Category Archives: Learning - Page 3

The ribbon in SharePoint 2010 – tutorial

Posted by on December 1, 2010 No comments

I have been getting a lot of questions about tutorials on how to use the ribbon in SharePoint 2010. Of course, creating a “general” tutorial about this is not so obvious, because the ribbon is context-sensitive, and what you need to know about it, actually depends on the functionalities you use in SharePoint. But I think the movie below (by Lynda.com) gives you a good overview.

Users who are familiar with SharePoint 2007 and are looking for a familiar command in the ribbon, can download the SharePoint Server Ribbon Reference on the Microsoft Office website. This is an Excel spreadsheet that lists the new locations of SharePoint commands in the 2010 version.

Upgrading an Adobe Captivate 3 project to Captivate 5

Posted by on November 17, 2010 No comments

There seems to be a lot of confusion about upgrading projects created with Adobe Captivate 3 to Adobe Captivate 5. I did some tests today, and these are my conclusions:

  • You can upgrade files from Captivate 3 to Captivate 5. However, you can not “go back” and do a “save as Captivate previous version”, because the Captivate 5 file format is different;
  • When I tried to publish an upgraded project, it did not work, the result showed just a black screen. This was because the project I tried contained “text animations”, and there is an known issue with these. Adobe published a fix for this issue.

After applying the fix, all worked well.

Quotes from DevLearn 2010 #DL10

Posted by on November 6, 2010 1 comment

DevLearn 2010 has been an amazing three days of sessions, discussions, tweeting and playing. Too much to blog in detail, but I do want to share some quotes, one-liners and thoughts I heard and that I keep in mind. I hope I do credit the right people, if not, I do apologize…

Jay Cross and the Internet Time Alliance on Informal Learning:

  • An LMS can only be successful if people are “capable learners”.
  • Formal learning can be like a bus ride. People tend to fall asleep.

John Seely Brown on “The Power of Pull”

  • The purpose of a company in the 20th century is to minimize transaction cost and to achieve scalable efficiency. The purpose of a company in the 21th century should be to achieve scalable capability building.

Marcia Conner on “New Social Learning”

  • Together we are better.

Thornton May on “The New Know”

  • Your network will keep you safe

Of course, there were a lot more sessions that were less conceptual but more specific, and thus produce less “quotable content”. Many thanks to all the speakers for sharing their knowledge and kudos to the people of the E-learning Guild for organizing a top event.

Teaching in the future with Microsoft Interactive Classroom

Posted by on November 1, 2010 2 comments

Sometimes you discover a great learning tool, hidden somewhere on the web. The Microsoft Interactive Classroom is such a tool, and it gives us a taste of what classroom training might be in the (near) future. If you have ever wondered if they was way you could avoid printing tons of paper manuals, if you are tired of distributing PowerPoint handouts that nobody ever uses, this is for you.

Basically, it is an add-on to PowerPoint and OneNote (2007 or 2010). As a teacher, you use PowerPoint to prepare your slides as usual, and you can use the Microsoft Interactive Classroom add-on to add question slides in your presentation. You get an extra tab in the ribbon for that:

Once you start giving your session, you click the Start Session button. This starts a broadcast of your presentation on the network. Your screen will look like this:

With the ribbon, you can annotate your slides (works great if you have a tablet!) but also start polls, display the results of the poll to your students…

But the best feature is yet to come. Your students connect to your broadcasted session with… OneNote! They automatically get a copy of the slides as a separate note page, they can take their own notes on the slides, they see the annotations of the instructor in their OneNote… and after the session they go home with their own annotated lesson material. Of course, they need to be connected to the same network (wired or wireless).

We tried it during an interactive session of one hour with 20 workstations and it was quite impressive. And what is even better: it’s free!

 

More information:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2010/aug10/08-16education.mspx

 

Download:
http://www.educationlabs.com/projects/IC/Pages/default.aspx

Going to DevLearn 2010!

Posted by on November 1, 2010 No comments

My bags are packed, I’m ready to go… to DevLearn 2010. I’m joining 1600 e-learning professionals in San Francisco for one of the biggest e-learning conferences in the industry.

I’ll try to leave some traces on my blog or on Twitter, but if you want to learn more, follow the #dl10 hashtag.