Tag Archives: training - Page 2

Tips and best practices for screencasts

Posted by on October 30, 2009 No comments

The people from TechSmith (Camtasia, Jing, Snagit…) recently polled their community for best practices and tips for creating effective screencasts, software animations, screen demo’s, whatever you want to call them.
They bundled the result in a 3-page booklet, in a kind of “tag cloud” format. Quick to read, and very valuable!

You can download it from their blog.

My Top Learning Tools

Posted by on October 12, 2009 1 comment

Jane Hart keeps a list of Top Learning Tools, submitted by learning professionals from all over the world. This is my top list:

1. SharePoint: has become my platform of choice for knowledge sharing. The My Site stores all my content, shared or not shared, and makes it accessible from anywhere.

2. OneNote: because of its integration with other Microsoft Office products, I prefer OneNote over other note taking tools like Evernote.

3. Captivate: has been my favorite screencasting tool since version 1.0, because of its ease of use and flexible outputs.

4. Camtasia: my alternative for Captivate when it comes to recording complex applications that need real-time recording.

5. Jing: an ideal screencast recorder for “quickies”

6. WordPress: a versatile weblog with a great community around it

7. Delicious: has replaced my favorites and is quickly becoming my personal web memory

8. Google Reader: allows you to follow hundreds of RSS feeds, share posts, rate them…

9. TweetDeck: Twitter is great if you want to follow the “buzz” of the moment, but it would be impossible to manage the stream without an application like TweetDeck.

10. Adobe Presenter: one of the easiest PowerPoint converters with video, quizzing and SCORM support.

User adoption has not changed since the Middle Ages

Posted by on October 2, 2009 No comments

A lot of IT projects fail because users struggle with the change that the new tools bring them. As an IT implementer or trainer, it is good to “unlearn” everything you know about the software, and view it from a user perspective.

The video below shows that what is simple, is not always obvious!

Interface language in Adobe Presenter projects

Posted by on September 10, 2009 No comments

In one of our recent projects, we used Adobe Presenter to create some course material and quizzes based on PowerPoint slides. This actually works very well, but one thing bothered me: the “interface” of the course or quiz is sometimes shown in a different language. We are talking about these texts:

presenter1

presenter2

 I was wondering how you could “force” it to be in one language, and what was the logic behind it. This is what I found out:

  • the language you get in the interface is based on the Regional Settings of the pc you display the content on. So NOT on the language settings of your browser (which seems more logical to me). This is an issue in Belgium as we have French (Belgium) and Dutch (Belgium), and not every computer is configured correctly.
  • the text is only modified if your regional settings are set to one of these languages: German, French, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Simplified Chinese, or Dutch. In all other cases, English is shown.
  • you can customize this text by creating a custom theme with the Theme Editor for your project. Consult the Adobe Presenter help pages for the correct procedure.

And this last topic gives you a possible solution for a “fixed” language: if you set the labels for all languages to the same language, you have your uni-lingual interface. That’s a lot of copy-pasting, but it works!

SharePoint in Plain English

Posted by on August 24, 2009 No comments

The people from CommonCraft have created a new video about SharePoint. If you want to learn what it is and what it can do for you in 3 minutes, this is the way to go: