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Spring CLO Symposium: Virtual Edition

April 18, 2011 By

CLO Virtual Symposium 2011 LogoI’m always a fan of free stuff (and learning from the big guys in enterprise training) so I thought I’d share that Chief Learning Officer magazine is offering an online version of their Spring Symposium on April 26th & 27th, 2011. Titled Learning Evolution: Alignment, Agility and Adaptability, there are several levels of registration, the free version includes all of these events:

  • ALL Workshops in Salon One, with a few titles below:
    • The Great Divide: Adapting and Aligning L&D Initiatives to Meet Worker Skill Realities
    • Learning at the Speed of Need
    • Adaptive Learning Design Principles and Best Practices
    • Accelerate Learning and Drive Behavior Through Social Networks and Informal Learning
    • Virtual Learning Environments: Trends & Insights
    • Creating an Adaptive and Innovative Learning Environment
    • Using Measurement to Improve Outcomes
    • Great Webinars: Crossing the Chasm from Classroom Training to High-Performance Virtual Delivery
  • Welcome Address from president and editor in chief, Norm Kamikow
  • Opening Keynote from Bill Jensen and Josh Klein, authors of Hacking Work: Breaking Stupid Rules for Smart Results
  • Access to the Expo Hall
  • Networking Lounge
  • Resource Center

Let me know if you’re attending, we can hit the backchannels together too!

Marianne Lenox

As the Staff Training & Volunteer Coordinator for the Huntsville - Madison County Public Library in Alabama, Marianne is responsible for planning, directing, maintaining and implementing a comprehensive staff training and volunteer program for her library. She consistently strives to provide learning opportunities, professional information and technical training to ensure both better library service and the professional development of the Library’s staff and volunteers.

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Filed Under: E-Learning, Feature, Free Stuff, Synchronous Learning Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Learning Vicariously with Google Reader Play

December 1, 2010 By

Annewhite Fuller, HMCPL Heritage Room Manager, learns vicariously with Google Reader Play

Annewhite Fuller, HMCPL Heritage Room Manager, learns vicariously by watching Google Reader Play

Today several of our library staff are participating in WebJunction’s free (and fabulous) Serving the 21st Century Patron online conference. Those that choose to come into my office instead of viewing on their own computers are treated to a few perks. In addition to the several laptops available during webinars for staff, today’s event includes a personal login to the sessions so they may participate in chat. I also have the Twitter hashtag running in real-time on another laptop. Visitors are more than welcome to bring food, snacks or a favorite beverage into my little training room.

As you might expect from a visual learner, during the breaks or before sessions I usually project my Librarianship feeds in Google Reader Play, Inevitably, attendees say, “Oh, cool! what is that!?” I show them my feeds in the folders, then how to control the player with a wireless mouse. Because their interest is peaked with the slideshow of information, I almost always give them a quick lesson on how to use Google Reader and have several converts among our staff.

A few things about Reader Play:

  • Click the item’s title or the associated image to view the original site content.
  • Click the “read more” link to view the full feed content for that item, or click the eye icon in the bottom left to switch to always showing the full feed content.
  • Tired of manually navigating Reader Play? Click the TV icon to start a slideshow of items — simply sit back and enjoy.
  • Hide the thumbnails at the bottom by clicking the thumbnail icon in the bottom left.

I’d love to hear of other tools you might use to supplement your training events in comments!

Marianne Lenox

As the Staff Training & Volunteer Coordinator for the Huntsville - Madison County Public Library in Alabama, Marianne is responsible for planning, directing, maintaining and implementing a comprehensive staff training and volunteer program for her library. She consistently strives to provide learning opportunities, professional information and technical training to ensure both better library service and the professional development of the Library’s staff and volunteers.

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Filed Under: Cool Tools, The Training Life Tagged With: ,

Community Driven Professional Development

November 8, 2010 By

Participating in this month’s theme, I’ve spent a little while reflecting on professional development at my place of work. The more time I spent thinking about it, the more I realized it’s nearly entirely community driven.

It’s an official role in the library. We have an entire committee focused on staff development. I’ve served on it almost all of my seven years here, and have chaired it twice. The membership tends to rotate and the committee will survey the staff every other year or so to find out what people are interested in, schedule the sessions and arrange speakers, and publicize upcoming events. About once every two years this committee organizes a field trip to another local library to find out what they’re doing, see other facilities, and share what we’re doing.

More recently, the librarians at my library have transitioned to faculty status. With this change came more structure and we formed a mentoring committee. This committee pairs up individuals for mentors, but also plans panels around issues people are interested in. Last year several folks were interested in writing. This year people wanted to know more about how to get on professional committees. The mentoring committee creates a panel from folks on staff (we’re a staff of 52, so there’s a good pool to choose from), and the panel talks about their experience and fields questions.

There are also a lot of smaller initiatives that sometimes become part of one of these official groups. For example, a few years ago several people on staff were interested in creating a structure to encourage reading literature in the field. They formed a journal reading group which has successful grown into a regular program scheduled and marketed by the staff development committee. Each month a participant volunteers to pick next month’s article, and it is pushed out to the entire staff in case new people want to attend the next session.

My Teaching Teaching program grew out of this as well. People were interested in learning more about how to teach, and as the Instructional Design Librarian I designed two semester long programs to meet that need.

Similarly, our Emerging Technology Talks series arose in a similar way. Some staff members said they didn’t have time to keep up with everything, so we started holding monthly sessions discussing the things that those of us who did keep up with everything had come across. This, again, became popular enough to become part of the official list of sessions through the staff development committee.

Finally, there are a lot of one-off sessions created by staff members and shared to the entire library. If someone is giving a conference presentation and wants to do a run-through, that often becomes an internal session. If someone finds a webinar (for example, from Blended Librarian) that looks useful and interesting, we’ll book a room to show it so that more people can attend. In fact, if anyone finds anything that might be useful to share, they’re welcome to put it on through the staff development committee.

The exciting thing about this is that people really do have a choice about coming and are really invested and interested if they’re in the room since they made the choice. People know if there’s something they want to learn, they can request it. People know if they have something interesting to share, they can share it. All of this creates a culture in which people are invested and interested and has created a strong professional development program. In fact, the most frequent complaint I hear about our professional development culture is that people don’t have time to attend everything they’d like to attend. And that… it’s an entire post unto itself.

How do you do professional development at your library?

Image Credits:

Krug and Pullman by Robert Scales

Lauren Pressley is the Instructional Design Librarian at Wake Forest University. She also blogs at Lauren’s Library Blog and spends a fair amount of time on Twitter, too.

Lauren Pressley

Lauren Pressley is the Instructional Design Librarian at Wake Forest University. In this role she works with librarians and faculty to improve the design of their teaching and to share information about integrating appropriate educational technology. She also works with emerging technologies. Lauren’s passion is helping people learn about the changing information landscape and think about what that means for them as consumers and producers of information. Recently Lauren published So You Want To Be a Librarian and Wikis for Libraries. She was an ALA Emerging Leader in 2008 and was a recognized as a Library Journal Mover & Shaker in 2009. She frequently writes and presents on education, instruction, technology, and the future of libraries. Lauren also blogs at ALA Learning, tweets as @laurenpressley, and can be reached at lauren@laurenpressley.com.

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Staff Development on a Budget

November 2, 2010 By

Here in Georgia Public Librarians are required to have and renew our license each year and this requires we submit a number of continuing education credits. For my post on staff development I thought I’d share some of the free, no travel required, ways we get our continuing education credits.

WebJunction - Every month WebJunction hosts free online webinars on a wide variety of topics from Dealing with Difficult Patrons to Digital Preservation. Sessions are taught by WebJuction staff or other library community members including our own Maurice Coleman. You can see upcoming webinars on the events calendar or subscribe to the RSS feed. An added bonus all sessions are archived for free (no password needed!) with a recording of the sessions and all relevant links for review later or in case you missed one.

InfoPeople – Another great resource for regular online webinars. InfoPeople provide free online webinars on a variet of topics.  You can register for upcoming events and browse their archives without a password. The archives are a treasure trove of resources and all their handouts are Creative Commons licensed.

ADA Online – A great resources for information related to libraries and the American’s with Disabilities Act.  ADA Online offers the Accessible Technology On-line Webinar series for free.

SirsiDynix Institute – Sirsi occasionally offers free online presentations with an online archive of past presentations for easy access.

OCLC & Library Journal Symposiums – sometimes there is a fee associated with these sometimes they are free.  The next one The Ethics of Innovation: Navigating Privacy, Policy and Service Issues is free.

Your Local State Library Organization – in my case GPLS and GLA team up once a month to offer free online Webinars, chances your state organization does too.  Remember many webinars don’t restrict attendees so you might be able to sign up for webinars offered by other states.

I KNOW I missed something, where do you get your professional development?

Bobbi Newman

Filed Under: LearnRT News, Professional Development Tagged With: , , , ,

5 Library Sources for Quick Computer Training

September 25, 2010 By

It’s hard to find good online technology tutorials, especially those for quick and basic computer skills. Harder still to find some that meet our high expectations as information professionals. So why not turn to the library world itself?

Below is a collection of my top 5 favorite sites for these quick computer training materials. These could be webinars, class handouts, tutorials, screencasts, you name it. What’s important is the content. It’s content I’m comfortable pointing a customer or a fellow staff member to if some core computer fundamental skills need improving. Weirdly, two institutions get two mentions apiece — but that’s because what they have is awesome.  Browse through what they have, and you might be surprised to find there’s something there for you too!

  1. Infopeople Archived Webinars (all past Infopeople webinars, often with PPTs or other handouts linked too; on topics other than technology too)
  2. Infopeople Training Materials from Past Workshops (from 8 hour live classes and 4 week online classes each class includes numerous how-tos, readings, bibliographies, exercises, tutorials, cheat sheets, and more; on topics other than technology too)
  3. Akron Summit County Public Library Computer Training Class Handouts (great list, copious detail)
  4. Akron Summit County Public Library Computer Training Tutorials List (equally good list but the materials are in tutorial format)
  5. Milwaukee Public Library Computer Class Curriculum (an extremely detailed list of basic and more intermediate computer skills, with printable handouts on how to do just about everything customers ask you how to do)

Sarah Houghton-Jan

Filed Under: Cool Tools, Free Stuff, Technology Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

OverDrive’s Training Month

July 15, 2010 By

This is for those of you in libraries that offer OverDrive digital media for checkout to your patrons.  Here at MPOW, I am offering people the ability to come to the main System office to watch the Webinars together in a conference room on a large screen TV.  This is helpful for those who don’t have a dedicated computer they can use to join the Webinars.  It will also generate some useful discussion before and after the Webinars.  These will also count towards continuing education credit hours for anyone who attends.  I attended these last year and found them to be very good.  This is just another way to make less work for a single trainer and to utilize e-learning.

OverDrive’s Training Month.
September 2010.

Free online courses for library staff, beginner to advanced

Register now!
TM 2010 header

OverDrive’s Training Month is an educational and fun program to increase staff knowledge and help maximize circulation of your OverDrive ‘Virtual Branch’.

Registration is now open. To guarantee the best selection of available dates and times, sign up now.

Sessions will be offered online throughout September with open enrollment for individuals and groups. Contests and prizes are included.

NEW for 2010: In response to participant feedback, audio for Training Month sessions will be provided via speakers/headphones on your computer.  A phone connection is NOT required.

The curriculum includes courses covering each aspect of your OverDrive service:

  1. Collection Checklist
    With OverDrive’s collection checklist, you’ll be quickly up to speed with online ordering.  Best of all, you’ll learn how to attract users to your Virtual Branch website by creating an exciting and easy to maintain collection.
  2. Browse, Check Out, and Download!
    Join us as we demonstrate how to browse, check out, and download titles from a library’s Virtual Branch website.  At the end of this course, staff should feel comfortable answering basic questions about your OverDrive service.
  3. Patron Assistance
    We’ll help take your understanding of your OverDrive service to the next level so you can share your knowledge through support and training. We’ll review frequently asked questions, support tips, and online help resources.
  4. Community Outreach
    In this session, we’ll share creative, easy, and cost-effective ideas for introducing new patrons to your OverDrive service.  We’ll also feature prize winners from this year’s ‘Outreach Program’ contest.
  5. Real-Time Reports
    We’ll showcase reports which best track circulation, new patrons, site traffic, and popular titles. Your team can then evaluate how your Virtual Branch is doing, and chart a path to future success.
  6. Mobile Update
    In this session, you will be introduced to new mobile access options for users.  Devices highlighted include iPhone®, BlackBerry®, Android™, and more. We’ll also preview upcoming mobile features.

More than 7,500 librarians participated in Training Month 2009 and four libraries were the lucky winners of OverDrive’s Training Month award packages. Don’t miss out in 2010!

Stephanie Zimmerman

Stephanie Zimmerman is the Training Coordinator for the Library System of Lancaster County (Pennsylvania), a federated system with 14 member libraries, three branches and a bookmobile, which serves 490,562 residents. She designs and implements technology and development training and consulting to the member libraries. This includes training on Innovative’s Millennium Integrated Library System, Microsoft Office Applications, emerging technologies (i.e. social media) and various other areas. Her goal is to remove the fear of technology and help others to realize the amazing possibilities it provides. Teaching others to do things for themselves and see their excitement when they break through their barriers is her greatest reward. Stephanie has been a software trainer for 15 years. Her past employment involved training on federal and county government applications. She also worked for a private industry marketing company where she traveled across the country showing manufacturers and retailers in the consumer packaged goods industry how to use geodemographic targeting software. Always wanting to help others, Stephanie graduated from Millersville University (in Pennsylvania) cum laude with a BA in Social Work. She was also a student in the Computer Information Systems program at Harrisburg Area Community College. She is a member of ASTD (American Society of Training and Development). She is also a regular contributor to the T is for Training podcast which focuses on training in libraries. She was a trainer for WebJunction’s Spanish Language Outreach project and has done training for Commonwealth Libraries. She is grateful to have landed in the world of libraries. When she began her current job in January of 2004, there were no other library trainers in her immediate area. She turned to the social web to begin networking with other library trainers across the world and immediately realized her passion for social networking and social media. All of her continuing education has been done through these networks and she can’t help but push others to discover the immense opportunities available through online collaboration. Stephanie lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania with her family which includes husband, Bill (a self-employed stay-at-home-dad) and two children (ages 2 and 4 months). When she’s not being Mommy, or working, you’ll most likely find her singing. Stephanie can be reached at szimmerman[at]lancasterlibraries.org.

Filed Under: E-Learning, Free Stuff, Professional Development, Resources for Trainers, Webinars Tagged With: , , ,

Five Tips For Successful Webinars

March 15, 2010 By

Good webinars don’t just happen.  Beyond having a relevant topic and a great presenter, there are a number factors that affect the end result.  Whether you are scheduling and producing webinars, or creating and presenting them, these tips will help you deliver a great webinar experience for everyone.
5tips

  1. Write for the medium: Regardless of the webinar platform you use, tailor the lesson plan to the webinar environment.  Most webinars consist of an audio feed, a chat space, and a space that allows the presenter to share a slideshow, and possibly share their desktop or a whiteboard.  The webinar environment doesn’t allow for the useful visual cues that body language and eye contact provide in a f2f environment, and may not even provide audio feedback for the presenter.  For these reasons, well-designed lessons that work like a charm in a f2f environment might fail to engage the audience and hold their attention in a webinar environment.


    You can mitigate these issues and engage the audience by building in more questions, and taking advantage of whatever interactive features are offered in your platform.  Does your platform offer polling?  Use it!  Shared whiteboard?  Use it!  Hand-raising or yes/no capability for participants?  Use them!!

    MORE INTERACTION
    I like to start webinars by posting a map of the state (or country) and asking participants to use the arrow tool in Wimba to point to where they are on the map.  This communicates to the participants early on that the webinar will not be a passive experience for them–they are going to be involved.  I also work with trainers/presenters to build in slides/questions that can be drawn on (literally) during the webinar, and encourage presenters to include these types of interactive activities throughout the presentation.  At minimum, plan on using more questions, and using them early, to mentally engage participants and create the expectation that they will not be passive observers.

  2. Know your platform:  There are many good webinar platforms out there including Acrobat Connect Pro, iLInc, Elluminate, Wimba, WebEx, DimDim, and GoToWebinar.  Each platform has its own benefits and its own limitations.  You wouldn’t go into a f2f training without knowing the room layout and the availability of training tools such as chartpads, markers, laptop, AV, projectors, screen, etc., so don’t go into your webinar environment without knowing the layout, the tools available, and how to use them.   Most webinar platforms offer some great screen-shot heavy help files and/or recorded screencasts you can use to learn the layout and the tools.  Find them.  Use them.  Once you know your platform…

  3. Test, Test Test: The most common reason a webinar tanks is technology failure.  Wait, let me rephrase that.  The failure is not the technology, but the failure of the webinar producer, presenter, and participants to account for the platform’s limitations, and prepare and test their computers.  Each platform has it’s own requirements regarding browsers, operating systems, necessary bandwidth, and downloads/plugins recommended or required.  Each platform generally offers a simple link that can be clicked to setup/test the user’s computer.  Every person involved in the webinar must click the setup link prior to the webinar and make certain their computer is set up, tested, and ready to go.  Send this information out early and often to the participants. And make sure the presenter has tested/setup the computer they will be presenting from, and make sure it is a wired, not wireless, connection. 
    Let everyone know the preferred method of audio participation.  Nothing beats a good noise-canceling headset. (I love my Logitech Premium Notebook Headset.)  If you’re offering dial-in access, send/post the number/PIN.  If participants are going to use laptop or desktop speakers, make sure they know to mute their microphones!  Nothing ruins a webinar faster than feedback (which is why you also need to know how to mute participants individually or en masse–it’s a lifesaver.)

  4. Practice, Practice, Practice Whether you are the webinar producer, presenter, or both (not recommended), it is imperative that you log some practice time in the webinar environment.   I highly recommend that there is at least one “producer” in the webinar (i.e. someone other than the presenter who knows the webinar platform cold.)  The more experienced the producer, the less time the presenter has to practice–but the presenter ALWAYS has to practice.  At minimum, the presenter should know how to advance slides (if using them), and how to log out and log back in again, in case of a network interruption.  Desktop/application sharing, a vital part of some webinars, adds a higher level of complication, and usually requires the presenter to master the application sharing mechanism–something that is not always simple or intuitive.  The producer needs to know everything else: How to advance slides, how to mute participants, how to expand/limit control of various room features (whiteboards, control of microphone, etc.), how to toggle between various features (polls, whiteboards, slides.)

  5. THE ACTUAL EVENT:  So, the presenter has written a great lesson, you’ve learned your platform inside and out, everything has been setup and tested.  Now there’s just the little matter of actually having the webinar!  Here are a few tips that I’ve found will greatly reduce problems and add to the overall quality on the day of the event:
  • Arrive early: Both the presenter and producer should arrive at least 15 minutes early to get logged in and do a final test to make sure the technology is working, and do one final review of the tools/features to be used.
  • Webinar Environment Review: Before the presenter begins the lesson/presentation, spend five minutes doing a brief review of the webinar environment with participants.  Walk them through playing with the features that they will be using during the webinar (writing tools, pointing tools, etc.)
  • Have a wingman (or woman): In webinar parlance, the wingman is the the producer’s assistant.  The wingman ideally knows the webinar platform inside and out, and is available to help participants with any tech/audio issues, and keep an eye on chat for questions or problems.
  • Recording: Yeah, it’s a newbie mistake, but it happens to everyone.  Don’t forget to hit “record”!  (I put this right into my script in 24 point bold type.  But then again, I need notes to myself to remember to leave the house with my pants on in the morning.  Whatever works for you.)
  • Take notes during the webinar: During the course of the webinar many useful resources and/or URL’s may be mentioned by the presenter or by the participants in chat.  It’s a great value-added service if you can capture these resources and post them with the recording and other handouts (i.e. the presenter’s slideshow, supporting documents) after the webinar.
  • Save the chat: Before logging out, copy and paste everything in the chat into a word document and save that document… Besides being a good backup for the recording, having a text copy of the chat to share with the webinar participants after the webinar can help them quickly  find useful pieces of information that may have been shared in chat.  I treat the chat transcript as semi-confidential and I don’t post it–but depending on the webinar I will send copies directly to those who participated.
  • Extend the Learning. Post the recording, notes, handouts:  Finally, spend some time in post-production (the specifics vary with each webinar platform) and get the recording posted to a website along with related documents and the presenter’s presentation, if available.

I hope you find these five tips useful in creating or presenting your webinars.  Let us know what works for you!

Peter Bromberg

Filed Under: E-Learning, Presentation Tips, Technology Tagged With:

Webinars for Trainers and Training Managers

February 16, 2010 By

The Learning Round Table is happy to have two Emerging Leaders teams working on projects for our group. The message below is from one of the teams:

Our team has been tasked with the designing and planning of a series of webinars on topics of interest to trainers and managers/coordinators of training and staff development. The first step in this process is to determine topics for the webinar series, and we would like to hear what you have to say!

We would really appreciate it if you could take a few minutes to complete the following survey:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/YK9YFV6

Thank you!
Jennifer and Team (Angela, Natalie, and Sonnet)
Jennifer Spriggs

If you have questions about the survey please direct them to Jennifer at jspriggs@allconet.org

Lori Reed

Lori Reed, Managing Editor of ALA Learning, has more than 15 years experience in training and is the Learning & Development Coordinator for the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library where she oversees the learning & development of a diverse group of staff at twenty libraries. Lori’s passions are performance consulting, learning strategies, and e-learning. Lori is coauthor, with Paul Signorelli, of Workplace Learning and Leadership: A Handbook for Library and Nonprofit Trainers. Lori also blogs at LoriReed.com and can be reached at lori[at]lorireed.com.

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