Using Audio Narration

A couple of good blog posts from CommLab's Custom Training and eLearning Blog

"Is Audio Narration Indispensable for Online Learning?" Link
"Effective Voice-Over In eLearning" Link

Let me know what you think!

Sharing vs. Uploading

Last week Ken Molay posted an interesting entry on his blog on the relative advantages and disadvantages of uploading your PowerPoint presentation to your chosen webinar-delivery site vs. sharing the presentation live from your desktop.

Uploading came out on top in six of the ten categories including perfomance, multitasking, multiple presenters, failsafe, and more.  Sharing the desktop excelled in categories such as fidelity to the original design and layout, and use of animations and transitions.

Just follow this link: The Webinar Blog

Cognitive Overload

Donald Clark on his Plan B Blog has a nice piece on cognitive overload entitled: "10 Ways to Keep Courses Short".  Clark's opinion is that most training is too long and contains more information than can possibly be absorbed by the learner.

Here's the link:  Donald Clark Plan B

One Stop Login for Google Apps

If you regularly use more than one or two Google Apps this site might be incredibly useful.  Basically it provides one-stop login to all of them. Google Docs, Blogger, GMail, Picassa, Google Reader, Tasks, Adsense, Maps, Sky...everything, they're all here.  Nice clean interface.

The site is called GPanion.  Here's the link:  http://gpanion.com/

Free Screencasting Tools

Screencasting software allows you to record what you do on your computer screen, including the pages you open, follows you mouse across the screen...anything.  For example, rather than place a static image of my organization's website in a self-paced training and adding arrows and numbers to highlight a series of sequential steps, I recorded in real time the steps it took to navigate from the Homepage through to the hard-to-find page I wanted to show the audience how to find.   

There are a number of tools available to accomplish this.  Two I've been using are Camstudio (I run the portable version off my jump drive), and Jing.  Both are free and fairly simple to use.  

Let me know how well they work for you, or if you are using another screencasting tool that you'd like to recommend.

Very Useful App

If you are designing presentations or anything else for that matter Pixie is a great little color picker app for PCs. If you see a color that you'd like to use in your design anywhere on your screen, simply scroll your mouse over it and Pixie will tell you the hex, RGB, HTML, CMYK and HSV values of that color.

Here Pixie is detailing the color values of my desktop color:

Pretty cool no?
Pixie

Cognitive Load and PowerPoint

A couple of articles that have really got me thinking about cognitive load theory and how it relates to using PowerPoint as a teaching tool.

The first article "Cognitive Load Theory" by David Lewis, provides an overview of cognitive load theory, of which he writes:

"[C]ognitive load theory proposes that since working memory is limited, learners may be bombarded by information and, if the complexity of their instructional materials is not properly managed, this will result in cognitive overload...later resulting in lower performance."

The second is an interview with educational psychology guru Richard E. Mayer titled: "The Cognitive Load of PowerPoint: Q&A with Richard E. Mayer". This is the best article on the use of PowerPoint in a training context that I've encountered.