Sunday, February 5, 2017
LSG Webinar Emerging learning tools you cant afford to miss
LSG Webinar Emerging learning tools you cant afford to miss
This afternoon, Im attending a Learning and Skills Group webinar by Julie Wedgwood - where she plans to share with us an amazing new suite of tools that has caught her imagination, demonstrating how they work and why shes been using them. Ive never been to any of Julies past events but given how well known she seems to be in the UKs elearning community, Im quite keen to hear what she says.
These are live blogged notes from the event and as always Ill do my best to capture the proceedings with some of my views thrown in for equal measure! Julie promises to focus on tools thatll help us with our changing roles as trainers - being facilitators, graphic artists, animators, designers, and every new aspect of our jobs.
So heres a quick list of the tools that Julie showcased today.
A Quick Fix for Amateur Photos
A good picture is worth a thousand words and given how cool digital photography is turning out to be, its more an more available - though very few of us are good photographers. So how do you make your photos look better on slides, elearning, etc. So what tool did Julie show? One of my current favourites - Poladroid. Its a great tool to create vintage style polaroid pictures. You will see some of these on my blog posts and demo elearning modules. Mywebface and Zwinky combined with Poladroid, can be a potent combination. Polaroids - dont have to be posh as Julie says -- they just need to be real. A great new tool Julies showed was Shape Collage, which can just convert a bunch of pictures you own into a collage of the shape of your choice. And the output looks just great.
Message Posters
Who doesnt like to do posters -- but if youre like me then you perhaps suck at it. So if you want to create a motivational poster, Big Huge Labs has an online app called Motivator. And then again, the output may not blow you away, but I guess the fact that you can make things really quick makes it very useful for a lot of people.Colour scheme tools
Big Huge Labs has a colour schemer too, but then I like Kuler much better and on my desktop I like Color Schemer studio and Pixie. Obviously colour coordination lends a huge amount of professionalism to your presentation. Ive written about this on my recent blogpost as well, so this is handy advice.Screen Annotation Tools
Julie demonstrated this screen annotation tool called Mouse Shade -- on the Mac I use Omni Dazzle. Theyre great to annotate the screen when recording screencasts or doing application training or even doing some special effects during presentations. Theyre definitely two great tools that you should have depending on which platform youre on.Free Tools for Accessibility
Some tools that I couldnt keep track of especially amongst Julies accessiblilty tools list:- Rapid Set
- Spr-Ort
- Orato
- Sonar
- Big and Chunky Mouse Pointers
- Mousekeeter
Finding Tunes to play in Elearning or Training
Julie showed a great site called Television Tunes for you to find and use the kind of tune that you want for training and to use in your courses. You should get a broadcast license to use them for yourself. You can get a broadcast license by asking PRS for Music. Its a great way to get social culture into the classroom, help people relax and takes the edge off some of your difficult subjects. Please check the legal statement before you use these PLEASE!Creating Animation Sequences
Im sure what Ill see here: another of my favourite free tools - Xtranormal. Julie, youve won my heart by promoting my latest favourite tool.I recently put up a demo with this on a previous blogpost.
Creating Simple Props
Often youll need props to create the right kind of environment in training - for example a Britains got talent style buzzer maybe! Julie told a very interesting story of how she used this kind of a prop -- you should make Julie tell the story. Ill be no good with it. You can get your own stuff from I want one of those. Very very interesting! Julies webinar was so fast paced, that I got a lot out of this session. Some of the other tools I love are:
- Prezi
- Vuvox - online collages
- Dipity and Xtimeline
Available link for download
