These 12 Tutorials Teach You How to Build an Interactive E-Learning Course It’s a fact that you CAN build effective elearning with rapid elearning tools. You’re not locked into linear, click and read content. All it requires is that you craft a sound learning strategy and get the most out of your tools. To demonstrate this, I deconstructed an effective elearning course originally built in Flash and then built a mock up in PowerPoint. In a previous post I shared how to create the graphic elements for that course in PowerPoint. In today’s post, we’ll look at how to assemble the course and some of the production techniques I used. While the tutorials give you a quick tour of what I did to build the prototype, your best bet is to download the PowerPoint file and break it apart to see how it was assembled. Deconstruct the Course Structure The course places you in a situation where you determine the threat level of various employees. Review The first stage is the overhead office where you review the threat level of all of the characters. Production notes: Interview Refer
Create a Presentation Your Audience Will Care About - Nancy Duarte by Nancy Duarte | 9:00 AM October 10, 2012 Generating ideas is the easiest part of creating a presentation. The hard part is deciding what to keep. Many of your ideas may be fascinating or clever, but you can’t squeeze them all in — and no one wants to hear them all, anyway. The people in the audience are the stars of your show. Spell out the big idea: Your primary filter should be what I call your big idea: the one key message you must communicate. Try expressing your big idea in a complete sentence to make sure it’s fully baked. Once you’ve spelled out your big idea, generate lots of supporting material to give yourself more to choose from when it’s time to pick your best stuff. By the way, you don’t have to start from scratch when generating content: Dig up other presentations, industry studies, news articles, reports, surveys — anything that’s relevant to your big idea. Wield a sharp hatchet: Once you’ve gathered lots of material, start cutting mercilessly on your audience’s behalf.
Structure Your Presentation Like a Story - Nancy Duarte by Nancy Duarte | 8:00 AM October 31, 2012 After studying hundreds of speeches, I’ve found that the most effective presenters use the same techniques as great storytellers: By reminding people of the status quo and then revealing the path to a better way, they set up a conflict that needs to be resolved. That tension helps them persuade the audience to adopt a new mindset or behave differently — to move from what is to what could be. Here’s how it looks when you chart it out: And here’s how to do it in your own presentations. Craft the Beginning Start by describing life as the audience knows it. After you set that baseline of what is, introduce your vision of what could be. What is: We fell short of our Q3 financial goals partly because we’re understaffed and everyone’s spread too thin. What could be: But what if we could solve the worst of our problems by bringing in a couple of powerhouse clients? Once you establish that gap, use the rest of the presentation to bridge it
Disney Research software makes mechanizing characters easy Mechanized characters, such as clockwork automatons that move using a series of gears, go back hundreds of years. Now the most difficult aspect of their mechanical design, which took specialized engineering skill and lots of trial and error, has largely been eliminated by a pair of new software tools developed by Disney Research labs in Zürich and Boston, and labs at ETH Zürich and MIT. They're being presented this week at ACM SIGGRAPH 2013, the International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. View all The first set of tools allows a designer to load an articulated character model into the software, where they define the actuation points on its joints. Then by simply drawing a curve to represent the desired path of a joint, the software automatically builds and optimizes the mechanical assembly that will produce it. The researchers tested the software by designing ten animated characters, which took about a half an hour apiece.
3 tips for TED speakers (and other talkers) ¿iPad y educación? ¡Ya no es un debate! Si el dinero no fuese un problema, ¿querría un profesor o profesora que sus alumnos/as tuviesen un iPad? Incluso aunque solo fuese para investigar otra perspectiva diferente o agregar recursos a nuestra práctica docente. Incluso aunque sólo lo quieras para usarlo como una forma alternativa de desarrollar el aprendizaje... La investigación apoya que este tipo de dispositivos son una herramienta, un medio, de aprendizaje para el alumnado: las escuelas e institutos de todo el mundo empiezan a implementar tablets PC, y el iPad es la predilecta Cualquier dispositivo móvil puede ayudar en el proceso de aprendizaje: el iPad, sencillamente, es el líder actualmente. Ofrece oportunidades únicas dentra del aula y ayuda en la transición del hogar al colegio. Pero, entonces... Por 3 MOTIVOS: - Gestión del comportamiento: solemos oir/decir cosas como "si los estudiantes están utilizando una tecnología inapropiada podemos tener problemas de comportamiento, no de tecnología".
How to Properly Use Instagram and Pinterest For Your Company After the first two Etiquette Guides for Facebook and Twitter, I’ve decided to also tell you something about two other services which, although popular, are quite new to the market: Instagram and Pinterest. If you find them difficult to use in such a way that your company will benefit, this article will most likely answer your questions and help you make better use of these two underdogs. What’s Instagram You’ve probably heard about Facebook buying Instagram for a billion dollars some months ago, news that was a hit in the stands for many weeks. Basically what Instagram does is simple: it allows you to take photos with your smartphone, apply filters and share them on Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and other networks. Who uses it? Instagram is used by a number of companies, news channels, sports teams and so on. What companies like is that for every time you check-in on Facebook, you advertise them. What about you? Decide on what you want to do. What’s Pinterest? Spend the time. Conclusion
The lecture I recently wrote that Understanding by Design is agnostic about any specific method or pedagogy. The bottom-line question has to do with validity: given the goals, what follows? Thus, it makes little sense to say “I never lecture” or “I always do authentic assessments” as if it were a question of ideology or personal taste. As educators, we should use the methods that best work to achieve our goals. To that end, let’s consider as dispassionately as possible the oldest instructional method in formal education: the lecture. (By “lecture” I mean the typical HS and college class in which a Professor or teacher speaks for most of the period.) As the etymology of the word suggests, the original lectures were readings. What could not be more obvious as efficient pedagogy? A deeper look at pedagogical purpose. Here are a few commonly-given reasons for lecturing: Students need to know core information. There are times and places where lecture works quite well, even better than the alternatives.
Looking & Telling: Take a good look! | Picture This A format for looking at and talking about photographs. Overview As Professor of Art Education Terry Barrett says, "Describing is a logical place to start when viewing an exhibition or particular photograph because it is a means of gathering basic information on which understanding is built." Length of Activity varies, depending on how many images are viewed and described. Materials: Images printed from the Picture This Web site, or have students view images directly from a computer monitor. Activity Use Take a Good Look! Subject Matter What is the main subject of this photograph? Time When do you think this picture was taken? Visual Elements Light Light is an essential element in the making of any photograph. Does the light seem to be natural or artificial? Focus What parts of the image are clearly in focus? Note: The range between the nearest and farthest things that appear in focus define the photograph's depth of field. Color What colors do you see, if any? Texture Framing Vantage point Dominance
10 Ways to Prepare for a TED-format Talk These 18-minute talks are hard to do. It’s easier to blather on for an hour than talk for a tight 18 minutes knowing that if you go over, you (literally) will get the hook. The talks I give usually take me a comfortable 45 minutes but I needed to get the insights out in 18 minutes. The culling process forces you to convey only the most important information for spreading your idea. I delivered one talk at TEDxEast and was thrilled to look up at the clock just as it was ticking down with :06 seconds left on the clock. Here are the ten steps I went through in rehearsing for my talks. 1. I trimmed and trimmed and trimmed until I felt like it was close to 18 minutes. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.