Tag: technology
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Should You Use Audio in a Slide Deck?
Audio can enhance presentations but often complicates them due to technical issues and distractions. Effective audio should serve a clear purpose, like reinforcing key ideas or signaling transitions. Background music is challenging and can hinder focus. Always be prepared for failures, ensuring the presentation works without audio. Use sound judiciously to support, not overwhelm.
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Digital Skills Teachers Should Learn This Summer
Summer break for teachers is supposed to be a time to relax, recharge, and temporarily forget the painful sound of crowded hallways. I’m not suggesting teachers spend their entire summer break taking courses and attending webinars. If you’re going to try to learn something new this summer, focus on small skills that will actually save…
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QR Codes Might Be the Most Underrated Tool at Summer Camp
Technology has permanently integrated into a countless number of professions and environments, but summer camps still fear technology interfering in their outdoor regiments. QR codes may be all you need to keep summer camp working efficiently. Just because we are promoting a “device free environment” for the campers, doesn’t mean that there’s no place for…
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Multiple Choice Is Boring: 5 Better Ways to Measure Learning
If you’ve ever built learning experiences and training modules, you’ve probably ended it with ten multiple choice questions because that’s what everybody does. Question 1. Check. Question 2. Check. Question 10. Congratulations, you’ve clicked enough buttons to prove you’re a cybersecurity expert. The problem is that multiple choice questions mostly measure whether someone can recognize…
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Canva or Adobe Express? Which One is Better?
Instructional designers are most useful when they can make their own graphics, edit videos, build slide decks, create job aids, take screenshots, and somehow become the unofficial design department too. Tools like Canva and Adobe Express can make those everyday tasks much faster and easier. Both have free and paid versions, but are the upgrades…
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The Real Cost of Starting a Live Streaming Studio
A lot of schools and businesses think building a live streaming studio means having to transform a room into a NASA launch center. It really doesn’t. The two biggest purchases are usually: That’s basically the entire studio. I’ve done live shows where we didn’t even use a single physical camera. Every speaker just joined from…
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K-12 Teachers Solved Interactive Training Years Ago
K-12 teachers figured something out a long time ago: if their students are staring at a screen anyway, you might as well make it part of the lesson. That same idea works surprisingly well with adults too. Teachers are using live quizzes, polls, word clouds, audience responses, and game-style competitions that keep people paying attention…
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Your Best Training Tool Might Already Be Free
Managers think that workplace training needs expensive software with dramatic animations and enough buttons to launch a satellite, without even considering using free training tools. Somebody mentions Articulate 360 or Adobe Captivate and suddenly a small business is pricing software that costs more than the break room fridge. Most employees do not care what platform…
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Your Company Broadcast is Not the Super Bowl
Somewhere along the way, people started acting like a company live stream needs a control room, six producers, a countdown clock, and someone named Brad yelling, “Take Camera Two!” It does not. You can start with a laptop, a camera, a decent internet connection, and something useful to say. That is all. A company broadcast…
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Your Slide Is Not a Document. Please Stop Treating It Like One.
There is a special kind of panic that happens when someone opens a slide deck and the first slide has twelve bullet points, three paragraphs, two screenshots, a footnote, and a quote in 9 point font. That is not a slide. That is a cry for help with a title. Text on slides can be…
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