Tech4learning

I'll Show You in a Jing!

There is now seemingly no end to the number of free programs available on the web that allow you to create screen capture movies. 

But Jing, although free, comes from TechSmith, the provider of the popular tool, Camtasia.

You can quickly capture still images, or as is more likely, short video clips of on-screen activity, with up to five minutes of audio narration.  That duration limitation actually encourages you to keep things short and sweet, which I encourage.

You can also add annotations to your screen shots to help focus the viewer (learner) on the aspect you want them to observe.

When it comes to sharing your content, you can publish this to TechSmith's screencast.comsite - you get 2GB of space - or you can publish to your own website, blog or reach out to your audience via Twitter.

If you upgrade to the Proversion, you can add a video feed from your webcam too.  Video quality is also higher and you can compress the finished output to a more efficient size.  You can also share your content to a wider range of sharing websites, including YouTube, and your movies won't have to carry Jing's branding.

bITe Size Microsoft Training

Browsing through the list of exhibitors at this week's World of Learning Conference and Exhibition, I noticed this provider of Microsoft Office training, Bite Size.

What I particularly liked about their offer was their approach to IT skills training.  Just as we've moved away from 3 to 4 hour long soft skills e-learning modules, in favour of much shorter 30 minute chunks of learning, it's right that we have taken a similar approach to e-learning for PC applications.  Indeed, we can dice up this training to much smaller pieces, as quite often we're more after performance support - help me to get passed this "block" - rather than longer sessions of traditional "tell, show, try" type learning.

Bite Size provide 5 examples of their short  minute bursts of learning, to highlight how they treat each nugget.  First of all you can read a short passage about the background to the topic to be covered - useful to give context to the content and to highlight possible objectives for using that aspect of the software; then you are presented with step-by-step written instructions, followed by a short video demonstration.  The fourth stage is to receive a useful tip, before being able to download an example with which you can practice. 

The model presented here also got me thinking about how it could be applied to any custom IT software training that we might need to deliver.  Using tools such as Adobe Captivate, Camtasia or Kallidus Simulate, it's easy to replicate the "show" stage.  But often our IT skills training lacks the "why?", the "what's in it for me?" and an opportunity to practice (the complexity of our own applications is often beyond the "simulation" power of these tools).  But it's relatively easy to embed an attachment of a sample page or whatever from the application that can be used to try out the new skill and the background can easily be slotted in.

Using my favourite rapid e-learning authoring tool, Articulate, it would be very straightfoward to construct a custom module using this model, using one or more of the Engage templates, with some embedded Flash video.