Professional Development

4 (More) Free E-Learning Tools I Use

May 31, 2015 By Jackie Van Nice 12 Comments

I shared 4 Free E-Learning* Tools I Use exactly one year ago as part of an Articulate challenge, but the world has moved on and so have I. What happened? Redbooth got rid of their free option, Microsoft Clipart took a powder, Pinterest I rarely have time for, and I don’t use free fonts anymore, so here are my current (free!) fab four:

1. Trello: Task & Project Management

I resisted Trello for the longest time, but the sheer simplicity of it won me over. At the moment it’s my primary project management tool. There’s nothing better than seeing every project at a glance and being able to quickly and easily share with others. I’m quite happy with the free version for both personal and work projects. I use it daily in my desktop browser, iPad, iPhone, and AppleWatch and it syncs beautifully. Love.

2. Toggl: Time Tracking

Speaking of love and seamless syncing, Toggl for time tracking may have won even more real estate in my heart than Trello has. When I want to start or stop the clock I grab my iPhone and tap the app or do the same in a desktop browser. I control the same running task on either. The reports are perfect for my needs, it’s free for teams up to 5, and includes unlimited clients and projects. Wish I’d been using this for yeeeeeeeears.

3. Coolors: Color Scheme Generator

This one is brand new to me, but the moment I saw David Anderson’s tweet about it I checked it out and was sold. (In a free kind of way.) With Coolors I love that you can quickly pull down existing palettes or generate your own in a way that even non-adept color scheme generators like me can handle. I’m also crazy about the fact that I can instantly export my found or generated palettes to PNG, PDF, or URL. It’s my new go-to for colors. (There’s a cool-looking iPhone/iPad app for 99 cents but I haven’t played with it yet.)

4. Greenshot: Screen Captures

For many years I used Snag-It for screen captures. A year or so ago it decided it didn’t want to play nicely with others and was continually crashing and not responding to fixes. I had to quickly find a substitute, which led me to free, open-source Greenshot. I’ve never had it crash, it’s not a resource hog, and it works reliably, quietly, and beautifully every time.

So those are my latest go-to tools that cost nothing at all. If any of them sound good to you, they might be worth a try!

*I use them for e-learning but they’re clearly great for project management, design, or general organization.

Working Together to Create E-Learning

May 16, 2015 By Jackie Van Nice 6 Comments

Select Image to Launch Demo

This week’s challenge is to show how you create online training. The process of how I work with clients is something I’m always having to explain, so it’s about time I added a quick explanation to my site.

Who Does What?

David Anderson suggested we could use the helpful post How to Create an Online Course in 7 Simple Steps as a launching point if we’d like. That process is quite similar to mine, but mine reflects exactly how I work and shows which steps I perform and which ones my clients perform.

My Steps

These are the steps. You’ll find more details in the demo – and you can see them written out on this page. It’s an abbreviated list since it’s only meant to be a quick (yet useful) overview. Each step can be an entire world unto itself:

Set Goals
Set Content
Design It
Storyboard It
Build It
Deliver It
Evaluate It

See it in Action!

Here’s my e-learning process succinctly explained.

Select Image to Launch Demo

DIY E-Learning Icons (+ Free Download!)

April 12, 2015 By Jackie Van Nice 8 Comments

This week’s ELH challenge is to create and share a set of icons for the e-learning community. (I’m in!)

Theme: Language Learning

Arts & Culture

List or Knowledge Check

Listening

Reading

Role Play or Discussion

Speaking

Viewing

Writing

For last week’s emoji challenge I created a language learning demo. It’s a topic near and dear to my heart, so I kept the theme going this week. These are the icons, and they align with most of the basic activities you engage in when learning a language.

Design

I created them in PowerPoint and made them simple and flat. To save time I took one of David Anderson’s challenge suggestions and pulled the basic images from The Noun Project. Credit and links back to the original images are in the file.

Colorize Your World

Snack Pack Colors

To show how you can customize them I mocked up a few color combos. They’re in the PowerPoint file, too. To color the PNG images I used Format > Color, and to add texture I used Format > Artistic Effects.

Download Them Now!

Black & White

If you’d like to download the PowerPoint file with these fully-customizable icons, you can grab it on the download page.

Feeling Neutral

Icon Feel the Blues Coming On

Texture Becomes Electra

Build & Share Your Own Image Library!

March 2, 2015 By Jackie Van Nice 9 Comments

I Took This Photo, Added Some Text, and Voilà! My Title Image

This week’s challenge is to create a set of e-learning images to share with other course designers. Recently I’ve been contributing images to MorgueFile via their daily challenges (which I wrote about here), but was excited to put together a full set of related images.

The Setting

I was headed to a nearby island with a friend on Saturday anyway, so I grabbed my camera and spent a chilly afternoon snapping away. This location is often used for group retreats, and I tried to capture as many types of usable images as possible.

Simple Backgrounds

It’s easy to make simple background images. Below left you can see my pictures of wine glasses and some dry plants. On the right are the same pictures after I applied a couple of PowerPoint effects. It’s simple and I love the result.

Left: My Unretouched Images. Right: The Same Images With Simple PowerPoint Effects

Left: My Unretouched Photos. Right: The Same Images With Simple PowerPoint Effects

Scenario Backgrounds

When I create e-learning scenarios, I try to treat them like a movie. I go for the wide establishing shot, the group shot, the two-person shot, the one-person shot, and all sorts of close-ups. I took lots of pics with that approach in mind, where you can easily add in characters. These images are also HUGE, so they’re easy to crop to focus on any area you’d like.

Here Are a Few of My Scenario Backgrounds: Just Add Characters!

Objects & Themes

Recycling? Home? Nature? Recreation? Food Service? I found lots of image subgroups to play with. With a little creativity, they can be used in endless ways.

I Love These Images For Their Great Colors and Shapes

This is a Cottage Where I Focused on Photographing Everyday Objects & Scenario Backgrounds

I Just Love These Recycling Bins – They’re Fantastic Images to Work With

These are Just a Few of the Objects I Found at a Community Dining Hall

Download Them for Free!

Update: I’m not seeing these up on MorgueFile anymore – but if you can find ’em, you can use ’em!

Podcast: How I Get Things Done As an Instructional Designer

January 28, 2015 By Jackie Van Nice 4 Comments

Pencil-Sketch Version of My Recording Set-Up. See The Original Below.

This week’s challenge is to do a podcast to answer David Anderson’s questions about how we work as instructional designers. Here’s mine, and I explain how I created it at the end of this post.

If you’d rather listen to all of the tracks on autoplay, listen here: Podcast: How I Get Things Done as an Instructional Designer.

1. What’s your job title?

2. What software tools do you love?

3. What’s your workspace setup?

4. What is your creative or design philosophy?

5. How do you stay fresh and keep building your skills?

6. How do you avoid burnout?

7. How do you save time and boost your efficiency day to day?

8. How do you manage your workflow?

9. What books or blogs have been influential to you?

10. What kinds of tasks do you love to do? What gets you excited to sit down at your desk?

11. What do you like to do least? How do you keep yourself motivated to do that stuff?

The Process

My Recording Set-Up

This is how I did it:

Wrote down some thoughts the day before I recorded them, and probably used about 20% of that. The rest I winged.
Used my trusty Audio-Technica AT2020 desktop USB mic to record in Audacity on iMac. If you’d like to see a photo of my setup, along with some of my favorite recording tips, they’re right here.
Added some noise removal to get rid of ambient noise, then exported individual tracks as mp3s.
Headed over to SoundCloud where I uploaded them as a playlist.
Headed here to my WordPress blog to write this up. To embed these tracks I referred to the SoundCloud instructions which work well; though rather than doing a link-type post I simply pasted each of the track links into the body of a standard post.