eLearning Courses Should Be More Immersive and Interactive Than Ever Before Instructional design teams need to leverage advances in learning technology to transport learners on a sensory voyage and make elearning courses more immersive and interactive than ever before. Comics Vs Textbooks In the battle of Comics Vs Textbooks, the comics always won. As a child, I always found my collection of comics far more interesting than my school text books. Thanks to DC and Marvel in no small measure, I could spend hours lost in fascinating stories of legendary superheroes in epic battles. These stories were always far more interesting than math text books filled with quadratic equations which refused to be solved! Ignoring the basics tenets of learning It was only much later, when I was exposed to the science of learning, that I began to understand how the human brain is better tuned to understand concepts that are explained pictorially and made interesting by weaving stories around them. Yet, through much of my career spanning 18 years with large corporates, I have been exposed to eLearning courses that ignore these very basic tenets of learning. As we grow older and busier we also suffer from an information overload which causes the attention spans of adult learners to diminish - drastically reducing their ability to process any information that is not of immediate interest or essence. Studies have shown that the average adult attention span is 8 secs, lower than that of a goldfish! Not very flattering for humans and definitely not a statistic that corporate training departments would like to hear. The bulk of eLearning courses being churned out by organizations today contain content that is staid, serious and plain boring. Amen. Training departments have the unenviable task of regimenting learning and churning out volumes of prescriptive eLearning courses for a generation of millennial learners who are already being bombarded by external stimuli like social media. But as Uncle Ben (Spiderman’s late uncle) aptly said "With great power comes great responsibility" Corporate training and development teams will need to respond to this challenge by using creativity in transforming eLearning courses and content. Rediscovering the basics No wonder then that we are rediscovering the basic fundamental principles of active learning. Scenario based learning, 3D simulations, game-based learning and video-based learning are attempting to put the joy back in learning by creating an immersive learning experience that is truly enjoyable. Advances in learning technology have empowered instructional designers to think out of the box and move beyond creating courses to creating new learning experiences. Further advances in learning technology promise to transport learners on a sensory voyage and make learning more interesting than ever before. It’s only when training managers script this transformation of content that we will begin to see legions of learners take to imbibing learning experiences that start to define them. After all as Batman said, "Its not who I am underneath. But what I do that defines me." This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

We've put the finishing touches on our second weekly podcast detailing all the happenings in the mobile learning field for the week of April 9, 2012 and you can listen to RJ Jacquez and I talk about the week that was by clicking the link here.The central theme for this week's episode was a discussion of the use of  "Mobile App vs. Mobile Web" for creating and delivery mobile learning but we also covered a variety of other topics including announcements like Google's new Project Glass initiative, ADL's Project Tin Can preview and recent rumblings from Adobe as to what we can expect in the upcoming Creative Suite 6/CS6 in foundational products like Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Flash and how these new features will help push the boundaries of possibility for mobile learning content creation and deployment.While we're still trying to gain our footing in terms of pace and approach, the first couple of podcasts have been well received and we're appreciative of the comments and suggestions being offered by early listeners. RJ continues to perform double duty by recording a second weekly podcast in Spanish with Mayra Aixa Villar that is bringing benefit and knowledge to a whole other market...I only wish I had paid attention enough in high school Spanish class so I could at least listen to each episode much less participate in any substantive way. I know their episode "dos" will be posted by Monday, April 16th so watch (and listen) for that!Finally, RJ is working to gain approval from Apple to release the weekly recordings to a broader audience via the iTunes App Store and we'll let everyone know when that's a reality.#TWmLearning App of the WeekThis week's choice for App of the Week is Snapguide, which bills itself as "the easiest way to make and share good looking guides".  This free App for iOS devices is quite cleaver and an excellent example of how compelling user generated content can be built on-the-fly using only an iPhone or iPad and easily shared with a broader audience.  Everything is KISS elegent here including and sign-up and friending process.Thanks in advance for listening and please share any comments or ideas with me below so I can pass them on to my fellow podcast collaborators too.Robert  ;?)

  Updated daily, the HR News home page is your one-stop shop for the latest news and featured articles. This page compiles top staff-written and external news of general interest to HR, plus major stories in the HR Disciplines. Quits Rate Continues to Rise, Signaling Worker Confidence By Roy Maurer  3/11/2015 More Americans are quitting their jobs—a sign that labor demand is strengthening, according to the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The March BLS report examines the hires and separations in the U.S. labor market from January 2015, but also...

This post from Marketing Vox is a great piece for continuing the thread of how we can change conferences. They cite a survey that found that: Conference organizers are now planning more time for Q&A (72% more vs. three years ago), more interactive sessions between speaker and audience (70%), and more panel sessions (64%). At the same time, they plan fewer keynote sessions (30%) than three years ago. Business leadership conferences feature more podcasts (62%), blogging and Twittering during events (58%), as well as live videocasting (56%). Less common, though still noted, are YouTube broadcasts (34%) and "unconferences" (18%). Organizers are expanding or considering expanding their business into emerging markets such as China (32%), the Middle East (24%) and India (24%). So, as you head out and plan your conference activities, look to see if you are providing the appropriate infrastructure to support these functions.

So I'm doing a couple of things at DevLearn 2009 this year. I'm doing a pre-con workshop on Social Media and Learning and we're also doing a Social Learning Camp that will run throughout the conference. Of course I want to use Social Media to develop the ideas, themes and focal points for these events and I've always found that you can't really learn if something will work unless you actually try to use it for something - so here goes. I always liked using post-it notes and whiteboards (I know, how very 0.5 of me) for general organization of something so I like this metaphor that PinDax is using.The image you hopefully see below is a live view of the PinDax board I'm using to organize thoughts for DevLearn. The full board is here. It's not perfect - I want to be able to edit notes once they are posted and I want some way to export the whole thing to my desktop for an archive - but the price is right and I think its got some good functionality. I've checked with a couple of folks and while you should be able to view the site without signing up, you need to sign in to be able to leave a note- should take a few seconds - pls let me know if there are any problems. Anyway, once you are signed up, please feel free to add, move, comment, etc - there is also a synchronous chat app so we might check that out - but I do believe that We are better then Me at putting something like together and would love and value your input. Thanks and Happy Posting!

Way back in 1996, a small company, Forefront, contacted me and traded their new software, WebWhacker 1.0, for a small click-thorough to their site on my Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators page. It was the neatest piece of software. It allowed the me to download a Web page or series of Web pages to the computer desktop and the text and images were able to be accessed locally! To put things in perspective, this software was for Windows 3.1 and Mac OS 7.x with a beta version for Win 95. Those were the days when many of us were still writing HTML by hand to post our pages. It was nice to be able to download someone else's site to my computer to showcase it a workshop, since there was often not an network connection in workshop rooms. I would bring the "WebWhacked" sites on a diskette since, of course, we were all working on desktops.Nowadays, the ability to save Web page text and images to the the desktop is built right into the Web browsers. In Firefox, simply pick FILE-SAVE PAGE. In Chrome, pick SAVE PAGE AS - WEBPAGE, COMPLETE. In Safari,it is FILE - SAVE AS - WEB ARCHIVE. Don't forget to copy the original page's URL for your citation!However, the Web now has more types of information available than just Web pages that we want to archive or read locally when there is no Internet available. As students collect assets for a project, they are interested in Web pages, tweets, and videos. If students can download their assets to read and view when they do not have access to the Net, they can work on their projects anywhere. In addition, if educators require students to hand in their downloaded assets with their papers or projects, it can also be a deterrent to student plagiarism.Keep EverythingThere is a new software app for Mac computers and iPads created by groosoft that is called Keep Everything. It allows the user to locally archive Web pages, Tweets, videos, and more to the local computer or iPad. Users can simply drag the URL or Tweet to the Keep Eveything window and the archived pages are saved both locally and to a Dropbox folder and can be synced between all the user's Apple devices. Through Keep Everything, you can also get back to the original source page through a link icon. Another useful feature of Keep Everything is the choice available when downloading an article. The user can have the entire page archived or just simpler-looking page that includes the text of the article. The app is available for both the Mac and the iPad. Here is a introduction to how it works. I also made a short video on the Mac of how I saved a tweet with Keep Everything.  There are free versions of both apps to try out the product. There are in-app purchases to upgrade to the premium version. ($4.99 for iOS and $9.99 fo for the Mac.) The free version limits the user to under 100 saved items.iOS app store:https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/keep-everything/id786975595?mt=8Mac app store:https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/keep-everything/id786983884?mt=12   Visit Kathy's Web pages: Kathy Schrock's Home Page Kathy Schrock's Guide to Everything

My favorite session at Educon was session 5. You won’t find this title in program, but this is a snapshot of a great conversation that I had with Rob Grecko. He asked me: "What are you willing to get fired for? Poor test scores vs. refusing to teach scripted curriculum?" Photo Credit: muffytyrone via Compfight cc We all make compromises and do things that we may philosophically disagree with at times to work in a system called a school, district, or whatever. If we are always backtracking to obey district mandates it is a slippery slope. Where do we draw the line? When is enough, enough? But I also have an addiction to food, clothing, and shelter (hat tip to Ron Houtman)  that my wife and children share. I need my job to live and I was raised to respect and obey authority figures. I think a not so subtle belief of my religious upbringing was that they have all of the answered figured out and everyone else is wrong, which very quickly leads to listen to their authoritative voice and don’t question it. If you know me, you know that I have shed the "don’t ask questions part" but in truth I am a complicated mixture of rule follower and rebel and don’t even know how to classify myself. So the driving question haunts me because the truth is I am not willing to lose my family income for what I believe is the best for students. The truth is also though that I am not in a position where I have to make that choice. But let’s try an experiment in empathy. What if you WERE met by your administrator tomorrow and handed a scripted test prep curriculum and told that you had to use it the rest of the year and that your students had to reach a certain level on the state test or you would be fired.  Which risk would you choose? Teach the test prep curriculum and hope you don’t get fired from low scores or ignore the scripted curriculum in favor of meaningful student-based inquiry and risk getting fired for disobeying orders. Which risk has the better payoff? Which risk helps students? What are YOU willing to get fired for?

  My good friend Christine Martell shared a wonderful story of career mentoring with me the other day. A woman was being sexually harrassed at work and went to see a labor attorney about it. After a few minutes of discussion about the situation, this was the conversation that followed: "Karen, I’m going to talk to you like we’re having a glass of wine, okay?" "Okay, I like those conversations," I responded with a small smile. Then she looked at me quite calmly and said, "What the f*$% are you doing?" Huh? It’s not often that I’m dumbstruck. The look on my face must’ve relayed my shock. "What the hell are you doing?" she repeated. "Clearly this organization is showing you that they don’t value you." It was like getting cold cocked right on the side of the head. "Here’s what you need to do. First, you need to have a better understanding of what your compensation really is. Fix that. Then, every single day, do something to get yourself out of there. Every. Single. Day."   I love this story for two reasons. First, is the absolute clarity that comes when you ask a question like "What the F*#& are you doing?" It cuts through all the crap and gets right down to basics. When someone says this to you after you've gone through your tale of woe, it pulls you up short. You say to yourself,  "Yeah, what the F*%# AM I doing?!" You need that periodically. It's a reality check that puts everything into perspective.  The other reason I love this story is the attorney's advice at the end--to do something every single day to move out of the situation. Every. Single. Day. It's easy to get stuck in complaining or worrying about your dysfunctional career situation. But this doesn't do anything for you in the end. You're still stuck. You need to focus on action--moving yourself forward into something new and much better for you. Doing something daily not only creates the forward momentum you need, it also gives you something else to focus on besides how much your situation sucks.  So. What the F*$# are YOU doing? And what are you doing each day to move your career forward?  _______________________________________________________________________ Trying to figure out what the F*$# you're doing? I'm running two Virtual Retreats this fall and both of them will help you get clear and create a plan for moving forward. More info here.   

(link)This is a really interesting article about differences in the ways that young boys and girls learn and process language. "Some careful consideration needs to made of instructional implications for boys given some of these new discoveries. Learning by listening and learning by reading are not synonymous; route-congruent factors(listening - oral presentation, reading - written response) may need to be considered when a learning gap or frank underachievement is seen, and an insistence on the availability of auditory-visual supports (reading along with books-on-tape, detailed handouts for lecture courses) should be a requirement of every classroom."Take a read for yourself - I need to dig deeper into some to the other resources mentioned in the piece - but am I alone or does this give anyone else pause about how we think about instructional design? Does anyone else wonder what else we may be missing? Anyone? Anyone?

"Would schools improve if administrators had to send their own children to the lowest...

Watched part of Meet the Robinsons this week. This clip is a great example of what we mean by failure being an important part of learning.  

If you really do put a small value upon yourself, rest assured that the world will not raise your price. - Anonymous How many of us, as professional service providers, have heard from prospects, "Your fees are too high," "Someone else will do it for less," or "I don't see why I have to pay all that money just to have you do an audit, write a brief, create a marketing plan, etc.?" And, more important, how many resist the urge to simply lower our fees to get the work? The answer: all of us and few of us. The problem with lowering our fees for a particular piece of work is that we forever have established our value as that lower amount. As our anonymous friend said, if we ourselves put a low value on our work, certainly no one else is going to suggest our value is any higher. Why do so many of us fall victim to these worst tendencies? To answer this, we first have to look at objections in general and how they fit into the selling process for professional services...      

Here at TalentLMS headquarters, building a great LMS platform is not just a business for us — it’s also our passion. Like modern-day craftsmen we take pride in our products and in how well our customers and the market at large has embraced them. And today, we have a special reason to be proud of, as GetApp -the premiere Cloud-based business apps marketplace — has just been named TalentLMS as the #1 LMS solution in its Q3 GetRank listing of the top 25 LMS apps. GetRank is GetApp’s quarterly ranking of the top 25 Cloud-based business apps across different enterprise-focused product categories (CRM, LMS, HR, etc). GetApp uses a variety of publicly available, in-house, and third-party data to calculate each apps GetRank scores, and applies its unique in the industry methodology to weight multiple factors such us user generated reviews, integrations, mobile platforms, media presence, and security. You can read GetApp’s Q3 LMS ranking in full here. We started working on TalentLMS with the aim to build the best and easiest-to-use Cloud-based eLearning platform, and our market success along with GetApp’s ranking us as the #1 Cloud LMS is a vindication of our vision and hard work. That said, we’re also especially happy for the glowing reviews TalentLMS has received all these years from our customers at GetApps’ TalentLMS review page, and elsewhere. Save for our Support team, which will stay put to provide you with the best support this side of the galaxy, the rest of us will now go and celebrate our victory with some champagne and M&Ms. Then, starting again tomorrow, we’ll get back to working on making TalentLMS even better — as we don’t plan on leaving that #1 spot anytime soon. The post #1! TalentLMS tops the GetApp best LMS rankings for Q3 2015! appeared first on TalentLMS Blog.

I've always liked ideas which in a way connect us to what is really important in life. In this world of snapshots and selfies, I find myself many times overlooking little things in life which brighten my day. While reading my Facebook feed, I noticed a link my friend, Daniela Pesconi-Arthur shared about the 365 GRATEFUL PROJECT. I just loved it!The idea is pretty simple: you take a photo a day of something you're grateful for.According to the 365grateful website, "The project was created by Hailey. In early 2008, in an effort to fight depression, Hailey started a year long photographic project which involved taking one Polaroid photo a day of something she felt grateful for. Initially this was a chore but eventually it became a delight."Watch Hailey's inspiring video:  My friend, Daniela, has started her #365grateful project here: http://365reasons-mywritingshed.blogspot.co.uk/I'll be posting my photos and posts using instagram plus the hashtag #365grateful and will be collecting them all at my Tumblr http://anamariacult.tumblr.com/This was my first photoWouldn't this be a great idea for a writing project with students?Coincidentally, this same week, I read a post by Vicki Davis about writing a Joy Journal which kinds of reinforces this idea of being positive about life.http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com.br/2013/04/9-fine-reasons-to-keep-journal-and-how.html

You’ve probably seen the headlines following the Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens. Adults seemed shocked that teens spend 9 hours and tweens 6 hours a day with media. Knee-jerk reactions include a call for a shutdown switch for devices after a set time. No media in bedrooms. No technology while doing homework. Now take a breath. I want more »

I had the honor of speaking at #AISA15 in Montgomery, AL today. Below you will find the resources I shared and ways to keep abreast of developments from me and from Choose2Matter. I look forward to […] The post #AISA15 Leaders Matter! appeared first on Angela Maiers.

Chad Udell shares his slides from his session, "Content Strategy for Conversion and Multiscreen Delivery."

Join author and mobile learning expert Chad Udell for this session at ASTD 2014 in Washington, D.C., on May 6.

Only a fraction of exhibitors offer mobile learning, and even fewer are using mobile’s unique capabilities. These 23 vendors leverage mobile’s building blocks for exceptional mobile learning.

If you're still talking about the digital divide, you haven't heard about Google Chromebooks. Chromebooks are not only affordable, they actually save schools, districts, and families money. Chromebooks are only about $225 and last for about three years. That's $75 a year. The devices cost less than your back to school list for the next three years and yet provide so much more.Let's take a look. Check out the basic list below. With the exception of your child's clothing, the back-to-school list is history. Pencils, paper, sticky notes, calendar, crayons, erasers, notebooks, even trading cards are a thing of the past with Chromebooks. Say "Goodbye back to school list" and "Hello Google Draw, Docs, Sheets, Calculator, and more."I want more »

As the school year begins there are numerous resources to ease and enrich the lives of innovative educators and their students that will facilitate effective teaching and learning. Here are my top picks for 2014/15.I want more »

As a 2014 Blackboard Catalyst Exemplary Course Award Winner, I’ve prepared this poster presentation to share at BbWorld14 on Tuesday, July 17th from 5:00pm-7:00pm in the Exhibit Hall. Stop by then and/or feel free to tweet me any questions you might have. To enlarge, click poster image above For more details about my award-winning course, see the 6-minute course tour as well as detailed overview I previously shared. I have also made the entire course available to self-enroll and/or download as OER package, available at http://coursesites.com/s/_ett510ecp. For more details about Blackboard’s Exemplary Course Program, visit blackboard.com/ecp

Tue, 7/15/14, 2:45-3:30pmMurano 3304 During this session at the BbWorld 2014, Learn about one instructor’s use of YouTube’s free and easy-to-use features incorporated in Blackboard for recording, editing, captioning, and embedding video into his online course. An overview of the steps for recording, editing, captioning, video in YouTube will be provided as well as examples shared for various approaches for seamlessly incorporating video into any online course. A summary of feedback survey results from students regarding their experiences with video in the course will be shared as well as lessons learned by the instructor for those wishing to follow the same suggested steps for incorporating video in their own course. Participants will have the opportunity to ask questions throughout the session and see first-hand a demo by the instructor of how the video was seamlessly incorporated into Blackboard Learn. Accompanying slides are available here and links included in slides shared below. Resource Links Blackboad Learn Quick Hit: Video Everywhere Building Block Sample YouTube Account Profile Verify Your YouTube Account Sample Course Playlist on YouTube Sample Captioned Course Welcome Video Sample Screencast Course Tour Sample Screencast Group Tour Sample How-To Screencast for Video Discussion Self-enroll in the Sample ETT 510 Exemplary Course

See the highlights from day 1 of BbWorld 2014.