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Using Trading Cards as Promotional Tool

March 17, 2008 By

At SOLINET, we are trying new and funky ways to make sure not only our fellow staff members know what we do, (hitting my co-workers on the head with a club hasn’t helped so far) – but also people we meet out in the field.  We created trading cards to give out – including some fun facts about ourselves but also some relevant information that would be useful to explain what we do and who we are, to people.  What we found was that some fellow staff members weren’t always sure who taught what – and who was responsible for what subject matters.   Hopefully this will be a fun way to get that information across.

If all goes well – meaning the cards have a warm reception by our staff members, we may give some out to attendees at our upcoming SAMM – (SOLINET Annual Membership Meeting).   The cost was quite good, and we even had them printed on post-consumer waste paper to fall in with our green initiatives this year. Just to give you an idea of the cost of the trading cards – we made 40 cards of 6 people each and it cost $70. The size of the cards when printed will be 3.5″ X  2.5″. We are doing a Training Showcase here next Monday (24 March) to promote our newest classes to staff members and each will get one of our cards.

Here is an example of the front of my card:

Trading Card of Max - Front

And the back of my card:

Trading Card of Max - Back
What sorts of interesting promotional things do you do?

Max Anderson

Filed Under: LearnRT News Tagged With:

Using Weird News to Teach Information Literacy

November 25, 2007 By

Sometimes when I teach Information Literacy, I try to come up with unique ideas to teach how to verify information on the web. What I have found to be fun as well as informative is using strange news to achieve this. Some examples include:

  • In November, Britain’s new weather-themed Cool Cash lottery game was canceled after one day because too many players failed to understand the rules. Each card had a visible temperature and a temperature to be scratched off, and the purchaser would win if the scratched-off temperature was “lower” than the visible one. Officials said they had received “dozens” of complaints from players who could not understand why, for example, minus-5 is not a lower temperature than minus-6.
  • Belleville, Ill., psychiatrist Ajit Trikha pleaded guilty in June to defrauding Medicare and Medicaid of at least $1.85 million, including invoices claiming he worked more than 24 hours a day on 76 different occasions (40 hours on one day and treating 83 patients in 2 1/2 hours on another). He also claimed to treat patients 1,267 times in Belleville while he was traveling in Europe.
  • A fiery auto crash in July near Augusta, Ga., had killed the driver and would likely kill the passenger, too, if the fire were not immediately smothered. Firefighters were still minutes away, but passing by was a pump truck from a local plumbing company, whose quick-thinking driver extinguished the flames with 1,500 gallons of raw sewage from a septic tank-cleaning job he had just finished.

These three stories come from News of the Weird. There is a great and simple lesson plan on this site, which has the students break into groups and try to verify the information using a variety of reputable news sources including Lexis-Nexis.  What types of stories or sources do you use to teach verifying information on the web?

Max Anderson

Filed Under: The Training Life Tagged With:

Accidental Technology Trainer

October 3, 2007 By

Thought I would point this out – received it today via a WebJunction Newsletter:

In this month’s Learning Webinar, Stephanie Gerding, author of The Accidental Technology Trainer: A Guide for Libraries, will address common concerns, recommend tools and techniques, and share helpful advice from her many years coordinating and providing training for libraries of all types around the country. Register for this webinar through the WebJunction Calendar and be entered in a drawing to receive a free copy of Stephanie’s book!

I used to work with Stephanie, so I know that SHE knows her stuff! :-)

Max Anderson

Filed Under: E-Learning, Synchronous Learning Tagged With:

Alternatives to PowerPoint

September 18, 2007 By

Since PowerPoint was first released, there has been a slight backlash to it. It reminds me of a couple of things. I remember in the late 1990′s, people discovered they could put dancing chipmunks all over their webpages and put twinkly lights as their backgrounds. Perhaps worse was when the site would have background music you could not turn off.

Here is the World’s Worst Website. Don’t look at it too long though – it might hurt your ears or your eyes. My how times have changed.

Skip to today and MySpace profiles look much like the early webpages of yore. Ok so I had it wrong – they were hamsters. Whoops. Anyway – if you are missing those hamsters, you can get a little taste here – though for the love of your co-workers, turn down the sound! Oh my. I just looked again at the page and started to drool.

Then we have PowerPoint. PowerPoint turned 20 this year! There are plenty of bad PPT designs out there, and I’m sure we’ve all had our experiences with them.

Some best practices for using PPT:

  1. PowerPoint is not a teleprompter. Don’t include every word you plan on saying on every slide
  2. It is meant to be a compliment to a presentation
  3. Use sans-serif fonts like Arial or Helvetica (easier to see) – I like Verdana because it is similar to Arial but a bit more spread out
  4. General guidelines:
    • Titles 44 pt
    • Subtitles 28 pt – 34 pt
    • Bullet points 24 pt
  5. Don’t include too much text
  6. 6X6 rule – no more than 6 bullet points and no more than 6 words per bullet point
  7. Check your spelling – people will notice errors and start looking for others
  8. Don’t go crazy with colors – test your presentation on a projector before you go live
    • Colors can have cultural connotations and even increase or decrease respiration and mental stimulation
  9. keep your background and graphics simple
  10. Use sounds, animations or transitions sparsely (an example was a presentation I saw in Phoenix once for PLA where there was a blooming cactus on each slide – very distracting! I don’t even remember what the presentation was about…)

You can upload your presentations to SlideShare and then share them – also people can comment on your show or subscribe to your shows.

Zoho has had a presentation component for a while now. It’s called Zoho Show. Here is what I found about it:

  • You can have presenter notes
  • You can add shapes
  • There are more choices of fonts in Zoho than in Google Presentation
  • You can use “Public Gadget” to make it available as a side panel listing on your blog or website
  • There are more choices of slide layouts (including one with title and bulleted list which Google does not currently have)
  • You can add tags to your show
  • You can add symbols and shapes to it as well like arrows or boxes etc.
  • You can customize the background colors
  • The themes available: Plain, Dark Cloud, Simple, Professional, Casual, Fusion, Brushed Metal, Midnight, Royal Blue
  • Can set timing
  • Can export to HTML
  • This is my example…

Google Documents and Spreadsheets now have a sibling. They just added (drumroll please) Google Presentation to the brood. These are my findings from testing it out:

  • There are numerous themes available: Blank, Gradient White, Gradient Black, Graph Paper, Grass, City, Bubbles, Pink n Pretty, Liquid, Shelley, Sparkling, Rustic, Plain Jane, Texturized, and Chalkboard
  • Four slide layouts: Title, Text, Two-Columns, Caption, Blank
  • You can move slides up and down
  • You can add new slides but you can’t change the layout of an existing slide
  • You can duplicate slides
  • You can insert new text boxes and images
  • You can share and publish your presentation and see revisions
  • You can subscribe to your presentation or others presentations via RSS
  • When you start your presentation, there is a collapsible box on the right that lists people in your presentation at the same time – Very nifty!
  • It can be saved as a Zip file but I don’t see how you can export it as a PPT.
  • Here is a link to one I played around with: Good Food
  • though it seems currently you have to create a Google Docs login to view it

Check ‘em out!

Max Anderson

Filed Under: Presentation Tips Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

One Web Day September 22

August 23, 2007 By

Check it out! Meet up on Sept. 22 to talk about how the web could change lives around the world in the future. From One Web Day:

The essence of OneWebDay is to create a global constituency that thinks of itself as responsible for the future of the internet, so that when negative things happen (censorship, restricted access, heavy-handed law enforcement control) people will act.

How can you participate? Sponsor a teaching event (how to create/edit a wiki, putting photos online, creating a podcast, etc.), host a conference or panel to discuss the future of the web, host a live chat…what other ideas can we come up with? Take a video of your event, post it to YouTube and tag it with onewebday2007. I can’t wait to see what we all come up with! Here are some examples from Flickr…

Max Anderson

Filed Under: E-Learning Tagged With:

Captivating your Online Audience

July 27, 2007 By

Thanks to Pete and Gail for inviting me to add my words of wisdom to this blog (whatever those words may be I’m not sure yet!)

At SOLINET, we are busily creating asynchronous classes using Adobe Captivate.  We used to use a product called Toolbook and unfortunately when the one person at SOLINET who knew how to use it and update it, left the company, we decided it wasn’t worth our time to re-learn it.  So for a couple of years we haven’t really had any asynch training.  It has been an interesting road to deciding on a product.  It took a long time to finally decide on Captivate – and most of it was a money issue.  I personally wanted something a lot more robust and complex but those cost a lot.  So we did a lot of testing internally and finally decided on Captivate.  There is a new version coming out (#3 to be exact) in August and I have high hopes for some of the quiz functionality.  I’m curious to see if anyone has any specific tips to share about creating content with Captivate.

Max Anderson

Filed Under: Asynchronous Learning Tagged With: , , ,