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.
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