As a trainer you can show your effectiveness by measuring the skill level before and after the training. But how do you make sure that the skills acquired in a training are actually applied in the workplace? This is also known as the issue of transfer of training. Follow-up training addresses this issue. Every organization that provides training for employees does so because it recognizes the need to improve employees’ results. Trainers are therefore tasked to improve the workforce’s skills, knowledge and, ultimately, behavior. However, humans are creatures of habit. To change behavior, a single training does not cut it. Instead, a training should be followed up by various reinforcement strategies. In addition to the traditional follow-up training, to which we will return shortly, we can now apply technology to reinforce the trained skills and knowledge: Mini interventions: summarizing emails and pop quizzes suitable for mobile learning. Peer-to-peer discussions through internet forum, stimulated by the trainer and workplace mentors. Online training serving as a refresher - learning management systems are suitable for this purpose. But clearly, increased follow-up training would be best. So, how do you signal the need for follow-up training to the organization? Conduct formal tests at regular (e.g. yearly) intervals Hand out certificates Utilize competency management   Conduct Formal Tests Photo Credit: Thomas Hawk via: imager.io, cc To decide whether an individual employee needs follow-up training at all, you may decide to conduct a formal test, e.g. once a year. If trainees "tests out", fine, they don’t have to do the refresher. In most learning management systems (lms for short), this is facilitated in some way. In lms Moodle, for instance, you can can enroll trainees into an online training session (called a ‘course’ in Moodle) which simply contains the test. If they pass the test, then another course, which contains the meat and potatoes of the actual training, is considered complete. Otherwise, they have to complete the actual training once more. The use of regular formal testing saves the company on unnecessary retraining. It establishes trust in the trainers involved and thus increases the chance that trainers are hired for other training sessions. In a roundabout way, as a trainer you get to deliver more follow-up training (for those other training sessions). If there is currently no follow-up training at all, then introducing formal testing is an excellent way to ensure reinforcement of training. Hand Out Certificates Certificates are best used when you already know that follow-up training is absolutely required. This may the be case to meet regulatory requirements (‘compliance training’). Hand out certificates with an explicit expiry date. Alert all personnel involved when the expiry date approaches. How do you create certificates? In the same way as a mail merge: put the data (trainee’s name, name of the training, expiration date) in a database (e.g. MS Access) or spreadsheet and link up your Word Processor to either one of those. Then perform a mail merge with an appropriately formatted template. An alternative is to use the certification options in an lms. In lms Moodle, for instance, there is a certificate module available which allows users to download their own certificate (as a pdf document) once they have completed the training session. Certificates implicitly carry the assumption that an employees skills and knowledge may get obsolete over time. For example, whenever the content of the training changes to mirror ever evolving best practices on the work floor, a certificate is an instrument to ensure that everybody receives retraining before their skills and knowledge are completely outdated. However, in situations where the nothing much changes, it may be more practical to just perform the formal tests as mentioned above and only retrain if employees are found lacking in relevant areas. Utilize Competency Management Competency management maps the organization’s goals to the skills required in the workforce. For example, if a company addresses a new market, they may need to hire new personnel, or retraining existing employees. If done properly, competency management also identifies the organization’s training requirements, even if only indirectly. Therefore, trainers should demand access to competency management software (if used at all) in the organization. At the very least they should talk regularly (i.e. once a year at minimum) with management about the direction the organization is heading for. The outcome of these talks should be a list of new training sessions. But it should also be clear where follow-up training is needed. For example, if a company decides to pay more attention to customer service, then a follow-up training in that field may be rescheduled to take place earlier.   The post 3 Tips For Increased Follow-up Training appeared first on TrainerTops Blog.

A few months ago Educational Technology and Mobile Learning posted a detailed guide on how Teachers can Use Blogging in Education. We are glad this post has received a wide interaction from… Source: www.educatorstechnology.com See on Scoop.it - InformationCommunication (ICT)

Picture by the_tahoe_guy, published under cc Compliance training can be a real drag for employees. They’re expected to show up and sit through a course about stuff they already know. Or, if done online, it’s  a click fest of  hitting the "next" button. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Here are a few to tips to nail compliance training in a way that is satisfactory for all parties involved: your trainees, the organization and the trainer. What’s In It For Me? First of all, answer the question "What’s in it for me?" for trainees. Show how the compliance training is relevant. Prepare by sending out news items, a few weeks in advance of the training session, about the topic of the training. For instance, if the training is about compliance with food and health safety regulations, send out a news item where things went spectacularly wrong because regulations were ignored. Wrong as in, the whole place was puking. Sorry for being graphic, but this illustrates the power of examples. This particular example shows the relevancy of compliance with the food and health safety regulations. To the employee, it signals "your actions have consequences". Please note that the company ordering the compliance training has a responsibility too, here. If management does not enforce compliance or condones lax behavior, no amount of compliance training is going to change the work force’s behavior. Ultimately, management should make it clear that job security is at stake for any employee who doesn’t take compliance training seriously. Test First Picture by Carl Milner published under CC Give your trainees the option to ‘test out’: if they pass the test, they don’t have to take the training. As a trainer, this strategy may seem to reduce the work you get from a specific organization. But your reputation as a money saver will get you hired more frequently and the word will spread to other organizations as well. If you’re an in-organization trainer (e.g. you’re employed there), you’ll be a hero, because you’ve saved the company a lot of money. As an example, a large company makes employees take a whole training course before they get to the compliance testing part. So, even if they already know their stuff, they still have to take the entire course. Needless to say, this is not only demotivating, but it also means wasted hours. If every lost hour is calculated at a cost of $50, and 20,000 employees have to take the training needlessly, this represents a loss of $1,000,000! Deliver It Piecemeal Picture by Jo Naylor published under CC If you’re in an industry where regulations change frequently, why wait a year before training and certifying everybody according to the law? Whenever a new regulation passes, create an online mini training around it. Present a number of cases and scenarios, deliver the theory and have all employees take a test at the end of the mini training. Then, at the end of the year (or whenever their current certification ends), give everybody the option to "test out" of the entire compliance training, which now encompasses every piece of new regulation as well as the unchanged content. This approach has two benefits: Your trainees don’t have to swallow everything at once. If you deliver it piecemeal, retention will be higher. For extra retention, follow up with email or texting reminders, pop quizzes, and news items. If you act as soon as the new regulation is passed, your trainees are immediately up-to-date which might give your organization a competitive advantage, especially if customers are affected by the regulation as well and start asking questions about it which your trainees are expected to answer.   The post How to Nail Compliance Training appeared first on TrainerTops Blog.

Among educational buzzwords this is for sure the one with the highest pitches nowadays. The flooding of classrooms with new technologies has led to new approaches to classic lectures and traditional educational strategies, and Flipped Classes can be a good one if applied with common sense.The elements involved have to be well-known to better appreciate the scope of this emerging philosophy:Actors: teachers, students and parents. Each one of them will see things differently, and knowing how to make them buy your new proposition will be the key to your success.Processes: lesson preparation, outside of classroom time, inside of classroom time, evaluation.WHATIt’s an alternative to the traditional teacher/lecture centered approach. In a flipped strategy classroom contents are multimedia based and are accessed through some LMS outside of school. Classroom time is used to deepen that home-acquired knowledge using other strategies, as project based learning, collaborative tasks, etc.For teachers it is a great way to improve lessons’ structure. Resources can be mapped from the syllabus and new activities can be implemented for classroom time. For students it can be challenging, after all you are taking them out of their classical school environment. But they are also given the opportunity to be in charge of their own education, and they can even set their own pace in the process. For parents it’s an excellent opportunity to take part and track their children’s education. WHYOur world is changing. New technologies are gaining power, societies are readapting their habits and schools should improve in the same manner. Our students, who are used to manipulate complex devices like mobile phones, are getting more and more bored in front of paper books and crave for multimedia based, dynamic, colourful, and interactive contents.A teacher can find a great ally in flipping to engage his students, apply new techniques and create a personal reusable repository of well-selected contents. But not only teachers, students can also take advantage of being empowered and trusted. For them it could be seen like being abandoned in the middle of the dessert, but let’s not forget that constructivism also deals with uncertainty, and that’s a relevant factor for learning reinforcement. WHENThere are two whens. The first one is related to preparation. The more quality contents you want, the more time you will have to expend curating them. Anyway it’s important not to be over exigent about them and check their effectiveness (some polls can be done to know the opinion of your students). Your repository should be something flexible and dynamic. If it’s not, then it mightn't work.The second when is about the time students invest at home, i.e, when should students work after school? That's a tricky question as you lose control of them after they have got out of school. Each student will have a different agenda: sports, music, etc. Then this factor shouldn't preoccupy us excessively, but keeping a record of your students’ complains about not having enough time could be of help for strategy improvement. If out of school time is scarce, flipping could be approached differently.WHEREFor teachers, where can quality materials be found? My own strategy was to curate a good PLE with plenty of resources classified in: presentations, social networking, documentaries and videos, research, production, publication, citation, collaboration, storage, project management, coding, and augmented reality and virtual worlds. Have a look at one of my boards at Symbaloo which I use in my lessons to teach PLEs to my 13 year-old pupils. What you shouldn't do is just scan your notes, save to a PDF and publish it. There wouldn't be any engagement. For students the where refers to what place to check lesson’s contents. Forget computers and focus on mobile devices. In fact those are the ones accompanying teenagers everywhere. It's more likely to find a student laying on the sofa, sitting on a bench in the park, or waiting in a mall's entrance for his friends with a mobile on his palm than seeing him sitting down in front of a computer at home. Make it flexible and affordable for them.HOWAnd finally the how-to’s. For teachers it is about how to set up an effective LMS, look for engaging resources, do engage students, and make the rest of the parts involved participate constructively.LMSs include Moodle (my favourite one and free of charge), Google Apps for Education, TalentLMS or Edmodo among many others. You can bet for one option or weave a combination of them, being the second option more preferable. Moodle is great to track your students' activity, workshops (students grading other students), do exams and to gamify your lessons, while Google rules with documents and real-time collaboration.Keep in mind your students remain the same (so what you take in count for common classes should be considered likewise for your LMS), they need to communicate, tell things, show off, wear mobile devices, only fix their attention for a short time, want recognition, socialise, want practical, close to their lives exercises and ask for colourful and interactive means. Even more, they should be given the opportunity to reflect what they have inside their minds to better settle it down. Thus, take advantage of such profile. Flipping is just a framework where to apply many other strategies (gamification, project based learning, multiple intelligences, role playing, etc), but the participants are still the same.Let me shed some light and make things practical through the following example:A lesson about Natural Sciences: mass, volume, density, pressure and temperature are the concepts to work with. I want my students to read the definitions, see a couple of videos, manipulate a simulation and write the conclusions in teams. Maximum estimated time outside school: 30 mins. I set up two/three conditional activities in Moodle so they will be hiding and will appear consecutively. Videos are selected from YouTube and some simulations from PHET. Students will accomplish these tasks on their own or in teams. Final conclusions will be written in a shared Google doc in teams. Each student will make a quick test exam in Moodle. Having completed everything the team will be granted a badge and be put in a leaderboard (gamification’s PBL model).Next day in the classroom we'll discuss about the concepts, experiments, conclusions and corrections. Each team will publish its own work in a blog or site and will score other teams' work in a Moodle workshop. That will be used as a final grade percentage, only earned if a minimum amount of badges have been collected during the term. As new lessons are analysed students will go on curating their own PLE. That will also be scored. THE CONSIt’d be impossible not to find detractors and complains. Don’t avoid problems or give up. Improvise! Rearrange! Reschedule! Hybridize!TeachersIt’s more work: yes, indeed... in the beginning, but once it's done you can reuse it over and over. Work in teams or involve the whole department to better distribute the workload. Look up other teachers’ works in the Internet. Plan smartly and make your work be accessible and easily reviewable.I need to know about new technologies: go step-by-step adding new elements to your flipped classes, don’t try to be a sage too prematurely.It’s a change in my working routine: start with a hybrid approach (and don't forget the fun). More time and effort is needed, but after everything is done you’ll have much more free time periods to be invested in other tasks.It’s difficult to find resources: start simple with some Youtube videos and look for interesting PLEs in websites like Symbaloo or Delicious.I can’t track my students: Moodle does it for you. Don’t forget to devise a contingency plan for lazy students.It’s not flexible: it is! You have total control over your resources and strategy.I don't trust third party systems: install your own LMS. For about 40€ a year you can have a domain and a Linux based space in a server. Moodle installation is way easy to do. For sure there’s a Computer Scientist in your school to help the team.StudentsI need to spend extra time: it’s true, that’s why you teacher should be careful about it. Micro lessons and hybrid approaches can be a good starting point.I feel helpless: give quality materials, make students help each other, provide with forums, chats and the like, value the effort they’ve made, not only the results.I don't have any laptop or PC: open up the computer room in your school.I get distracted (as it happens inside the classroom): make your lessons very social so the students will have to be communicating all the time. That’ll give them a chance to stay more focused as social collaboration is very natural.ParentsI don’t want to get involved: it’s comprehensible. Don’t force it and let them know it’s something optional and that their children are perfectly assisted.I pay for the education of my children: wrap your flipped lessons as homework. Some parents could think you’re not doing your work as you should.I can’t help my children: many parents haven’t attended school or University, or they’ve just forgotten everything. Just let them know their participation is optional and that their children can go ahead on their own. CONCLUSIONSFlipped classes is a good framework to deliver your lessons, as long as its use is flexible and realistic. For the worst case scenarios hybrid approaches can do the trick. In any case it’s very important for your students and parents to be convinced that flipping is a good idea, otherwise voices contrary to it could ruin your plans. And don’t forget about polling and measuring to better know how things are developing. Good luck!

Activity 1: Explaining digital citizenship Watch this clip, Edtalks: 2010 Ten trends: Cyber citizenship with Derek Wenmoth, Director of CORE Education, discussing digital citizenship. He explains that responsible digital citizens need to be respectful and act appropriately with information in an online world. He suggests it is necessary for teachers to have direct experience of the online environment to teach students effectively about responsible cyber behaviour. Activity 2: Defining digital citizenship Compare NetSafe’s definition of a digital citizen with the Nine Elements of Digital Citizenship outlined by Gerald Bailey and Mike Ribble in their book Digital Citizenship in Schools.  1. NetSafe’s definition of a New Zealand digital citizen A digital citizen: "A digital citizen accepts and understands the rights and responsibilities of inhabiting ‘cyberspace’, including online safety." is a confident and capable user of information and communication technology (ICT) uses ICTs to participate in educational, cultural, and economic activities uses and develops critical thinking skills in cyberspace is literate in the language, symbols, and texts of ICTs is aware of ICT challenges and can manage them effectively uses ICT to relate to others in positive, meaningful ways demonstrates honesty and integrity and ethical behaviour in their use of ICTs respects the concepts of privacy and freedom of speech in a digital world contributes and actively promotes the values of digital citizenship. 2. Nine elements of digital citizenship Digital access: full electronic participation in society Digital literacy: the process of teaching and learning about ICTs and the use of ICTs Digital communication: electronic exchange of information School environment and student behaviour Digital security (self protection): electronic precautions to guarantee safety Digital etiquette: electronic standards of conduct or procedure Digital rights and responsibilities: those freedoms extended to everyone in a digital world Student life outside the school environment Digital commerce: electronic buying and selling of goods Digital heath and wellness: physical and psychological wellbeing in a digital technology world Digital law: rights and restrictions Activity 3: Implications for you and your school Blog Reflections questions (Post on YOUR blog only). Reflections must a minimum of 10-12 sentences for each question. Please post by Friday, January 20, 2015 @5pm. What does digital citizenship mean to you in your personal life, professional life? What implications does this have for our young people now and in the future? While most of today’s students are comfortable with using technology: Are they using it appropriately? Do they understand their roles and responsibilities in digital society? How can teachers help students become responsible digital citizens? What are the norms of appropriate, responsible, ethical behaviour with regards to technology use?

Trainers are on the road a lot. To travel lightly, consider replacing your notebook / laptop with a tablet. A tablet is lighter, smaller and the battery lasts longer. It also allows you to use a projector, beamer or big screen monitor without being glued to your laptop. In other words, you can walk through your classroom with your tablet in hand, displaying the content of the tablet on the big screen. Here are the requirements for the ideal tablet for the trainer. Number one is battery life. You don’t want your tablet to die half way through the day because the battery is completely drained. Screen size should be at least 9.7 inch. Any smaller than that, and you might as well just use a smart phone. On the other hand, you don’t want it to be much bigger - or you won’t be able to walk through your classroom with it (of course, this only applies if your training is classroom based). Here’s a video of a teacher walking around the classroom while using a tablet. USB ports. You want to be able to connect your tablet to peripherals (printers, monitors, etc.). An easily accessible file system. If you’ve got a video or a some heavy presentation slides, you don’t want to upload all files through Dropbox. You want to be able to connect your tablet to your pc at the office (where you prepared the presentation) and simply copy the files to the right place. This pretty much rules out Apple (i.e. iOS based) devices. Bluetooth support. You should be able to hook up your phone to the tablet so you can access the internet. Bluetooth also provides the wireless connection with the projector, beamer or big screen in your classroom. Like ordinary PCs, tablet computers have an operating system (OS) too. Most PCs have Windows, Apple has OS X. For tablet computers there are currently three major operating systems: Windows (a special version of it), iOS (on iPads, from Apple) and Android (from Google). And just like ordinary PCs, tablets can run computer programs too, except they’re called "apps". Because Windows’ apps are still not up to a par with Android’s (strictly speaking about mobile devices of course), I’m leaving out all Windows based tablets (as well as Apple iPads for reasons mentioned above), focusing exclusively on Android devices. Market in July 2014 I did  a little bit of market research in July 2014 and based on that I’ve compiled a small list of tablets which meet our requirements. Acer ICONIA A3-A10-L662: 11 battery hours; $255 Acer Iconia Tab A510: 15 battery hours; $380 Asus Transformer Pad Infinity TF300TG: 14 battery hours; $300 Asus Transformer Pad TF701: 13 battery hours; $350 Lenovo Yoga Tablet 10: 18 battery hours; $240 Sony Xperia Tablet S: 12 battery hours; $290 Toshiba Excite 10 SE: 12 battery hours;  $350 Prices are based on features and properties such as working memory (ram) and storage memory, type of microprocessor and all the other usual stuff for computers in general. Not all reviews of the listed tablets were positive. For instance, quite a few reviews were very negative about the Lenovo Yoga tablet, especially the pre-installed software (and adaptations made to the OS, or operating system - Android, in this case). I’ve used a unit in a store very briefly, and I didn’t find anything wrong with it. But then again, I haven’t actually used it as thoroughly as the reviewers presumably did. The Winner Is… I’ve used the Asus Transformer TF300TG extensively for a few hours and I was very charmed by the detachable keyboard which comes along with it. I prefer a real keyboard over the screen based keyboard as introduced by Apple’s iOS. On the other hand, while reading or browsing I don’t want to carry a superfluous keyboard. So a detachable keyboard is the perfect solution for me. The Asus Transformer TF300TG is probably still a perfect choice for many people, but I wanted a little more power. So in the end I chose the slightly more expensive Asus Transformer Pad TF701, trading a little battery life for better performance. Coming from the original iPad (the one which started the entire table industry), I have to say it took a little while to get acquainted with the Android platform (the operating system behind the selected Asus Transformer tablet). If you’re new to Android as well, you should spend a few moments looking around in the ‘Settings’ menu. Here you can adjust notification options. You don’t want your presentation interrupted by a chime or a message flashing on the screen. Sources http://tablets.findthebest.com/saved_search/Tablets-With-Longest-Battery-Life Be aware though: this site lists a few very unrealistic entries, reporting a battery life of 1240 hours in one instance. This is obviously wrong, things start to get realistic at 18 hours and lower. http://www.tabletpccomparison.net/battery-life/large-autonomy No erroneous entries, but no option to select multiple features. The post A Tablet for Trainers appeared first on TrainerTops Blog.

This 2014/2015 school year’s first term is about to expire. After approximately 8 lessons of coding (less than 8 hours of work), and one week for project development (homework time) the final results are really awesome, taking in count that:Students didn’t have any previous knowledge about coding.They didn’t know anything about game strategies.As a picture’s worth a thousand words, have a look at this video to see some examples:Here you have some of my first conclusions about this exciting project called Gamecodization (more at gamecodization.com):Different levels of students: superb (20%), average (70%), poor (10%). I divided coding exercises in stages, so all students could catch up eventually.I had to consider repeating 1 session for the lost ones.Student types:Engaged: they know what they’re doing. They use pseudocode wisely. They understand and solve. They want to learn deeper.Robotic: they translate pseudocode without much understanding. They don’t really know where to place code (inside loops, conditions…).Lazy: they need to have most of the pieces in place to start understanding things.Pseudocode:It’s key to help students in the beginning.It can be a problem when students just do things robotically, translating from pseudocode to code without further understanding.Debugging.Students don’t read compiler’s messages, they prefer to ask the teacher.There are plenty of problems with variable names due to case sensitiveness.I instructed my students to use PRINT sparingly to know variables’ states.Exercise phases: a single exercise can have many stages (increasing complexity). Start really simple and build on them more layers. Examples: Guess the number. Stages: Calculate a random number and print it properly (no decimals).Read a number from the console and print it.Now compare both numbers, for higher than and lower than.Loop everything until the win state is reached.Include other elements: messages, points, leaderboards, preferences.Avoid long, tedious exercises to avoid students getting stuck.Homework:Aside of coding games, basic exercises are of help to clarify some concepts:Basic operations: use of the console, file I/O.Arranging of elements.Dynamic data structures.Etc.I gathered my students in groups and gave them flipped resources so they could group in teams at home.Assessment:Projects in pairs (in three people groups one of the participants tends not to work as hard as the rest).Ask for pseudocode and code: the last one could not execute in the last time. And as a teacher you can always check the pseudocode to tutor them better.Some interesting and easy games to develop.Escape the maze.Arkanoid.Asteroids.Snake.Frogger.Space invaders.Other of their choice.Test exam:This will make them memorize better basic instructions (LET, PRINT…). Otherwise they’ll feel they don’t have to bear anything in mind, and they’ll waste lots of time checking compiler’s help all the time.Anyway, I made it easy, in the end you want to keep fun in your classes.Grade: you have three elements for grading.Theory: test.Practice: pseudocode and code (if code works well pseudocode shouldn’t grade anymore).Attitude, interest, behaviour.Game structure for arcades: for this first stage all the game developed have been based in the following algorithm.Initialization.Main loopMovement.LaserEnemies.Collisions.Items (keys…).Win-state check.End of gameLeaderboard.The main strategy for teaching coding through games has been:The idea is not to teach the coding language used (in this case Basic256), but to teach coding basis (sequences, conditions and loops) and strategies to build games.As lessons went ahead, I maintained a document (a sort of a cheat sheet), so they could know what instructions and concepts had been worked with, so they didn’t need to check the official documentation over and over.It’s key to start teaching very basic things through a simple game, in this case "Guess the number".Print on the text console.Read a number from the console.Calculate a random number.Compare both numbers.Repeat the operation until the number is guessed.With the previous game you’ve covered the three structures and some instructions, as PRINT, READ, RAND, LET; WHILE, IF THEN.The students shouldn’t be breaking their heads trying to figure out complex things. For example, I gave them enough information to calculate a random number, as INT(RAND*10). The same goes for spaceship movement, collisions, point scoring and so on. It’s like giving them basic pieces so they can combine them in different ways to create a wide range of outcomes.I passed rapidly to graphic based games. Visuals are key for students. For the second exercise we developed a rebounding point:Concepts of x,y positioning (plot).Variable for controlling the direction of the point (NE, NW, SE, SW).Out-of-bounds control, to make the point move properly.For the third exercise we started developing the Asteroids game (reduced version). In it I introduced the concepts of game structure (main loop), etc. Challenges took the form of:How to move several elements at the same time: they tried using FORs, popping up the concept of time slicing.How to set an element’s life-cycle in the main loop (as a laser), also popping the concept of flags.One of the topmost curious things was the fact that some students had the tendency to include code out of the main loop, revealing they hadn’t understood correctly previous concepts.Other aspects, as sprite collision, were easier to solve, as basic256 includes several ad-hoc functions. It is so easy to manage you don’t even need arrays to structure your sprites, as you can use expressions like SPRITEPLACE 1, SPRITEX(1)+5, SPRITEY(1) to move the sprite #1 to the right 5 positions.After finishing the basic version of asteroids we started including other elements: explosions, animations, points, leaderboards...As a final project my students had the opportunity to choose a game and develop it in groups (check the video).

These are my 5 favorite educational blogs. I’m not saying they’re the best or the biggest - but they are the ones I actually read & enjoy. Source: teach4theheart.com See on Scoop.it - InformationCommunication (ICT)

Learn how to create your own, highly engaging online icebreaker in under 10 minutes with this easy to follow step-by-step video. Create the online icebreaker to better prepare and motivate your trainees for your training. Find out how to include a YouTube video on your own Google Sites webpage, add a discussion forum and invite trainees to leave their comments. This works especially well as an icebreaker because trainees get to know each other a little bit through the discussion forum before the training actually starts. If you have to squint to make out the details, please use the Full Screen option in the video viewer. Also, make sure that you have selected 720p under the quality settings, because this is a HD video! Links mentioned in this video: groups.google.com sites.google.com www.youtube.com The post Super Engaging Online Icebreaker, Created in under 10 Minutes appeared first on TrainerTops Blog.

Did you know about the existence of WITHGOOGLE.COM? Wow, it’s like a box full of treasures. Check out some of the interesting things you can find hidden in this mysterious domain (and other classified folders):https://creatoracademy.withgoogle.com/page/educationhttps://webaccessibility.withgoogle.com/coursehttp://think.withgoogle.com/databoard/https://www.google.com/takeaction/http://www.google.com/ideas/projects/https://seefurther.withgoogle.com/https://streetart.withgoogle.com/es/#homehttps://mybeautifulearth.withgoogle.com/https://connectedclassrooms.withgoogle.com/https://smartypins.withgoogle.com/http://qcplayground.withgoogle.com/#/homehttps://cube.withgoogle.com/https://devart.withgoogle.com/And some more...https://www.buildwithchrome.com/http://www.cs-first.com/homehttp://www.cs4hs.com/resources/cscs.htmlhttps://www.solveforx.com/search/allhttps://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/homehttps://www.google.com/opengallery/?hl=enhttps://nightwalk.withgoogle.com/en/panoramahttps://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/browse/?projectId=world-wonders&hl=en

  Team 7-2 Teachers participated in a LipSync Competition prior to Christmas Break 2014. The music is a little difficult to hear, but if you listen closely you can hear the songs the teachers are lip-syncing too. The reason behind the post was during a recent #whatisschool twitter chat participates and discussed "relationships" between teachers and their students. I offered the point that teachers; must get out of their comfort zone and allow humor within their teaching and school. This is why I figured I would share our humor experience with our students here at PHMS!!    lipsync` from Mr. Kirsch on Vimeo.

Picture by tim, published under cc Online training is often presented as a way to save costs on training. But as we are about to reveal, the costs behind producing and offering online training are staggering. Compared to ‘traditional’ training, you won’t save a dime. Here, we’ll uncover how you can save on the costs of online training. Hint: trainers don’t have to start from scratch. We’ll even give you a link to a cost savings calculator, at the bottom of this article. Before we do that however, let’s get a grip on what online training is. What Is Online Training Anyway? Online training is training supported by online tools, or taking place through a website or a mobile application (you know, an app on your smartphone). Online training comes in two flavors: Synchronous online training: trainees and trainer are present at the same time, just not in the same place (think of a video conference or a webinar). Asynchronous online training: trainees and trainer only meet each other in an online discussion forum. In asynchronous online training the trainer has more of guiding role in what is essentially a ‘self paced’ training. Trainees can take the training on their own time, e.g. from home. Picture by Jannes Pockele, published under cc These flavors can also be mixed, of course. You could set a date for a video conference for instance, while adding the requirement that everybody complete an online test (quiz) first. Most online training platforms support setting such a requirement. The platform simply checks whether you’ve got your test completed before allowing you inside the video conference. By the way, an online training platform is usually called an LMS, which stands for learning management system. Cost of Synchronous Online Training Basically, the cost of synchronous online training is predictable and relatively cheap. You need video conferencing software, or webinar software, and that software is your main cost. A webinar is you talking live on video (presented through a website) while your trainees are listening and typing in comments or questions. To start with webinars or video conferencing, it’s probably cheaper to not own the actual software (and the required servers or internet computers) - unless you’re a really big company. Instead, look at services such as GoToWebinar and WebinarJam which start at $468 and $497 a year, respectively (GoToWebinar has restrictions on the number of attendees and presenters, but also offers a monthly subscription of $49). Picture by Natesh Ramasamy, published under cc. In addition to the software purchase, you need to factor in the costs of preparing the webinar just like any other ‘live’ (or face-to-face) training session. This does not deviate too much from your usual preparation time, for a training session. One estimate for an hour long Instructor-Led Training (ILT) comes down to 34 hours of preparation. Next, we present the cost components of an 8 hour synchronous online training session, e.g. a webinar, for 20 trainees and one trainer - as compared to ‘traditional’ training (which includes travel expenses, etc). As a side note: an 8 hour webinar would be way too long, but this makes it easier to compare the costs with a traditional training session, which usually lasts 4 - 8 hours. Cost Components: Synchronous Training & ‘Traditional’ A. Trainer Cost: Hourly Wage $50 B. Hours of Development & Preparation for One Hour of Training 34 C. Webinar Software Cost (simplified) $50 D. # Trainees 20 E. Trainees’ Hourly Wage $25 F. Lost Productivity / Trainee / Hour $50 G. Travel Expenses / Trainee (Rental Car & Airfare) $300 H. Overnight Stay / Trainee (Meals & Hotel) $150 I. Training Materials / Trainee (Handouts, Binders, etc) $20 J. Training Duration (Hours) 8 How does this all add up? Costs of 8 Hours Synchronous Online Training ‘Traditional’ Synchronous Trainer Cost: J x A $400 $400 Training Development Cost: J x B x A $13,600 $13,600 Cost of Lost Productivity: J x D x F $8000 $8000 Employees in Training: J x D x E $4000 $4000 Software N/A $50 Logistics: D x (G + H + I) = 20 x $470 $9400 N/A Total: $35,400 $26,050 Great, you can save more than $9000 ($35,400 - $26,050 = $9,350) on traveling expenses and such, with the aid of synchronous online training. This means synchronous online training represents an actual saving compared to a ‘traditional’ training session. Now let’s take a look at the other flavor of online training. Asynchronous Online Training Costs With asynchronous online training, such as a self paced online training module, the upfront costs are much higher, but the delivery costs should be lower. As a matter of fact, if trainees can be persuaded to take the training on their own time, the delivery costs are practically zero. (If you’re a trainer and you’re worried about this, see the blog post Cut Your Training Session by Half to find out how you can use online training to your advantage). Picture by Andrea Schaffer, published under cc. In addition, online training materials can double as documentation, reference guides and check lists. There are even more benefits to this kind of online training, but for the cost estimation we’ll try to keep it simple and ignore these. Cost Components: Asynchronous Training & ‘Traditional’ ‘Traditional’ Asynchronous A. Trainer Cost: Hourly Wage $50 $100 B. Hours of Development & Preparation for One Hour of Training 34 220 C. Software Cost / Trainee (simplified) N/A $5 D. # Trainees 20 20 E. Trainees’ Hourly Wage $25 $25 F. Lost Productivity / Trainee / Hour $50 $50 G. Travel Expenses / Trainee (Rental Car & Airfare) $300 N/A H. Overnight Stay / Trainee (Meals & Hotel) $150 N/A I. Training Materials / Trainee (handouts, binders, etc) $20 N/A J. Training Duration (Hours) 8 8 In this table, the difference between the hourly rate for ‘traditional’ trainers and ‘asynchronous online trainers’ (i.e. instructional designers) is striking. And again, the difference between the development time for 1 hour of traditional training versus 1 hour of asynchronous online training is very significant. Let’s run the numbers and what this means for the bottom line. Costs of 8 Hours Asynchronous Online Training ‘Traditional’ Asynchronous Trainer Cost: J x A $400 N/A Training Development Cost: J x B x A $13,600 $176,000 Cost of Lost Productivity: J x D x F $8000 $8000 Employees in Training: J x D x E $4000 $4000 Software: C x D N/A $100 Logistics: D x (G + H + I) = 20 x $470 $9400 N/A Total: $35,400 $188,100 Wait, isn’t online training supposed to save costs? Yes, and it does, provided that: trainees take the online training on their own time; you can spread out the development costs over a large number of trainees the online training is used over a longer period of time (reused) But what if you could drastically lower the costs of asynchronous online training? What if your online training would cost the same to develop as ‘traditional’ training? Let The Trainers Run The Show Picture by Jannes Pockele, published under cc. I believe that trainers are highly professional people, capable of developing their own online training. Let me rephrase that: I know this for a fact because I have seen them do it. So let the trainers take over the role of instructional designers, the folks who used to run the online training show. I also know you don’t need an entire production team to shoot videos and create interactive activities. Nowadays, you should be able to produce 1 hour of online training using the same resources as when developing 1 hour of  traditional training. Just buy a decent camera, microphone and an lms subscription (learning management system - your online training platform) and you’ve covered most of the upfront production and delivery costs. And finally, trainers also have the advantage that they don’t have to start from scratch, when developing online training. They already have their ‘traditional’ training materials. For instance, as a trainer, you can turn your powerpoints into videos with a voice-over. (You can do so much more with online training, but it’s a start). This is how it looks in numbers when trainers create their own online training: Cost Parity Between Asynchronous - & Traditional Training ‘Traditional’ Asynchronous A. Trainer Cost: Hourly Wage $50 $50 B. Hours of Development & Preparation for One Hour of Training 34 34 C. Software Cost / Trainee (simplified) N/A $5 D. # Trainees 20 20 E. Trainees’ Hourly Wage $25 $25 F. Lost Productivity / Trainee / Hour $50 $50 G. Travel Expenses / Trainee (Rental Car & Airfare) $300 N/A H. Overnight Stay / Trainee (Meals & Hotel) $150 N/A I. Training Materials / Trainee (handouts, binders, etc) $20 N/A J. Training Duration (Hours) 8 8 Alright, let’s see how this adds up. Trainers Run The Online Training Show ‘Traditional’ Asynchronous Trainer Cost: J x A $400 N/A Training Development Cost: J x B x A $13,600 $13,600 Cost of Lost Productivity: J x D x F $8000 $8000 Employees in Training: J x D x E $4000 $4000 Software: C x D N/A $100 Logistics: D x (G + H + I) = 20 x $470 $9400 N/A Total: $35,400 $25,700 Picture by Vinoth Chandar, published under cc. This saves you almost $10,000. If employees take the online training on their own time, savings get even more spectacular: more than $21,000 ($35,400 − $13,700 = $21,700). To summarize, online training can be a cost real saver if you keep development time to a minimum. Nowadays, you can do that by using high quality, yet affordable hardware (such as recent cameras and microphones) as well easy to use software, such as a learning management system (lms) which is specifically catered to trainers. Using these tools, you can take your existing training materials to create an engaging online training experience. Sources Estimating Costs and Time in Instructional Design Does e-learning save money? Online Training Cost Savings Calculator (Google spreadsheet, copy first before inputting your own data) Online Training Cost Savings Spreadsheet (MS Excel) The post Dirty Little Secret: Online Training Costs Way Too Much appeared first on TrainerTops Blog.

This article is about the application of constructivism in your e-learning teaching practice using Moodle. With the help of different strategies as how to organize information, the looks, teaching dynamics, gamification, PLEs, and time and desktop management, we’ll ensure: pedagogy, engagement, self regulation, metacognition and brain-based learning.Read it now in EdTechReview.

As a person who believes in the power of community, I have decided to include strategies, tips, and links for my fellow bloggers and freelancers. This page will change from time to time, and I sugg… Source: eccentriceclectic.wordpress.com See on Scoop.it - Educational News and Web Tools

Photo Credit: Christopher Michel, published under CC. Working for a large company or corporation as an employee has certain benefits. The pay is good and there’s usually room to change jobs - without having to update your resume or going for a job search. Much the same goes for selling your training services to large companies and corporations. Once you’re in, you get paid decently and there’s always more work. But how do you get in? How do you market your training business to large companies and corporations? Here are 5 tactics to get you started. Be Yourself, Don’t Pretend to Be Big Build Social Proof First Identify Decision Makers Don’t Do Freebies Accountability Is Extremely Important Be Yourself (Don’t Pretend to Be Big) If you’re a very small training company, you may be tempted to project a much bigger image, or simply to pretend you’re a big company. After all, this is very easy nowadays. Just create a very well designed, very professional looking website. Use a phone answering service. Say ‘we’ all the time instead of ‘I’. But don’t fool yourself, if you actually start working with a customer, they will find out your company’s size at some point. Besides, if they ask you directly "How many employees does your company have?" - and some customers will ask you exactly that - what are you going to do? Lie about it? Big corporations who are willing to cooperate with individual trainers or small training companies don’t care about a ‘big’ image. They’ve already weighed all the pros and cons. So, be upfront about it and put your picture on your website. Because by introducing a human element, you’re actually turning a self-perceived weakness into a strength. You’re not some large training company where the customer never knows who the trainer is going to be for the next training. Your customer will actually get to know you. They will even get to rely on you personally. Build Social Proof And Authority First Photo Credit: Drew Avery, published under CC. To gain the trust of bigger customers, who have the financial means to pick any trainer in the world, you need to build social proof first. It’s very unlikely that any unknown trainer marching into a big office building is going to gain a new customer right then and there. Of course, if you’re actually not unknown, e.g. you have previously worked for a big company as an employed trainer, that is great. Use that connection to get hired back as an independent trainer. That’s all the social proof you need if you start calling other big companies. Otherwise, start small. It’s generally easier to get to talk to the right people in smaller companies. Go there first, do a few successful training sessions, then ask for references. Collect customer stories, work on a few case studies. Once you’ve got your act completely together you then present yourself to bigger companies, showing them the value that you can add. Find an Intermediary Can’t get your foot in the door? Consider working for training and consulting companies as a private contractor. Obviously you have to pick a training company that sends you out to a large company or corporation. Try to find out how the training company is able to land deals with corporations. If the training company is a small one, you may be able to copy (i.e. learn from) their marketing and sales tactics. If they’re a pretty big company themselves, though, you won’t learn much that’s relevant to you as a small contractor. To be absolutely clear here: you’re doing this to gain experience in marketing and sales and to get your name out. But you cannot pick up customers from the intermediary training company. You’d have your name out for sure, but in a very, very bad way. Establish Authority To get your name out in a positive way, it helps tremendously to establish yourself as an authority in your field. You do this by speaking at conferences. Nowadays, you can also use social media like LinkedIn. If you know which LinkedIn groups your potential customers are visiting, get involved there. Contribute to discussions and then start interesting new discussions. One very effective way to launch yourself as an authority is by writing a book. If your book is even slightly successful, you’ll find that previously closed corporate doors will now open. In fact, you may hit a point where people won’t call you any more because they’re assuming you’re too busy. (How ironic is that?) Identify Decision Makers Photo Credit: Christopher Michel, published under CC. Based on your specialty, create a list of suitable corporate companies where you can add the most value. Visit their websites to see if they publish the names of decision makers. For training they might be hr managers. Maybe they are listed in the jobs section of the site, under ‘recruiting’ or ‘career’. If you’ve got a few names, it’s time to put on your private investigator hat. Try to find them online. See if they have published their email address anywhere. Maybe they’re visiting the same LinkedIn groups as you do. Once you’ve got their contact data, send them a message (either through email or through LinkedIn) and try to get on the phone with them. At this stage, you must have your customer stories and case studies at hand. Of course, both online and offline, the best introduction is one made by a mutual acquaintance. Ask you current customers if they know anybody else who would benefit from your training services. Don’t Do Freebies If you’re just starting out, especially if you’re younger, you’re guaranteed to encounter this situation. You call a decision maker in a corporation, let’s say a bank. And lo and behold, you’re actually invited for a meeting. You get there very well prepared and you have a nice conversation about the value you can add through your training. In other words: you both agree that your training solves a real problem. The hr manager smiles and nods. Then you bring up the topic of compensation. Now the manager says: "We can’t pay you. You should be glad that you get to work for us, so you can get a reference from us. Being able to mention our brand name is a great opportunity for your career and your business." Don’t fall for this. Nor for any other requests for freebies. If they think your training adds value, they’ll be willing to pay for it too. Otherwise, why would they waste their employees’ time with your training? Accountability Is Extremely Important Photo Credit: McKay Savage, published under CC. The people who are hiring you, presumably the ones you identified as decision makers, are taking a risk on you. Make sure that you don’t disappoint them. What’s more, provide them with evidence that you have added value for the company, that you have solved their problem. Ideally, you start with a pre-test to measure current skills and knowledge. During the training sessions, keep accurate attendance records. After the training, test the trainees’ skills and knowledge again. If you don’t see enough of an improvement, try to pinpoint the problem and discuss it openly. This is something you should do for all types of customers, but corporate managers will want to see detailed reports from you (even if they don’t always actually read them). So, make sure that you can provide those reports.     The post Going Corporate: How to Market Your Training Business to Large Companies & Corporations appeared first on TrainerTops Blog.

Managing Your Digital Footprint: Think Before You Post. Digital footprint refers to the compilation of content on the Internet that can be associated with you and, thus, potentially available to anyone performing a search on you. The list of possible content visible online is endless (e.g., your family videos on YouTube, your comments on a news article or blog, vacation photos on Flickr, your posts on Facebook and Twitter). Please watch the video below, "Understanding Your Digital Footprint" and then write a blog post based on the questions below. UnderstandingDigitalFootprint from Mr. Kirsch on Vimeo. Blog Prompt Questions: Why should you be concerned about the information available online about you? Can you do anything to manage your digital footprint? How does a person take control of their privacy? Why should people manage their interactions with others on Social Media? Do you think is "wise" to use caution on social media and networking websites? Why or Why Not?  Please make sure you post your written blog response by Friday, January 30, 2015 by 5pm. Your responses to this post should be a minimum of 5-6 sentences for each question.  For More Information: MaximumPC: How To Erase Your Digital Footprint: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/how_erase_your_digital_footprint Washington Post: Beware of Privacy Policies: Time to Clean Up Your Digital Footprint: http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/beware-of-privacy-policies-time-to-hide-your-digital-footprint/2012/01/31/gIQADI7PnQ_story.html

Prefer a Transcript? Joshua Millage: Hello everyone. We are back, and as you can see, this is three of us on a bench here in Montana. It’s a little bit different format than our normal LMS cast episodes with the side-by-side video, because I’m usually in California, and Chris here is here on his beautiful farm in Montana, but today we’re going to switch it up because we’re at an off site and we thought we have a little bit of fun, and bring in our lead developer here, Mark Nelson, who is going to help us answer a few questions about WordPress LMS themes. So, Chris, why don’t you tell us a little bit about that and then we’ll just extract all of Mark’s expertise for the audience. Chris: So, when you build a WordPress Howard learning management system, one of the first things you start Googling is WordPress LMS theme, WordPress LMS plugin, and we decided with our learning management system plugin, LifterLMS, to go the plugin route. Maybe we can start there. Why are we using a plugin instead of a theme? Mark: Well, the main reason that we went with a plugin because, as you’ve seen, there’s a handful of LMS’s out there that are themes, and some that are plugins. WordPress, as a foundation, is really set as kind of a foundational layer that is you have plugins and you have themes, and there really is no difference, as far as WordPress is concerned, except for just to keep things organized. Plugins usually provide functionality. Themes provide design, and so since the LMS plugin is purely functionality driven, it’s a plugin, and so there’s kind of a line that we try to fit. Chris: So, the big idea here is I have been messing around in WordPress for years, and some themes come with functionality, like we mentioned earlier in our pre-chat, was things like slide shows, and in your mind a clean theme is just going to be design, and then you go and grab plugins for when the functionality is needed. Mark: Absolutely, and it’s not that the theme can’t have any functionality to it, but the functionality really needs to be driven towards the design and the layout of the site. So, I think a good example would be something like the Canvas theme by WooThemes that provides all types of functionality as far as designing and styling the site, and laying it out, as far as content. Chris: Without coding. Mark: Without coding, and it also doesn’t cross the line as far as providing too much in the way that plugins can provide. So, when you talk about things like catching, and SEO, and different things like that, you want to be able use plugins to provide that functionality, and it keeps things clean. It keeps a lot of conflicts from happening when you do that. It gives you a lot more functionality because what you really want to do is, ideally, you want to have a site with all this functionality built into it that you can quickly just grab a new theme, add a new theme to it, and still maintain the functionality, and just change the layout and design. Chris: That’s really cool. So, with the LifterLMS plugin, what we say is that it works with any well coded WordPress theme, and we kind of want to impact that a little bit and talk about what that means, and how to select a theme, but as a starting point what we’re saying here is it’ll work with any good theme. Pick a good theme that works for you, in terms of design and layout, and it’s responsive behavior on a mobile device, or iPad, or whatever. That’s really what the theme is for, but in terms of picking a well coded theme, there’s a couple of things you want to avoid. Number one is one of the other WordPress learning management system themes. If you install the LifterLMS plugin, it can create conflicts because they’re both trying to do the same thing, or similar things. Can you talk about that a little bit, Mark? Mark: Yeah, so if you look at some of the elements plugin themes, what they’ve done is they either have themes built into them that provide some … or plugins built into them that provide some functionality, or they’ve gone to the point of just including a bunch of different functionality into the theme, and when our plugin gets installed, and we have courses, and lessons, and sections, and quizzes, and your theme also has courses, lessons, sections, and quizzes, there’s obviously a conflict there. Besides that, you have the issue of just having a constant nightmare of trying to organize that, so I think that’s a big point. Chris: Another thing, when we say well coded WordPress theme, recently we were experimenting with the theme that was popular about three or four years ago called Thesis, and we ran into some trouble with the LifterLMS plugin on that theme. It still worked, but maybe you could tell us why it didn’t work out with the Thesis theme, which I want to caution you about if you’re selecting a theme to not pick that one for LifterLMS, but what happened? Mark: Right, and it’s not that necessarily Thesis is written badly at all, in any way, but what Thesis has done is they’ve I guess you would say hijacked the [templating 00:05:04] system of WordPress to provide their own templating functionality, which is fantastic for case scenarios, but what it does for plugins like ours, plugins like WooCommerce, and any other plugins that build templating features in order to provide things like products, or courses. It doesn’t … It just completely hijacks it so it won’t work at all out the gate. It requires an extension to be built in order to replicate those templates again in the [theme mix 00:05:30] theme. Chris: Well, let’s wrap it up and leave people with some specific ideas of where to go to find a good WordPress theme that would work with the LifterLMS plugin. All of us have worked with a lot of different WordPress themes, and so far in our experimentation with LifterLMS, some of the major players like WooThemes, and we mentioned the Canvas theme but Woo has a lot of themes. Another one is the StudioPress. Those themes which are built … are themes, are child themes built on top of the Genesis framework. We’ve done some testing there, and those look very beautiful, but you can also go out to ThemeForest, or other themes, and try things out and just see how it goes, but look for themes that aren’t trying to do too much stuff that a plugin should do. Look for good design, but not necessarily lots of extra functionality coming from the theme itself. That’s really what plugins are for, and … Mark: Can you give an example of what that looks like, Chris? Like, what’s a theme that’s doing a lot of plugin things that you think would conflict with what we’ve built, or something that people should be cautious of? Chris: Well, I would say one thing we mentioned is sometimes sliders that are built into themes can be a start to hijack the WordPress core. We call it custom post types. If there’s a lot of like really fancy stuff the theme is trying to do in terms of custom post types, it may be an indicator that, "Oh, I might not want to go that one," so that’s something to be cautious of. Another thing is when you install WordPress, as you know, it comes with the 2012, 2013, 2014 theme. Those are great themes if you’re looking for a free theme and just want to learn the plugin, and all the functionality it has. I actually recommend 2012 as the most simple looking theme that comes with the WordPress install that’s one hundred percent going to work in every way, so that’s a good place to start and it’s also free. Mark: Yeah, I’m a huge fan of the Genesis framework. I think they’ve just … They’ve done an amazing way of building the child themes, so you have this huge selection of all these great themes with all this awesome functionality, and the framework itself is just really well built and it’s built around the WordPress core so that it doesn’t hijack anything there. Yeah, WooThemes is another great one. I think you just want to be cautious of themes that just look too good, have too much functionality. A lot of theme designers today really, to sell the theme, add a lot of slide shows and special widgets, and a lot of extra functionality in order to really make the theme look good, but in the end it ends up causing you more trouble. Ideally, what you want is something that looks good, and is easy to style, and design yourself without a developer, and if you want slide shows, if you want extra widgets, if you want social sharing, you can get free plugins or you can purchase plugins to get that functionality. That way you’re not tied to a theme, because what you don’t want to happen is two or three years down the road, end up wanting to change the design of your site, which happens every three years or so anyway. Now your locked into this theme because all the functionality that you have built into your system comes from your theme, and you’re either forced into buying another theme from the same provider, or having to completely redo the system from scratch. Chris: So, if you have a question of like will this theme work, go ahead and send an email to Chris at Lifter@LMS.com, and I also want to say that when you buy or purchase LifterLMS, you also get access to our support forum. So, we’re going to have discussions there where you can really help find the best theme for your business, or your education application. So, it’s just one of the perks of joining the LifterLMS community so that you have that community, and people have tried different things, and you can really access the ideas and what has happened for other people trying to do the same thing you are. Feel free to email me directly at Chris@LifterLMS.com. Joshua Millage: Yeah, and if you have been watching the video and you feel like me, sitting between these two geniuses, with some extra questions, just feel free to email any of us here @LifterLMS. It’s Chris@LifterLMS, Josh@LifterLMS, Mark@LifterLMS, and we will get back to you as soon as possible. Other than that, we will see you next episode. The post Picking the Right WordPress LMS Theme appeared first on LMScast.

I've just finished an online course by Google: basics for teaching, where usage of Google apps has been taught for the teaching practice. Even if the course’s been really basic I’ve had the chance to get some more new ideas about its application. For the final work each participant has had to create a document explaining Apps’ usage experience.As you could find it of interest, here you can check it and comment whatever you want, the debate is open:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N7C_99mfDc-ydIk8VkphHtXf4hHtnEEhHY2BF0Zk8f0/edit

It has been 30 days since I joined the group 30 Day Blog Challenge. I scheduled this post in my editorial calendar to remind me to check in on how I did with the challenge. Truth is I am still doin… Source: www.hotlunchtray.com See on Scoop.it - InformationCommunication (ICT)

Prefer to read a transcript on Preselling? chris badgett: Hello everyone, we’re back with another episode of LMS Cast, I’m Joshua Millage and I’m joined here with this beautiful gentleman Christopher Badgett, and today we’re going to be talking about some marketing techniques and some ways of getting your course in front of as many students as possible. I’m going to start this off by asking Chris, you know Chris, I’m curious. You’ve launched a lot of courses over the past few years. What are some of the things that you’ve seen people run into when they launch the course in terms of what are some of the difficulties? joshua millage: Well for me and many of the clients I’ve worked with who are creating learning management systems and selling online courses, just the act of getting your learning management system together is a project in and of itself, but then what happens is people can get bogged down with actually creating their course. There’s an interesting way to move past that and also to test the market to make sure people are interested and willing to spend money on the course idea you have. That’s just called pre-selling. chris badgett: I’m familiar with pre-selling a little bit. Obviously it’s selling something before you launch it, but I think your definition of pre-selling is a little bit different. What does that involved? joshua millage: If you build an online course website and a learning management system, to really launch and get paying customers in the door, it’s good to validate your idea by putting a sales page up or putting your course offer out there. There’s a couple different ways to approach it. One is to come up with a course idea, publish it, put a price tag on it which can either be one time or recurring monthly revenue, and Lifter LMS plug-in is set up to eaisily be able to do either one of those options right out of the gate. You can put your course out there and have the first lesson ready, or even sell it but the course doesn’t officially start until some pre-defined date in the future. Another interesting thing you can do with learning management system like with Lifter LMS is set up drip content so  maybe you have one, two or three lessons in the clip, and then they’re designed to drip out once a week and then lesson 4, 5, 6, 7 and so on, you haven’t even created yet. That’s what I mean by pre-selling, and you can do it that way or you can be totally open about it. Either way is fine, but be totally open about the fact that you haven’t finished creating the course, and that if you buy now, you’re going to get some kind of early bird discount in exchange for their trust in you to create the course as you move forward with your students. chris badgett: There’s a really brilliant marketer out there named Clay Collins, who a while back, before he started his company Weed Pages, he was in the info product space and he created a product called the interactive offer. It was a method of actually going to a list that you had already created, that was kind of the key kicker. You had to have a list already built, but it was a way of engaging them to see if there was any demand for a product idea, and then selling it in such a way that was very honest and transparent but then also gave them time to create the product. I think his formula was there was the early adopter’s narrative, which was this idea that’s pervasive in western culture in particular, which is if you get in now, then you’re going to win. It’s the idea of an early investment in say a stock or a bond. We instinctively know that if we can hit the right type of company or right opportunity early, we’re going to be better off than the person who comes down the line. There’s an aspect of that, which in the case of a course would be if you sign up now, it’s not totally created but because you’re taking a risk here, I’m going to give you more of my time one on one, something like that. You give someone a benefit there. There’s the aspect of scarcity, which is I’m only going to allow 50 students in, or 100 students or 10 students. You make sure that there’s a small piece of the pie available for that first group. It’s early adopter’s narrative, scarcity, and then there was one other, I’m blanking on it. Essentially those are the two main pieces of the puzzle, which is let me engage with you because you’re engaging with me, and there’s only a limited amount of a space or time. Actually, these are things that we’re looking at doing with the Lifter LMS plug in. The difference with us is we actually do have a full blown plug in available. We’re not selling it and then creating it. It is fully created. We are limiting the amount of time the cart will be open from October 30th to maybe the 4th or 5th, we haven’t really decided, but we’re trying to capture the most engaged group because we want to engage with them over the course of the next few months up until our full blown launch, which is going to be coming up at the beginning of the year. The reason we’re doing that is we want to make sure we have a really focused group of people that give us good feedback, and that we’re building the product in the direction that adds value to their lives. We’re even adopting this mentality. I think it’s really healthy. I think there’s some mindset things that people have to get over because I’ve worked with people who are like, well I just don’t feel like I’m being honest if I pre-sell. That’s the thing though, you need to be honest in your pre-sell. You need to be honest about a) here’s the idea for the course that I have. It’s not fully flushed out but I have the credentials, I’m a subject matter expert and I can speak to this content and I want to see if any of you are available or interested in taking this course. I think that’s the thing, you have to know what you’re going to be selling. So many people in the internet marketing world that you and I have been a part of for so long sell something like hey, I’m going to teach you about facebook marketing. In reality they’re really good salesmen but they really don’t know anything about facebook marketing. That’s kind of given this whole theory about pre-selling a really bad idea. The colleges and universities do this all the time too. Back when I was at Isuzu Pacific University, in my senior year we created an MBA program, I didn’t actually create the course content, but I managed the logistics. It was a 15 month MBA that went all around the world, and really we pre-sold it in the sense that we wanted to make sure we could get 10 people signed up before we put a bunch of investment in making sure we had all the locations for us to travel and setting up the tickets and all of that. We had more demand than that and we executed the strategy over the course of that 3-month summer, got everything ready and then things started in the fall. I think it’s a good idea that I would encourage all of our listeners to consider when they’re launching their businesses. I’m sure they have core products out there that they’ll automatically be able to put in a system like Lifter LMS, but I think pre-selling, especially if you have a captive audience already is a great way to mitigate risk and also create a really stellar product because you’re getting feedback on the front end instead of releasing it from the back. It’s really cool. joshua millage: I think that that interactive piece is really amazing and important because we has entrepreneurs and educators, we may think we know exactly what people need to learn and how they need to learn, but by being interactive and being more agile in our approach to developing courses and taking that feedback early on in the journey, we can course correct and really give the market what it needs and adapt to the learning styles that seem to get the most impact and engagement from the customer or student. chris badgett: That’s huge. We need to do a whole other episode on the dangers of arrogance in education, but I think assuming that you know everything that a student wants to learn without getting any interaction from them is a disaster. I think that’s why we’re seeing such a resurgence in certain types of education, business education in particular. You go to college and they’re going to tell you what they think you need to learn. In reality, you and I both know we’ve been fighting in the trenches here for 4 or 5 years and business has changed a lot from the industrial revolution of the last century. I think that the professors need to hear from us about what we’re experiencing and then lend their wisdom and expertise to it. It’s a relationship. It goes both ways. We need everyone. The students need the teachers, the teachers need the students and we need to open up those communication channels. With a system like Lifter LMS, it’s really easy to do that. I’m excited to get it out there for everyone, and hopefully with this little tidbit of knowledge, we get some stories about proofs up. joshua millage: Absolutely. Just to close it out, if you want to be a part of our interactive offer with Lifter LMS plug in, we want you to know how much we value this group of early adopters and how much we’re listening to what you want and what you need, and you know we’re experiencing what it’s like to launch version one of something, but we’re not going away. This is a marathon, and that early adopter feedback is going to be really important to us and we value your opinion. chris badgett: Let me do a couple of shout outs. I want to give a shout out to Peter, who sent us a couple emails, thank you Peter. John, who sent me a couple emails, so I’m really excited about the people who are listening to this content and reaching out and engaging. It helps us think about things. That’s what we want to do. We want to make sure that we’re hearing about the things that you want to know. We have a lot of knowledge between our team, and we need to know what you want to know first, second, third and fourth. When you engage with us it just makes this community much more robust. I’m excited, so thank you for everyone who’s reached out to us. You can reach Chris at [chris@lmstask.com  00:10:03] and I’m excited. We’re ready to spread more good news about online education. Until next time, we’ll see you later. The post How to Presell a Online Course (so you know what to teach) appeared first on LMScast.

Internet Safety Cheat Sheet For Digital Media Use In Schools Source: www.teachthought.com See on Scoop.it - FootprintDigital

Prefer to read "how to price your online course"? Joshua Millage: Hello everyone.  We are back with another episode of LMS Cast.  I am Joshua Millage and this is Christopher Badgett.  Today we are talking about pricing and when it is important to choose a single price option over a reoccurring price option.  These are questions that make my head spin, Chris.  Where do we start with all of this? Chris Badgett: I think to get this conversation going we can talk about the Lifter LMS plugin that we’ve created in that.  If you use the built-in course cart, the shopping cart that comes with the plugin, no third-party plugin required, you have to assign a course to either have a one-time payment or have a recurring payment.  With our plugin you can also integrate it with WooCommerce if you want to use their card system and all their extensions which include a recurring payment extension called subscriptions, which is a great plugin for their system. Anyways, that’s the technology side but before all that is we have to have this conversation about I’m going to sell a course.  Do I want to charge a one-time fee or put it on a recurring monthly revenue?  That’s a big decision.  Let’s talk about that in terms of how big should the price be, like if you were to think about the same course as one-time payment versus recurring.  Then let’s talk about if we are going to do recurring, how do we continually add values to justify that monthly or weekly or yearly bill that product receive. Joshua Millage: I want to start off in terms of single versus reoccurring payment.  I think the big question is the business model behind it and reoccurring revenue means reoccurring value.  If you look at the Software as a Service base, so SaaS as it’s called, that idea is that people paying monthly like for salesforce.com or Infusionsoft [inaudible 02:06] and the reason that they’re paying monthly is that as the product matures it’s going to get better and new features are going to be added in.  The value is increasing because you’re paying more money. It’s also good for the business because it will have some predict revenue and all these other things and it situates them to improve on that.  The traditional model is you sell Windows 98 and you got to pay hundreds of dollar to go to XP and hundreds of dollars to go to the next to the next the next.  That doesn’t always work.  You’re waiting a year to get a bunch of upgrades all at once where it’s much easier to just go every couple of weeks get another few features and things. That’s like the software side of it.  I think when you apply that methodology to courses how are you going to be engaging your customer base.  Are you going to have a system set up so that you can maybe do something like weekly people hang out or foster community behind the product?  That I think justifies the reoccurring fee or maybe just continue adding content. Some of the people that we work with in the legal realm the reason that they have reoccurring revenues that loss or waste changing so they guarantee that they’re always going to be up on the new latest, greatest law for IRAs or something like that and so therefore that justifies the reoccurring because they have to constantly do work to make sure that they are upon it. In think if your selling a static like here’s an end-to-end product and I’m just going to put it out there, it’s going to be harder to justify that reoccurring fee.  It’s going to be much easier to just do a straight ups and low cost. Chris Badgett: There is a middle ground there.  Let’s say you do have an end-to-end solution but you don’t really have value that continues after they’ve gone through the program.  What you can do though is if you have 1000-dollar course that’s a lot of money for somebody to pay, but you could instead think about using that recurring thing just to lower the barrier, the entry to get people into your course so instead you could do a 2-payment options, 1,000 dollars or 100 dollars a month for 12 months or something like that. Or just not even do the one-time pricing but put an end to that reoccurring payment so that the value come sure this period and you’re done.  You don’t owe anymore money. Joshua Millage: That’s good.  When it comes to pricing, Chris, like 100-dollar course or it’s 1,000-dollar course, 2,000, how do you think about those different levels of pricing in a single format as well as reoccurring model? Chris Badgett: Pricing is a huge topic but pricing is also really subjective.  If you ask a real estate agent like, "How much is this house worth?"  Some will say, "This house is worth, what, people are willing to buy on it."  They’re dodging the question because a lot of value is perceived.  It’s in the head of the prospect. Then there’s things like actual value like if you … your learning management system and your online course maybe it includes a live event in the price, you know you have a certain amount of overhead, cost to put on the event and host the event, everything so there’s value.  That’s like more tangible hard value. A lot of online courses are purely digital in nature so we get more into perceived value space but at the same time if you’re really talented expert in marketing and sales, if you were to put on a course about how to market your Learning Management System or just market your business, that comes from your entire life of experience and your education, everything which is valuable. One way to think about it is what would it cost for me to have a one on one with you to teach me all that stuff.  Maybe we’ll do surprise a little bit because it’s an online format, but that’s another way to arrive that like what the pricings worth.  Obviously, if you ever have any one-on-one interaction either in a group of hangout, in person or whatever, that should substantiates a higher value. If your course is 100 percent passive in nature, it may be worth less.  With the Lifter LMS plugin if you use a certificate functionality, if you’re actually giving somebody a certificate that’s credited by something or allows them to fill continuing education requirements, that course is valuable and maybe be mandatory if the person has to continually submit these hours. Pricing and value is a really big conversation.  You can also use the interactive approach in terms of just asking your market, how much would you be willing to pay for me to teach you online how to do X.  That’s another way to do it. Joshua Millage: The thing I would want to add is that I think that most people, north to 90 percent of people are going to default on undervaluing themselves.  My dad for better or for worse so he send triple what you think you worth and then probably be close to the markets willing to pay.  A lot of that just comes from self-image, "It couldn’t be worth that much money," and there’s this resistance for asking for more money. I want to say that not that we need to be profiteers or price mongers and just charging a lot of money.  We do want to find that happy medium of what’s the value and what its worth.  I think naturally because people are naturally resistant to sales, they often undervalue themselves.  One of the things too there’s an old saying that says, "Where money goes, focus flows," and that’s definitely true. The higher that someone … The higher the price of the course you’re going to get … you probably get less students but much more engaged students, too.  That is that side of the pricing strategy that’s important to think about. A lot of people go and they sell 19-dollar course and then they wonder why no one ever took it and there was an impulse why.  It really depends.  Maybe that is new strategies just a volume, volume, volume or maybe you’re like, "I don’t want volume so much as just starting the community."  I think it’s hard to start a really robust community at the lower dollar points in my experience, because people just don’t take it seriously. Colleges as a great example of that, a lot of people take college pretty seriously but they’re also paying a lot of money.  That’s one thing to remember but I would say that when people are thinking about their prices, leaning to the idea of having a premium price model or at least having premium price options because I think you’ll be surprised to see who shows up in those [defined locals 09:19]. Chris Badgett: Absolutely. Joshua Millage: Cool.  I think that’s a good nugget on price and pricing.  I don’t know if we’re taking our medicine on this or not because I think our Lifter LMS is priced very, very reasonably at 97 dollars for a single set license and 297 from multi-set license.  That probably won’t hold forever.  That’s for this first group of people that get them on October 30th and then we’re going to shut the door shortly after that and open it back up January 1st.  I don’t know what we’re going to try then really.  We’re going to reevaluate what value we’re providing. One of these things when we talk about getting a little under the hood of our pricing strategy is we want to make this really easy purchase for a lot of people and we want to limit the amount of time it’s being sold to capture the highest engaged people, the people that are paying attention to the content we’re putting out there, the people that want to improve online education and the people that will give us feedback so that we can rapidly improve this product and make it evaluation more valuable than when it launches on the 30th. If you’re interested in that, you can learn more at lifterLMS.com.  Just enter in your email and you’ll be taken to the first set of videos that we’ve produced on the functionality of the plugin and how it can really change the way that you distribute and engage with your students.  We’re excited about that.  Again, if you have any questions, you can always reach me at joshua@lmscast.com and this is Chris at lms.com. Chris Badgett: One more thing.  If you purchase the plugin, one of the things of value that you get is access is to our support forum, but it’s also a community.  If you want to put an idea up on the private support forum about how much should I charge or for my course it’s about X, Y and Z, this … We’re building a community here of people who are all trying to do this online education thing and build a business around it if you’re outside of the nonprofit sector. Anyways, the community is here for you.  You can see what other people are doing, what they’re charging, they’re pricing structures and so on.  Feel free to reach out to us directly if you just want to run an idea by us or anything like that for your pricing or fixed price versus recurring revenue. Joshua Millage: Right on.  All right.  Until next time, we’ll see you then. The post How to Price Your Online Course appeared first on LMScast.

Would you rather read how to create a strategy for your online course? Joshua: Hello everyone we’re back with another episode of LMS Cast. I’m Joshua Millage and I’m joined once again with my very [mountainous mountain man 0:00:09] friend here Christopher Badgett. Today we’re talking high level strategy but I think this is really, really important when you’re thinking about building a course because well, because strategy informs everything else. We’re going to be talking about Blue Ocean Strategy versus dealing with things in a Red Ocean so Chris what is the fundamental idea? What is that even mean blue ocean versus red ocean? Chris: Well it comes down to strategy like you said in positioning your business your course, your product your offer to the world. A blue ocean is wide open it’s like you’re the only one out there you’re essentially creating a category, you’re offering something that’s truly unique. The red ocean is competitive market where if I were to think the context of online courses I would say a competitive market would be how to do internet marketing. It’s very competitive but a blue ocean example of that would be some very specialized new competitive or non competitive market where you ca just rise up and create a name for yourself as a leader and gave that what they say is the first mover advantage. Joshua: Right and this is a concept that goes back to a book that was written I believed in the late 90’s or early 2000 it’s called the Blue Ocean Strategy and essentially what the analogy that is being used here is that you don’t want to participate or you want to avoid participating in a ocean that is red where it is like sharks are eating each other and eating things and it’s all bloody to it’s competition versus a blue ocean which is like you said wide open and there’s not a lot of competition. But some of that comes back to language and positioning messaging, so one of the most incredible books I’ve ever read I think I have it … It’s somewhere around here. It’s a book called Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz. It’s a book that’s like it’s about two hundred dollars, two hundred fifty dollars if you’re going to buy it now it’s been out of print but it’s the most phenomenal book for one copy writing but really this idea of positioning and one of the key ideas in the book is one of market intelligence and so as the market matures the messaging in the market become it has to become different. The example he is because this book was really like I think in the 1960’s or so. He talks bout cigarettes so it used to be cigarette companies come out and it’s like we have the best cigarettes when the market is really new that headline could work like we have the best cigarettes. Then as time goes on the market gets more mature, more competition comes in to the market we have to position themselves differently. Now its cigarettes with toasted tobacco and filters, like what the heck is toasted tobacco? I don’t know it’s like the language changes and then the market gets more mature and now we have Virginia Slims [which had it told 0:03:17] the female demographic. As the market matures again so they’re constantly positioning and current trying to create these new pockets this new opportunities in the market that already heavily kind of bloodied with competition and I think that happens everywhere you see it all the time. The cell phone market was absolutely saturated but Apple came in and just changed everything, they had a new message new opportunities. I remember when Steve Jobs gave that speech he said today we’re releasing a revolutionary, new internet device a phone and a personal I think he said like a personal productivity device too or something like that or like a internet reader. Then he’s like he said like three or four times he’s like by the way it’s all one device and he’s like oh my gosh because up into that point you had your phone, we had like a little like compile at internet tablet, these things are working bonds he created a whole new market by putting them together and doing something different. My question to you Chris is how do you do this with education courses? Chris: Well let’s have a fun little experiment here and give me an industry or type of skill and we can do a competitive version and a blue ocean version. Joshua: Okay well let’s do one and I think let’s do gardening. Chris: Gardening, all right easy for me. Joshua: I want to say easy yeah. Chris: Because I have a learning management system my own gardening so I’m kind of familiar with pace. Joshua: Right, but I want to talk about gardening too not because you are a domain expert in this and you and your wife have a phenomenal course on organic gardening. I also think that for the untrained ear like myself I just think gardening. I don’t know about all these other things and I was just getting to know you I don’t know about Pharma culture and organic gardening all these things but to me it’s just gardening. I look at it from my perspective it’s like I don’t want to get involved there, there’s too much competition. How I would I position myself differently? Chris: Well let me just start it off just kind of go Macro in high level and say that sometimes a blue ocean strategy is better and sometimes entering a competitive market is better and all that really comes down to as a blue ocean can be harder to pull off, and it takes great marketing and positioning and your offer really needs a resonate. It needs to have what we called product market fit, if you go into a proven market you just … It’s going to be the ocean is going to be red the model is kind of improving and now you just have to position yourself a little differently as why you’re better competitor to these other offers or your still in the same category. For organic gardening it falls to create an educational course about a beginners guide to organic gardening that would be a very competitive market, very red ocean, there’s a lot of books and courses in person online about how to get started with organic gardening. If I wanted to take more blue ocean strategy approach I will create a course that’s very specific and in some ways like you mentioned the new Steve Job’s example combine a bunch of elements that people already understand into like one product. That course would be how to turn your regular lawn into a food forest in one year? With Pharma culture techniques or something like that, that was so targeted and so specific that there’s really not that much competition out there for in that nature of Pharma culture and also with the food forest focused. Joshua: Right. Chris: Which is an organic gardening that doesn’t exist just on the ground in the way we traditionally think about a backyard garden that has layers and canopy and all these different things. That would be an example of entering a organic gardening very competitive. Joshua: Right. Chris: How to turn your lawn into a food forest in a year very niche specific and blue ocean like. Joshua: That’s awesome. That’s really cool and I think that’s the difference. Let’s do another one, let’s do like accounting. Chris: Accounting so intro to a cruel method accounting would be very competitive in terms of accounting expertise. If I were let’s say you and I are location independent entrepreneurs we can work from anywhere, we were just in Thailand I spent last winter in Costa Rica and just so we have this location independent thing which is really cool. Accountants can do that too so if I were to create a course called how to take your brick and mortar accounting business one hundred percent online and fully location independent? So you can. Joshua: Yeah. Chris: Ran your accounting business and continue to attract new clients from a Southeast Asia beach? Joshua: Right. Chris: That would be like, that’s like mind blowing-ly different and kind of more blue ocean like and it goes against the grain of the traditional more standard accounting education material. Joshua: Right and then one this is it looks like something that I’ve been looking for is, if there’s any accountants listening I would love to talk to you because I’m constantly looking for help me in the accounting world and understanding so if you had a course on accounting basics for internet entrepreneurs that would, no one is doing that. Chris: Yeah. Joshua: If there’s an accountant listening no one is doing that well and no one is teaching us how to organize other seats no one is teaching us and it’s excruciatingly painful but it’s because there’s this idea of like one side fits all this is how you do it across the board. No I want to be spoken to specifically as a location independent internet entrepreneur the way I’m doing the way of accounting. That’s taking accounting down to any entrepreneurs down to location independent entrepreneurs, internet entrepreneurs. The niche goes deep there and I would read that and go that’s for me, because I’m that person and he can speak directly to me. We talked so many people lately from all over the world, people who are also in gardening, people who are in mind set meditation training with VA Pension planners. I’ve talked to all sorts of people and I think this is something I hope inspires them to talk, think about what they’re teaching and think about they’re messaging around and get really specific on who they’re trying to help curved out that blue ocean for themselves. Chris: I just want to say too we’re big believers in the power of niche marketing and focus. If you’re concern of like which way should I go? Should I go red ocean? Should I go blue ocean? Or you say there’s a lot on this podcast that one approaches to transcending include so do both. Try if you’re an expert in accounting try a traditional competitive course that is similar to other ones you’ve seen out there and targeting a more general audience. Then just do some experiments with some really niche focused, combining different ideas or processes in different ways to try to make this kind of blue ocean course. Do both and see what your market resonates with because you may find that one way or the other it works best for you but the best way to do it I would encourage you to watch couple episodes ago about pre-selling as put both offers out there and get people on those courses and see what resonates and also see what you have the most fun doing in the type of interacting with the type of people that you’re attracting to those different offers. Joshua: I couldn’t agree more. Well Chris I think that’s a beautiful way to sum up today’s episode and would love to hear everyone’s thought on this content. You can email me at Joshua@lmscast.com or chris@lmscast.com we’re really loving this podcast we’d love hearing from everyone in the audience. We’re excited for the upcoming launch of Lift your LMS and if so if anyone is [interested 0:11:46] would like to be notified about that you can go to liftyourlms.com watch some of the content that we have available on that plug in and yeah let us know what you think. Until next week, we will see you soon. The post How to Create a Strategy for Your Online Course appeared first on LMScast.