Did you ever wish you were smarter? It would be great to be able to absorb information but where are you going to get the time? The day is only 24 hours long and you’re going to spend a good chunk of that time in bed anyway. For the rest of the time, you’ll probably be doing some vacant task like walking, driving or ironing. That’s no kind of life! Do you want to look back on all of those hours and cry tears of regret for all of the things you could have been learning? Of course you don’t - so why not make a change? For all of those moments when you’re not using your ears, fill them with knowledge! There are hundreds of educational podcasts out there and, to tell you the truth, the bulk of them are just excellent insomnia cures. It’s easy to gather together a list of educational podcasts but where are you going to find a catalogue of podcasts that are actually worth listening to? Luckily for you, kind reader, your friends at Growth Engineering have cobbled together the best of the bunch. Here are 7 of the most interesting, most entertaining and most educational podcasts to help turn you into the trivia-monger you always knew you could be. So when you take a break from your online learning courses to walk the dog, potter around the garden or chop onions, load up one of these bad boys and continue your learning journey: 1. The QI Podcast Did you know that your favourite font of quite interesting facts also has a podcast? No Such Thing As A Fish, to give it its full title, is a weekly podcast presented by the QI Elves, the cogs that run the QI research engine. Expect the same heady mixture of LOL and OMG! 2. Stuff You Should Know This podcast is presented by Chuck & Josh (Charles W. Bryant & Josh Clark), two senior editors of howstuffworks.com, a giant in the world of educational websites and a great place to go if you want to find out how stuff works! 3. Cracked Podcast Cracked.com is a reluctant teacher masquerading as America’s Only Humor Site. In the podcast, the top contributors come together to discuss issues of history, science or pop culture with their usual irreverent sprinkling of juvenile humour and liberal cursing. 4. Little Atoms Featuring guests as diverse as Noam Chomsky, Christopher Hitchens and Tim Minchin, Little Atoms is the go-to radio show for rationalists, atheists and sceptics. Check Little Atoms out for frequent discussions on the social impact of science, the ethics of medicine and the power of reason. 5. The Memory Palace If you don’t have a whole hour to spare, why not squeeze in an enlightening historical anecdote? These monthly little snapshots of history won’t keep you more than ten minutes but the chances are you’ll be thinking about them for the rest of the day. 6. The Futility Closet Here’s a great place to learn about some of the more quirky tales from the more obscure corners of history. 7. Intelligence Squared For those with a taste for debate, Intelligence Squared is the podcast for you. Each episode tackles a topical burning question and the argument is fought out by such skilled orators as Stephen Fry, Richard Dawkins and Germaine Greer. Click here for Part 2 Because these podcasts are entertaining as well as educational, you can share them on social media without feeling like too much of a nerd. Millions of people are reaping the benefits of social learning every day without even realising it. To find out more about the power of social learning, click that big, beautiful button! Like this article? Pop your email address in the box below to get an update when we post the second part!  

Research from OnTrack International People Development, detailed in a white paper, has found that 87% of companies use learner reaction questionnaires to gauge the results of training programmes. This ‘reaction’ evaluation - the first rung of the Kirkpatrick training evaluation process - can highlight whether learners enjoyed the training, but doesn’t tell you how successful it’s been. To truly evaluate the success of a training programme, the other stages of Kirkpatrick’s evaluation need to be reviewed. In other words, organisations also need to evaluate in terms of learning (e.g. by comparing pre- and post-learning test results), behaviour (has the training resulted in behavioural changes?), and results (essentially, how many more sales are employees making, how much more are they producing, to what extent have health and safety concerns diminished, how much faster is the business growing, etc). The OnTrack survey also showed that only 43% of respondents are measuring the business impact of their L&D projects - indicating that 57% aren’t able to specify whether their training programme has truly been a success. It’s pretty shocking to think that 57% of organisations are essentially in the dark about whether training is aligned to - and is achieving - business objectives. And only half of respondents are discussing with senior management the evaluation data they gather, indicating that senior management are not being kept sufficiently in the loop. After all, if senior management don’t know how successful the L&D projects are, how will L&D secure their buy-in further down the line? Indeed, one of the reasons it’s so important that senior management and decision-makers understand the success of training is that they will ultimately be signing off on L&D budgets. If they’re in the dark about the success - or otherwise - of their organisation’s training programmes, they might be reticent to sign off on a recurring budget, or erroneously increase a budget when the return on investment is not good. OnTrack’s research showed that just 35% of L&D departments are able to use evaluation to secure, create or increase L&D budgets. Thinking about those 43% of organisations, previously mentioned, which do measure the business impact of their L&D projects, 80% of senior managers in these organisations are confident that L&D is adding value to the business; 87% believe L&D efficiency has significantly improved; and 100% believe the data has driven additional commercial value. It just goes to show how vital it is that L&D departments thoroughly evaluate the impact of any training programmes on the business. Find out more about how to evaluate L&D projects by downloading our free white paper all about improving return on investment of training programmes:  The post The Importance of Evaluating Your L&D Projects appeared first on Growth Engineering.

There’s a lot to consider when you’re devising a new training and development plan for your organisation’s employees. Here are five facts that will make the entire process much easier for L&D professionals! Fact #1. Remember: boredom kills When our brains are active, we can absorb a whopping 84% more information than when we are bored. This is because when we’re bored, the amygdala (a part of the brain involved in the processing of memory, decision-making and emotional reactions) becomes hyperactive and sends information straight into the lower 80% of the brain - where it can’t be used or remembered. So don’t bore your learners. It’s absolutely vital that they are engaged in their training programmes if you want the L&D roll-out to be a success. Fact #2. We need a reason to learn If I ask you to go away and learn the states and capital cities of America, you’ll probably ask, "Why?" or "What’s in it for me?" It’s exactly the same for your learners. If they don’t know why they’re being asked to undertake training or what it’ll do for their career, they’ll think it’s just a waste of their time. "Taking this ISMM course will give you an Ofqual-recognised sales and marketing qualification that will be a great addition to your CV and may help your promotion prospects," is far more likely to motivate employees than, "You have been enrolled on the ISMM Level 3 Certificate eLearning course. Please log in to your Learning Management System to take it." Fact #3. Bite-size is best As humans, we can only remember a certain amount of information at any one time. If we try to squeeze in any more we’ll simply get ‘cognitive overload’ - a term coined by educational psychologist John Sweller in 1998. Once this hits, we’re unable to remember anything new, hence why bite-size nuggets of learning content is best. Fact #4. Repetition, repetition, repetition It’s incredibly unlikely we’ll remember anything without repetition. Think of moving house - it takes a while to remember your new postcode and landline number. For a couple of weeks you might have to carry the information around in your wallet, but after a few times of telling people and writing it down, you’ll find you know it off by heart. That’s why repetition is so vital in learning. But we don’t mean repetition in the sense of asking learners to write out an answer ten times or going through an eLearning module twice or more. Instead, this repetition can be achieved after the learning has taken place - through ‘social’ learning. Social or informal learning involves sharing information with fellow learners after the eLearning has ended, and collaborating on projects. It can be web-based (such as our Insights Groups) or taken into the classroom for team-based learning. Either way, it works to reinforce what has been learnt and get it to stick in learners’ minds. Fact #5. Fun is fantastic Fact #1 explained the importance of avoiding boredom, and said that the solution lies in engaging learners. One of the ways to do this is to make learning fun through the use of gamification. It involves awarding points, badges and achievements to learners as they process through their training, and it really works - evidence shows that our brains are 68% more active when we’re having fun, and since we’ve already seen that brain activity improves information absorption by 84%, it’s clear why gamification should be a part of your training and development plan! Find out more about gamification in eLearning and how it supercharges learner engagement by downloading our free white paper below!    The post 5 Facts Every L&D Professional Needs to Know appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Don’t worry, we’re not about to suggest that you arrange for your learners to break out into a fistfight! We don’t want them sharpening their pitchforks, we want them sharpening their minds. Here at Growth Engineering we’re best known for our gamified, social Academy Learning Management System. It might seem a bit odd that we encourage both collaboration (social) and competition (gamification), but they aren’t mutually exclusive and both are great ways to engage your learners. When you want to amp up your online learning competition, here are our top three tips: Real-world prizes Just because we’re dealing with online learning doesn’t mean we forget about the real world. Offering real, tangible rewards for work done online can be a fantastic motivational tool. We’ve talked before about our clients Hewlett-Packard and Tech Data Corporation. They regularly offer £20 Amazon vouchers for completing particular pieces of content, and these promotions increase traffic to their Academy by as much as seven times! But what if you’d struggle to rustle up the budget to give everyone a prize? Why not cut down costs by offering a single monetary prize? An easy way of doing this is by including some kind of quiz or other assessment within the learning content. Whoever scores best wins the prize, or in the case of a tie, draw the winner from a hat! And if you’re really working on a shoestring, there are a number of completely free prizes you can offer! So on our Academy LMS for example, you could offer a unique badge to the winner, or pin a post about their efforts on the ‘What’s Happening?’ feed. You could even mark them as an ‘Expert’ in that particular topic so that others can go to them to learn from their wisdom. These are simple things, but with a prize on the line you’re sure to see your learners fighting for victory. User-generated content This is a great way to engage your learners, because you don’t even need to spend the time and effort on sourcing new content! You simply run a contest which requires your learners to put together some kind of submission, and then offer a prize to the best one. For example, one of our clients ran a ‘Best Mobility Pitch’ contest on their Academy, with a tasty $2,000 travel voucher for the winner! To enter, each learner had to film a short video where they talk about mobile technology. The learners weren’t just signing up to a raffle, they were actually making an effort in applying their learning to these presentations. The contest did a fantastic job of firing up these learners, and they received dozens of entries. Having made the effort to write their entry presentations, these learners are also much more likely to have taken their learning on board. Gamification Gamification was one of the key reasons our Academy LMS was named the #1 LMS for 2015 by eLearning expert Craig Weiss. We know all about the value it brings to online learning. So on our Academy LMS learners earn badges and level-up as they complete content and share their achievements with each other. But the real competition is waged in the leaderboards, which proudly show off the learners with the most badges. These leaderboards can be broken down in regions and divisions, so learners from larger organisations can see how they stack up against their closest colleagues, as well as the organisation as a whole. Just take a look at how motivating GAME’s learners find this team-based competition: As we mentioned at the start of this post, sometimes competition and collaboration can go hand in hand. In fact, our Academy LMS actually merges leaderboards with social activity through ‘Insight Groups’. These act as chatrooms for individual topics, so that learners can have conversations about them and cement their knowledge. But the best part is that the more you contribute, the higher you’ll climb in that group’s leaderboard! This encourages everyone to get involved. If you’re interested in reading more about the benefits of gamification, we wrote a white paper on the subject:  The post Battle Royale: 3 Tips for Creating Online Learning Competition appeared first on Growth Engineering.

When you’re taking on the forces of dull online learning, you’ve got a massive challenge in front of you. You need to create an awesome piece of eLearning that engages the learners, teaches them what they need to know, and more often than not, you need to do it by next week on a shoestring budget. If only you had a secret weapon. Well it turns out that there is a source of power that all companies worth their salt should have. Your bank has it, your favourite coffee shop has it; - it’s even a key ingredient (figuratively speaking) of that chocolate bar that you’re quite partial to. That’s right - that powerful tool lurking in your arsenal is your brand! Your brand is more than just colours, fonts and logos. It tells the world who your company is and what your values are. If you mention your company’s name to a random passer-by, your brand will be the first thing that pops into their mind (unless they’ve never heard of you, in which case they’ll just think you need to lie down). But how does that help you create eLearning? Consistency Consistency is important if you want to deliver any kind of message and it’s no different for learning content. Inconsistencies, at the very least, will distract your learners from the task at hand. At their most destructive, they can derail the whole learning objective. You don’t want that, do you? Luckily, you’ve got a fully-formed brand at your disposal, which effectively means that you’ve got a framework to hang the eLearning from. The brand guidelines document (if you’re lucky enough to have one) is filled with rules that you need to follow, but it also defines the values and principles that guide your company. Try to tie your learning objectives to these core values- not only will this make it easier for your learners to identify with your message, it’ll also clarify the learning objective. That means that it’ll be easier for you to create! Reinforce company values There’s another sneaky little side-effect of using your brand to guide your eLearning production. By putting your values at the centre of the learning message, you are subliminally teaching your learners how your values inform everything that they do. If you decide to ignore your brand, you can probably create a good piece of content, but that’s all it’ll ever be. On the other hand, if you stay conscious of your brand, you’ll give the learners the tools they need to succeed within your company. Make your learners feel at home Your company’s mission statement is a powerful tool when it comes to training your people - but let’s not underestimate the practicalities of your brand. If you want to make the learning journey as stress-free as possible, you need to give your learners an environment that feels familiar. Refer to your brand guidelines when you’re creating the project and make sure that your piece of content looks like your piece of content. By doing this, you won’t shock people with unfamiliar colours and fonts, and you’ll also keep your brand guardians happy! So, the next time you’ve got to deliver really effective eLearning - try putting your brand at the centre of the production. You won’t just be matching the colours to your stationery - you’ll be helping to match your people with your company. Does your authoring tool give you the freedom you need to promote your company’s values? Does it let you upload custom branded images and assets, and arrange them into tidy libraries? No? Well, maybe Genie can help you out. This game-based authoring tool lets you collaborate with your whole team, meaning that you can invite your brand guardians to join in the eLearning production and make sure you don’t make any brand faux-pas. Give it a go for yourself by *rubbing the lamp below! *or you could just click it  The post Branding: eLearning’s Secret Weapon appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Yesterday we talked about the power a strong branding strategy will bring to your learning content. Well that’s not the only area which can do with a little brand magic. There’s also enormous value in making sure that your Learning Management System is more carefully branded than a farmer’s prize bull! We work very closely with our Academy LMS clients to make sure that their platform is THEIR platform, personalised just the way they like it. Unifying learners In much the same was as an army will rally behind a single flag, your learners will rally behind a strong brand. In an army, you can find people from all walks of life, but the flag will remind them that they’re all fighting for a common cause. Similarly, in a business, you’ll find all manner of people, and you’ll even find lots of diversity within individual departments. Let’s look at Steinhoff Retail, one of our clients. We joined forces back in 2011 when Bensons for Beds asked us to create Bensons Academy. It turned out to be such a roaring success, that in 2014 their parent company Steinhoff asked the team to expand the programme to include two more of its UK businesses, Harveys and Cargo. Bringing together more than 2,000 learners from across these three furniture heavyweights was a big task, and the branding strategy was right at the heart of the solution! Each learner level is a different African animal All of the Bensons branding was removed so that all efforts could be focused on Steinhoff. The Academy was re-branded as Steinhoff Learning Store, and the whole platform themed around the company’s South African roots. Even down to naming each of the levels learners can progress through after African animals. So while each of the three businesses could maintain their individual identities, it was made crystal clear to their learners that they’re part of a much bigger organisation. Traditionally, they wouldn’t have much contact with each other, but they now share a platform where they can interact, and add some consistency to the ways they operate. If you’re looking to find out more about Steinhoff’s story and the enormous ROI our partnership has brought, check out their case study! There’s no place like home Glinda the Good Witch of the North got it right when she forced Dorothy to repeat "there’s no place like home" three times. And a home is always better when you have free reign to decorate it as you please. That’s why we work so closely with our Academy LMS clients to fully customise their platform to meet each and every one of their needs. It’s also easy for their administrators to tweak at any time. Every single section of the LMS can be renamed to your liking. So, for example, Cisco renamed the ‘My Summary’ area to ‘My Wins!’. It’s a small, simple change, but it fits much more neatly with the message they’re sending through their learning programme! Your Academy can come in any colour you like (and not just black). You can build a welcoming home page, add custom banner images, and even design your own badges for learners to earn. Branding your LMS in this way makes it feel much more like a part of the business, rather than some project which has been tacked onto your learners’ existing workflow. It changes visiting the platform from being a chore into being all the rage! Take GAME as an example. They really went to town on their Academy, turning it into the perfect learning den for their employees. Their vivid purple branding floods every nook and cranny, they’ve designed some fantastic custom banners, and they’ve even created video game-themed badges (Such as Linked Awakening for sharing to LinkedIn 20 times). To GAME’s learners, their Academy is very clearly a part of their business. Thanks to GAME’s strong branding, this has become more than just an LMS for its learners. Instead, it’s the first port of call for anything GAME-related. It’s a learning platform, an information portal, and a company-wide social network. (Keep an eye out for a case study on GAME’s hugely engaging learning programme, to be released in the coming weeks!) So branding your LMS can deliver ROI, but what are the other benefits? Check out our white paper to learn about all the different ways you can be delivering ROI on your LMS!  The post The real value behind branding your LMS appeared first on Growth Engineering.

You want your eLearning to be as effective as possible. As we’ve mentioned time and again, engagement is the only way to win your learners’ hearts. If you’re trying to think of ways to boost engagement, how about this - why not just tell a story? Information is all over the place, all of the time. You’re being bombarded with it, right now, at an unprecedented rate. But it wasn’t that long ago that we conceived of such a notion as information technology. Hell, we’ve only been writing things down for the last few thousand years. Before that, stories were the only way to pass on our wisdom. Take Homer, for example (no, not that one). The Odyssey and the Iliad have stood the test of time to become two of the most celebrated works of classical literature - and Homer never picked up a stylus in his life! If stories weren’t so fantastic at passing knowledge on, we probably wouldn’t have kept doing it for so long. Storytelling is powerful, and it’s ancient and you’d be a fool to ignore it when you’re creating eLearning. Stories are the perfect software for the brain Storytelling is an act that’s been with us for so long, nobody even knows when we started doing it. Despite our recent technological growth spurt, our brains don’t evolve quite so quickly, and the preceding millennia of yarn-spinning have hardwired us to respond to stories rather than raw data. In laboratory studies, scientists have discovered that the listener’s brain produces oxytocin when they are being told a character-driven story. As social creatures, this chemical is essential in generating feelings of trust and empathy between members of the tribe. In the context of your eLearning, when you frame it as a story, your learners immediately engage - since it’s hard-coded into their brains, they have no choice! Stories put things in perspective If you have a tricky concept to describe to your learners, you could break it down into a list of the essential facts. You can sum these facts up in a nice bulleted list and feel satisfied that you’ve given them everything they need to know. The problem with facts is that without the right context, they lose meaning very quickly. If you want to explain a concept in a way that’s easy to digest, you need to put it in a form that works in harmony with the brain! Every time you provide an example, or present a scenario to your learners, you are effectively telling a little story. When you present your message in story form, your learners automatically picture the scene and begin empathising with the characters involved. This makes it easier for the learners to understand how the key facts impact their own day-to-day working lives. Stories are easier to remember We’ve touched on the Method of Loki before. To sum it up, this memory-enhancing technique helps people retain information by crafting a story around the key points. If you’ve ever watched Sherlock wandering around his mind palace , you’ll be familiar with the concept. By placing facts in a story, you can create a sequence of memorable steps that follow on from each other. With a keenly thought-out story, the learner simply needs to remember how it starts and the direction it’s heading in, and the rest of the details will fill themselves in - like magic! So, if you’re struggling to get a message across to your learners, try to make a story out of it - your next eLearning success might just start with ‘once upon a time…’ and, with a bit of luck, it’ll end with ‘happily ever after’ ! What’s that? You don’t have time to think up stories? Maybe you should give collaborative eLearning production a go. Genie is a game-based eLearning authoring tool that gets the whole team involved leaving you free to spin a great yarn. It’s also jam-packed with themed game templates, giving you plenty of inspiration for your next amazing learning journey! Take Genie for a spin today and start a new chapter in your story!  The post Why Your eLearning Needs A Good Story appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Do you know of any passionate individuals who would like to join the Google for Education Certified Trainer program? Certified Trainers are individuals who have a strong history of training other educators to reach their full potential using Google tools. Applications for Quarter 4 will open on Oct. 7th, 2015 and close on Nov. 22nd, 2015 this will be the last chance to apply to be a Certified Trainer in 2015! (From the Google for Education Team.)Google's new certification levels provide opportunities for more educators to seek a certification appropriate for their role. As a Google for Education Professional Development Partner, EdTechTeam provides schools and districts with the capacity needed to help more educators prepare well for certification (and prepare well to use GAFE with their students and colleagues).Introducing new technologies in schools is a long term cultural change commitment. We hope the following tips from our team will help you inspire and empower new trainers in the organizations you work with. For more GAFE and professional development tips, visit the EdTechTeam Blog, join the global community, or contact our team. We also hope you'll join us live on Wed, Aug. 26th at 1PM Pacific to deep-dive into tips for the Level 1 and Level 2 Certifications!

One of the best tools to hit education is getting an update extraordinaire! Google Classroom will now boast these six amazing new features.Calendar Integration - starting soon Google Classroom will 'automagically' create a calendar for each of your classes.Start A Discussion - Teachers can post questions and allow students to have discussions by responding to each other’s answers - fueling critical thinking and thinking about thinking. Reuse Posts - Did something go really well and you want to use it again next year? No problem - Google Classroom will now allow you to use old assignments  - and make them better by adding changes before reposting.Bump a Post - If you want to make sure students can find an old assignment you can "bump" it to the top of the stream - giving it the attention it deserves.Optional Due Dates - Teachers will now have the option to create assignments that don't include any due dates - making long term assignment easier to assign and manage.Google Form Integration -  Love using forms? We all do, but now you can attach your Flubaroo quiz or any class survey to your Google Classroom stream.

Today’s post was written by Bill Baer, senior technical product manager for the SharePoint team. "We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths." —Walt Disney In April, we broadly announced our vision, strategy, timeline and investment in three major areas: familiar and intuitive user experiences, cloud-inspired infrastructure with hybrid at the core and robust security and compliance for SharePoint Server 2016. Today we’re excited to announce availability of both SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview and the new cloud hybrid search preview for SharePoint Server 2013 and 2016. As we continue to develop SharePoint Server 2016, we’re paying close attention to trends in content management, team collaboration, user experiences across devices, and how the cloud can be blended into existing on-premises scenarios in new and compelling ways. We’ve been working hard to get this out to you, and we know you’ve been waiting patiently since we announced that it was coming. This is a long post, but there is a lot of important information, so if you want to jump in and install the preview, I really encourage you to read it completely. What’s new in SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview provides a first look at a select set of new infrastructure investments that will help define the scope, scale and reliability of SharePoint Server 2016. Since we’re building SharePoint Server 2016 on the same core platform for SharePoint Online, you won’t be surprised to see similarities between the two. SharePoint Server 2016 unlocks new user experiences that are intuitive, yet familiar. For IT professionals, it delivers improved performance and scale with simplified management. And for developers, it offers an opportunity to build for cloud or on-premises. As we move forward with future preview releases, we’ll continue to add new capabilities that represent our investments in audience and workload capabilities. What we’re sharing today is just a fraction of what will be in SharePoint 2016! Improved provisioning capabilities One of the more difficult challenges, beyond deploying software, is managing the IT infrastructure to support it. In many cases, IT investments directly impact the bottom line. SharePoint Server 2016 has been designed to reduce the emphasis on IT and streamline administrative tasks, so IT professionals can concentrate on core competencies and mitigate costs. Tasks that may have taken hours to complete in the past have become simple and efficient processes that allow IT to focus less on day-to-day management and more on innovation. Improved provisioning capabilities help IT departments and hosting service providers maximize existing infrastructure investments while exploring new services, improved management and higher availability through an improved role-based installation architecture. Mobile and touch Making decisions faster and keeping in contact are critical capabilities for increasing effectiveness in any organization. The ability for end users to access information while on the go is now a workplace necessity. In addition to a consistent cross-screen experience, SharePoint Server 2016 provides the latest technologies and standards for mobile push and information synchronization. You need to be sure your software works on the devices your users prefer. With deep investment in HTML5, SharePoint Server 2016 provides IT professionals and designers with capabilities that enable device-specific targeting of content. This helps ensure that users have access to the information they need, regardless of the screen they choose to access it on. SharePoint Server 2016 further empowers your workforce by delivering a consistent experience across screens, whether using a browser on the desktop, a mobile device, tablet or slate. Through this rich experience, users can easily transition from one client to another without having to sacrifice feature fidelity. App Launcher The App Launcher provides a new navigation experience where all your apps are easily available from the top navigation bar. You can quickly launch your application, browse sites and access your personal files. New and improved controls Based on our investments in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Server 2016 document libraries inherit the new, improved control surface for working with files and content, simplifying the user experience for file creation, sharing and management. Simple and natural sharing SharePoint Server 2016 improves the sharing experience by making it more natural for users to share sites and files. Just click the Share button at the top right corner of every page, enter the names of people you want to share with, and press Enter. That’s it; you’re done! The people you just shared with will get an email invitation with a link to the site. SharePoint still uses powerful concepts like permission levels, groups and inheritance to provide this experience, but you don’t have to understand those concepts anymore to accomplish everyday tasks like sharing a site. Part of sharing is also understanding who can see something. If you want to find out who already has access to a particular site, simply go to the Settings menu in top right corner, click Shared with, and you’ll see the names and pictures of people who have access to the site. Large file support The world of collaboration has changed, and text-based files are shifting to modern media, videos, audio and more. SharePoint Server 2016 provides support for uploading files up to 10GB. Compliance tools Preventing data loss is non-negotiable, and overexposure to information can have legal and compliance implications. SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview provides a broad array of features and capabilities designed to make certain that sensitive information remains that way, and to ensure that the right people have access to the right information at the right time. New In-Place Hold Policy and Document Deletion Centers, which allow you to manage time-based, organization-wide in-place hold policies to preserve items in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business for a fixed period of time, in addition to managing policies that can delete documents after a specified period of time. Learn more about SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview and see many of these updates in action on this week’s Office Mechanics show: Try it out and share your feedback You can download SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview today via the Microsoft Download Center and share feedback directly with our engineering teams through the new SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview forum. We also welcome feature requests and feedback via the SharePoint Server suggestion box on UserVoice, @SharePoint on Twitter, and in the comments below. We’re eager to hear your feedback and use it to make SharePoint Server 2016 the best experience for information workers, IT professionals and developers alike! Cloud hybrid search improving search and discovery Today we’re also pleased to announce the availability of the new cloud hybrid search preview, which allows customers using SharePoint Server 2013 and Office 365 to retrieve unified search results through a combined search index in Office 365. This new hybrid search solution is also native to SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview. With this new hybrid configuration, this same experience will also allow customers to leverage the power of Office Graph to discover relevant information in Delve—regardless of where information is stored. You’ll not only be able to get back to all the content you need via Delve, but also discover new information in the new Delve profile experiences and even have the ability to organize content in Boards for easy sharing and access. On-premises and Office 365 search results in Office Delve. Cloud hybrid search offers users the ability to seamlessly discover relevant information across on-premises and Office 365 content. With the cloud hybrid search solution, you index all your crawled content, including on-premises content, in your search index in Office 365. When users query your search index in Office 365, they get unified search results from both on-premises and Office 365 cloud services with combined search relevancy ranking. Cloud hybrid search provides some key benefits to customers of both SharePoint Server 2013 and early adopters of SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview, such as: The ability to reduce your on-premises search footprint. The option to crawl in-market and legacy versions of SharePoint, such as 2007, 2010 and 2013, without requiring upgrade of those versions. Avoiding the cost of sustaining large indexes, as it’s hosted in Office 365. The new cloud hybrid search solution is the first step in our new hybrid vision that allows customers to take advantage of new innovation in Office 365. You can download cloud hybrid search today via the Microsoft Download Center and share feedback directly with our engineering teams through the new cloud hybrid search forum. To keep up-to-date with all of our hybrid scenarios across Office 365 visit our new hybrid resources center. As Plato said, "The beginning is the most important part of the work," and we’re excited to start the journey for the next generation of SharePoint with SharePoint Server 2016. —Bill Baer @williambaer Frequently asked questions Q. Can I install SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview or the cloud hybrid search preview in production environments? A. It is not recommended to install SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview in production environments. Q. Can I upgrade SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview to RTM when released? A. No, SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview cannot be upgraded to RTM. Q. When can I start using cloud hybrid search? A. While the cloud hybrid search preview is now available, it will not be available to be configured for use with Office 365 until early September. Q. What will happen to my indexed content in Office 365 when the cloud hybrid search service is released? A. The indexed content will remain in the Office 365 index when the cloud hybrid search service is released. You will not need to re-index any on-premises content. Q. Where can I learn more about cloud hybrid search? A. To learn more about cloud hybrid search see connect.microsoft.com/office/SelfNomination. The post Announcing availability of SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview and cloud hybrid search appeared first on Office Blogs.

A second full moon for the month of July is seen next to the dome of the U.S. Capitol on Friday, July 31, 2015 in Washington. via NASA http://ift.tt/1KHzK49

The International Space Station, with a crew of six onboard, is seen in silhouette as it transits the moon at roughly five miles per second, Sunday, Aug. 2, 2015, Woodford, VA. via NASA http://ift.tt/1IRWKQp

On July 28, 2015, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on the Landsat 8 satellite captured images of algal blooms around the Great Lakes, visible as swirls of green in this image of Lake St. Clair and in western Lake Erie. via NASA http://1.usa.gov/1ImZPCp

All students must bring your student I.D. to confirm that you have registered and to check out books.Link Crew Orientation (Freshmen Only): 7:30 a.m. - 10:05 a.m.Period 0:  10:15 a.m. - 10:44 a.m.Period 1:  10:50 a.m. - 11:19 a.m.Period 2:  11:25 a.m. - 11:54 p.m.Period 3:  12:00 p.m. - 12:34 p.m. Lunch:     12:34 p.m. - 1:10 p.m. Period 4:   1:16 p.m. - 1:45 p.m.Period 5:   1:51 p.m. - 2:19 p.m.Period 6:   2:26 p.m. - 2:55 p.m.

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This new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows the center of the Lagoon Nebula, an object with a deceptively tranquil name, in the constellation of Sagittarius. The region is filled with intense winds from hot stars, churning funnels of gas, and energetic star formation, all embedded within an intricate haze of gas and pitch-dark dust. via NASA http://1.usa.gov/1K5cASs

This colorful bubble is a planetary nebula called NGC 6818, also known as the Little Gem Nebula. The rich glow of the cloud is just over half a light-year across — humongous compared to its tiny central star — but still a little gem on a cosmic scale. via NASA http://1.usa.gov/1MagZYQ

Saturn’s unusual appearance in this picture is a result of the planet being imaged via an infrared filter. via NASA http://1.usa.gov/1MfUeTg

NASA astronaut Scott Kelly took this photograph of a sunrise over the western United States and posted it to social media on Aug. 10, 2015. Kelly wrote, "#GoodMorning to those in the western #USA. Looks like there's a lot going on down there. #YearInSpace" via NASA http://1.usa.gov/1Tl6wQ4