program dedicated to inspiring K-12 students to take interest in computer science. Even the Google Doodle can teach us how to code.
If you’re a believer of John Stepper (@johnstepper) and the concept of Working Out Loud, you might like tuning in to the back channel from this week’s #WOLCON
A recent discussion prompted a thought that it might be helpful to assemble a ‘starter kit’ of resources for anyone involved with these types of projects. Here are a few of the things that have helped me over the years and which will give anyone doing these types of projects a good head start.
Getting to know your audience significantly increases the odds you’re work will have a meaningful impact. This important step can help you glean the insights and context required to truly connect with your audience.
“Designing a presentation without an audience in mind is like writing a love letter and addressing it: To Whom It May Concern.”
– Ken Haemer, former Presentation Research Manager, AT&T
Overloading your audience with too much information leads to LESS understanding – not more! Nobody enjoys the dreaded data dump and telling them everything means they won’t remember anything.
As you consider what to include, be sure to do it in a way that gives you the confidence your audience will easily be able to answer these two questions:
What three points do you want them to remember?
What do you want them to do?
One of my favorite ways wrangle the messy pile of random thoughts into a cohesive structure built around this context is the Beyond Bullet Points story template. Unlike native PowerPoint templates, Cliff Atkinson’s (@cliffatkinson) super helpful approach isbased on brain science to help get your message through and move your audience to action.
Looks really DO matter!
First impressions are critical for capturing attention and establishing credibility. While we might not always admit it, we do judge things based on what they look like. Our lizard brains can make snap judgments in as little as 17 milliseconds. Literally faster than the blink of an eye! (Your eye is a relative slowpoke taking 300-400 milliseconds to blink.) In some studies, as much as 94% of the factors involved in judging credibility were design-related.
People regularly make credibility judgments “based on the content presentation rather then by evaluating the content’s or creator’s authority, trustworthiness, reputation, or expertise.” source
For many, finding the right look and feel for their content can a challenge. Wisely selecting from a seemingly endless set of possibilities for fonts, colors, icons, and images is not easy.
Fortunately, David Anderson (@elearning) has got you covered with a visual analysis process that makes it easy for anyone to quickly identify the right visual elements that make up the “visual voice” of your project.
Once you’re armed with a relevant, focused message tailored to your audience and a vision for the appropriate look and feel, you’re ready to start building. That means you’re going to need design assets like photos, fonts, icons, etc.
The majority of us working on these types of projects are faced with the additional constraint of having a limited budget….or often no budget at all. To help you over that hurdle, I’ve collected my favorites into this free e-book.
If you’re not the type of person who likes to wade through that many options, here are three of my favorites to get you started. (But bookmark those resources anyway in case you ever anything else in the future.)
Photos: Everypixel
Save time and money by simultaneously searching multiple free and paid sites for stock photos, vectors and graphics.
Our march towards the holiday season has begun. Leading the way is a gift that keeps on giving — smart insights from smart people. Intentionally building your own personal network will net you a lifetime of amazing gifts, like the ones I’ve rounded up for you here.
““If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.” ― J.K. Rowling
Perspectives on new work
Coming in at over 100 pages, this one is definitely one for a lazy weekend or some other bigger window when you’ve got some time to take it in. The essence of what appeals to me in this piece edited by Esko Kilpi ( @EskoKilpi ) is captured in by this line:
Smarter and smarter tools surround us, but if we don’t want to learn the new practices and take up the new roles that the new technologies make possible, they might as well not be there.
This course from HT2Labs ( @HT2Labs ) focuses on the technical side of xAPI: getting up-and-running with a Learning Record Store. You won’t need to be a programmer to take part, but you will need some experience of implementing servers, software and systems administration in general.
You’ll also need access to a server (either on cloud, like AWS, or on your own devices) and administration rights to install new software. (For the server bit, you can use Google Cloud Platform)
Laptops Are Great. But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting.
This NY Times article by Susan Dynarski ( @dynarski ) takes a look at the growing body of evidence showing that overall, students learn less when they use computers or tablets during lectures.
Whether you’re learning a new software application at work or getting up to speed with the latest technology at home, odds are that Lynda.com has something for you. The secret to getting free access is your local library.
Lea Pica (@LeaPica) is on a mission to help “present information in a way that gets remembered and inspires action.” You should pop over to Lea’s blog and subscribe. Her recent podcast with Dustin Mathews ( @dustinmathews ), is just one of many reasons. Among the gems I took away from this episode are:
Why assigning an advocate to introduce you as presenter is mission critical
How to elicit engagement from your audience without putting them on the spot
Supercritical steps to take to maximize the effectiveness of product webinars
Neat tricks to stand out to your stakeholders such as video presentation teasers
Around here the temperatures are dropping, but things are still hot in the world of learning, technology, and social media. In addition to our regularly scheduled articles and insights, there were several great conferences and events this week. So be sure to carve out a few minutes to take a spin through the backchannels. (This is just one way you can benefit from Twitter and you don’t even have to tweet about what you ate for breakfast!)
TalkTime: A Free Presentation Time Management Add-in for PowerPoint
If you are someone who speaks or facilitates training of any kind, you’ll want to check out this nifty time management enhancement for PowerPoint. TalkTime is a free and simple add-in from Nolan Haims (@NolanHaims) and Jamie Garroch (@YOUpresentUK ) that adds a small set of tools to the transitions tab. TalkTime helps you keep track of how much time each slide and/or section takes to deliver and my favorite feature is that it enables me to print slides by section without needing to manually select them all. Check it out!
The empty brain: Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories.
In short: your brain is not a computer
For a long time now, people have been asserting that the human brain works like a computer. That is not true and this is a great article by Dr. Robert Epstein (@DrREpstein) that will set you on the correct path for thinking about how the brain does and doesn’t’ work.
We don’t store words or the rules that tell us how to manipulate them. We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not.
I was quite happy to stumble upon this site in my adventures this week. Whether you plug-in via email, Twitter or feed reader, this will be something you’ll always look forward to seeing the latest from Virpi Oinonen (@voinonen).
Now it’s time for a dip in the backchannel pools of these recent events. Come on in. The water is warm!
DEVLEARN #DevLearn
Lots of learning pros made the trek to Las Vegas this week for the Elearning Guild’s Devlearn Conference. It is big, bad and full of great opportunities to learn about the latest and from the greatest — even if you can’t be there in person. Personally, I’m bummed to have missed Levar Burton and Glen Keane.
Our rich pool of backchannels even span across the world to other continents like the one for the World of Learning event that took place over in the UK.
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