 Welcome to TechSoup Talks. Today's webinar is Tech Training Made Simple with Online Videos. We have Stephanie Girding, Lila Fever, Mary Beth Ciccioli, and Carolyn Blatchley. I'd like to introduce Stephanie Girding who works for TechSoup. And Stephanie, tell us a little bit about yourself and introduce the other presenters. Thank you, Kari. I'm Stephanie Girding and I'm a Library Consultant and Author. I present workshops around the country and online on grants, training, and technology topics. And I'm currently working with the TechSoup for Libraries program to support them in providing technology education to libraries and helping libraries save money through the TechSoup stock software donations. So I'm going to be interviewing Lee today from Common Craft to learn more about their videos and how they're created. And then we'll hear from Mary Beth and Carolyn on how they're using the videos to support the needs in their community. So why don't you all go ahead and introduce yourself. We'll just go in order of our photos. So we'll start with Lee. Thanks, Stephanie. Hi, my name is Lee Lila Fever. And my wife, Fachi, and I run Common Craft and we make videos. And we'll be talking more later about the process we use to make the videos and a little bit about our history. Great. And Mary Beth? Thanks, Stephanie. I'm Mary Beth Ficcioli with the Colorado State Library. And the State Library here in Colorado provides resources and services to libraries across the state. In my position, I do a lot of training material design for online environments. I also work with librarians to develop training and training materials. In addition to that, I produce webinars much like this one, although not as big as this one, but do that for the State Library for trainings and meetings. And do a bunch of web design and development. And also have started to get my hand in on working with audio and video to create training material and also for promotions for the State Library. Great. Thank you. And Carolyn? Thanks, Stephanie. This is Carolyn Blatchley. I'm the Training Services Coordinator at the Cumberland County Library System, and that's located in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. I'm talking from my home in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania right now. What I do as Training Services Coordinator is I'm responsible for development, implementation, and evaluation of a public services staff training program system-wide. I focus mostly on strengthening the information technology skills of our staff and I'm a Department of One, so I'm always looking for free and high-quality resources that I can share out easily, anything that will promote excellent customer service and the best trained staff that we can have. Great. Thank you, everyone. Well, we're really excited about this webinar today. We had over 200 people sign up, and from looking at registrations we see we have people from libraries, from schools, and from all types of different nonprofits. And I think one thing that we really have in common is just trying to figure out how to explain technology in plain English, which is what Lee is specializing in. And so, Lee, why don't we start by having you just tell us a little bit about the story behind how you started your company. Yeah, sure. I'm happy to. For those of you that might not be familiar with Common Craft, we're a small company in Seattle and we make videos that are usually about three minutes long and we take something complex and make it easy to understand. And our brand is in plain English. Our videos are like wikis in plain English. The story of how we got started is I was an online community manager from about 1999 to 2003. And I started Common Craft in 2003 to do consulting with companies about online communities. And I always ran into the same kind of problems. And that was the people that I was working with and hoping to influence lacked a really basic understanding of what was happening on the web in terms of the social side of the web, you know, RSS and wikis and blogs. And at the time I wrote blog posts about it, normal text, and called them in plain English and shared them with my clients and put them on the blog and enjoyed the process but never really thought much about it. And then when YouTube got really popular in 2006 and Saty joined the company, we started to think about how can we use video as a part of what Common Craft does. And we had the idea of turning those old blog posts into videos. And for a while I tried to be the guy standing in front of a whiteboard with a marker trying to draw and look at the camera at the same time. And it didn't really work very well. And then Saty, my wife, had the idea of pointing the camera down onto a whiteboard and using hands and markers and paper cutouts to tell a story. And in April of 2007 we did that and made our first video, RSS in plain English, which is still one of our most popular ones. We didn't do it with a real business model in mind so much as just something fun that we thought needed to be done. It was something that RSS was a subject that we felt had an explanation problem. And by that we thought that RSS is something that's free for people to use. It could impact almost everybody that uses the web but it's not being adopted in part because it's not explained very well. And the web is full of those things. But RSS was one that we felt strongly about at the time. Since then we've made a lot of videos about more things than just technology which we'll talk about later. But overall right now we have about 26 videos in our library that we own that we've done as educational materials and through sites like YouTube they've been viewed millions of times, over 15 million now I think with Twitter and plain English being our big one. So over time like I said that started in April of 2007 so we're getting close to doing this for three years. We really made two kinds of videos. The first is custom videos. And that's where organizations like Google or Microsoft hire us to make a video that explains their product. But that's not really the focus of the future of Common Craft. I think what we really want to do is make educational videos that we can share online for consumers but then license as educational materials for school systems and businesses as well. We have a really broad client base in that way. The idea of licensing came from people writing us and saying, hey can I use your, I'm doing a corporate training program in my business. So I want to put your video as a part of my training at school or work. And we said well maybe we can make a premium version of these videos that is delivered as a download so you don't have to have an Internet connection that skips the whole YouTube thing. So they said wow this is actually a business that maybe we can do. So now we're really focused on having a big collection of videos on our website that can be viewed for free on the website but can also be purchased in a licensing kind of relationship where you download a file and it's really high quality and you can use it, you have permission to use it for professional purposes. Right now we offer three basic licenses. The individual one is for one person's use. So if there's a trainer let's say that just wants a video to use and that person's training session wherever they're doing it or a presentation for instance, the individual license is perfect. Site license is for something you can share with everyone in an organization. Everybody can use it. It can be posted on the intranet. It can be used in multiple training situations. And we also offer one for public website use. That's sort of embedding into a website sort of like a YouTube video. Great. I'm really familiar with your technology subjects but you have other ones as well. Yeah, that's right. We got started in technology and I think technology is always going to be a big part of what we do but we also feel strongly about other things. And one is money and financial responsibility. I feel like that, I noticed somebody said Zombies on the thing. We have a Zombies in plain English video too but we're really focused on financial responsibility because I don't know about you but when I was in high school, in middle school I wasn't really taught much about things like compound interest and how insurance works and things like that. So we're really focused on creating materials that help people understand those things as well. We're also focused on green subjects and other sort of seemingly random subjects like electing a U.S. President. Well I'm sure people are more interested also in the cost. So let's talk about that a little bit. Yeah, for sure. This has been something that we've done a lot of thinking about. And from the very beginning we've always had a philosophy of being kind to our fans in libraries and schools. We see it as a business opportunity but also something that I feel like that we can make a meaningful contribution to outside of the cost. So our videos are free to watch and they're free to link to. If you wanted to put a link in newsletters or on your website or anything like that, of course that's definitely encouraged. What we always say is that we want the videos to be open to anybody that wants to use them for non-commercial purposes. Of course that includes libraries and most work by nonprofits and things like that. And I know that there's a lot of folks here that are in libraries. And that's a place where I think we really do encourage them to use whatever's on YouTube. Are you still there? Oh that was strange. Okay, so Lee must have gotten dropped off the call. I hope he realizes that. We will jump back to him. But I think while we wait for him to come and finish his part of the presentation, Mary Beth, do you mind jumping in for a second to tell us a little bit about how you're using his videos? That would be just fine. Go ahead. Okay, great. Well Mary Beth, I know you're using the videos in more of an online environment. So can you tell us how you're incorporating those? Sure. What we're doing in Colorado is a version of the 23 Things. And I know many libraries already know about 23 Things, but since we have so many other people on the call, I'll just describe briefly what this is about. A librarian in North Carolina created some years back an online learning program for library staff. The idea was that to teach Web 2.0 tools, a lot of library staff hadn't been able to keep up with the rapidly changing technology. And so this librarian, Helene Blowers, at the Public Library of Charlotte in Mecklenburg County developed this online learning program that would take library staff through different Web 2.0 tools, allow them to learn the tools, and these were self-directed asynchronous lessons. And the idea would be not only would they be able to apply them in their library job, they would be able to teach patrons who are coming in to use them also. They were seeing a lot of patrons coming in. How do I sign up for Flickr? What is this? And so this 23 Things idea was then repurposed by many libraries, but not all libraries have the resources to create such a thing. And so in Colorado, a group of continuing education librarians got together and we have been building Colorado's version of the 23 Things. And you can see listed here some of the sample tools that we're using in our version. And these are commonly used in many of the 23 Things. Great. Can you show us how that looks for your library? Sure. So here is an image of one of the tools that we use. So this one is a photo sharing lesson and the tool we're using is Flickr. And so we start out with this section called the what, and that has the concept of what this tool is about, what photo sharing is about. And here you can see how we're using Common Craft. It's just embedded right here on the webpage. So we really are interested in using Common Craft. I mean, I think everyone knows that these are just brilliantly done. And I have to admit that I learned RSS from Common Craft and hearing me talk about wanting to make a meaningful contribution, that's really happening in libraries. Thousands and thousands of library folks are learning about these tools from Common Craft. I don't know if he knew how many groupies he has in his library. They were really amazing. But in terms of online learning and trying to create good learning materials, there are a few things about these videos that are really important. The first thing is that people can connect these to something that they already know. You can see in the picture here that there's somebody holding a digital camera. So it's not just sort of a screenshot of a Flickr page and here's how you use it, but there's a story that's being told there. So that connection to what we already know, that the Twitter video has somebody mowing the lawn and has an image of somebody cooking. And in the RSS video, there's an image of a person sitting in their house working on the computer looking at news. And this is something that we can all relate to and that really helps learning to stick. And another thing that's also really important for learning to take hold is use of humor. And we all know from watching Common Craft videos that they're really funny, flicking pieces of paper off of the whiteboard and whatnot. So these are all reasons why we've wanted to use Common Craft videos to help explain what these concepts are. Just a little more about what we're doing in our learning modules, in addition to the what section where we're explaining the concept behind these tools. And we go on to include a section on the why, and in this section we're helping library staff who are taking these to relate it to their own environment. So again, we're working on that connection piece. Libraries are an environment that librarians know and library staff know, and then they're reading about this concept, the new technology tool. And in this section of the why, we're showing how it is that other libraries are using this tool for. Right. And then we go on from there to the how section where there's an experiential hands-on exercise. And also typically there's a reflection piece and they're also, so the staff are getting the concept. They're getting some connections to how libraries are already using that, and then have the opportunity to go through and use the tool themselves. And we will provide a link in the follow-up email to this website so you can look at it some more. So Aribeth, why do you really think that multimedia, using multimedia in your training is important? Well, just to throw out a little bit of data, it's shown that over a text-based environment, and I noticed that Lee mentioned in the beginning that in plain English started in blogs and they were just text-based. Also, I think some of the 23-things-style learning programs also use a whole lot of text and not a lot of images. But research shows that when you add multimedia, as in this Common Craft case, that recall and retention of the material goes up 42% and that transfer to other environments goes up 89%. And these are just huge whopping statistics. It's amazing to see these. So the idea being that you learn about something with this multimedia component and then you're able to transfer it to your unique environment. So it's really stunning statistics for learning. Great. Thank you. That's great. Have you read that book as well? Not fully. Okay. Yeah, I think that's one I definitely want to check out later as well. Okay. So thank you, Mary Beth. And I hear that we do have Lee back on the line. Are you there, Lee? I am here. Okay, great. Okay, I'm not sure where I dropped off on this slide. I kind of talked to myself for a little while, I think. I think we were just getting in. Let's see. I know you talked about libraries being okay. Yeah, definitely. I think the kind of message here is that we have, our clients are both for-profit and non-profit, so our business model is oriented around selling our licensed videos, but we really take a light hand for libraries. So please don't feel like that we're going to worry about you guys using the free versions on YouTube. And also I wanted to really quickly let you know that we do have a discount code for libraries and non-profits that you can use in the shopping cart that takes 20% off of any purchase. And it's SD1920 here. Wonderful. So can you tell us a little bit more about how you do what you do, what the process is? Yeah, sure, sure. Well, it's a very team-oriented process between Satya and I. We are a two-person company. And like a lot of things, we start with a script. And we feel like that's really where the value that Common Craft provides really comes from is the writing. And we spend a lot of time and do a lot of iteration in the writing phase of the script. And we try to think about telling a story and putting the viewer in a world that they already understand so they can see themselves in the video like, oh, I have that problem. I think that's one of the big kind of insights about what we do is context. So here you see a script and then what we call a thumbnail storyboard. I'm going to click over to this next one. And you can see where this is my little drawing here where we've taken the script and then for each scene just done a really basic representation of what would be in that scene for that section of the script. And then over on the left I've listed out the things that we would need to draw in order to have the right characters and things in the videos. So this is kind of a first step is this really first storyboard. Recently I started using a Wacom tablet and maybe when Apple has their tablet coming out, so now I'll use that but it's a way to digitally draw our characters versus doing it on paper which actually saves a lot of time. And it's something that I'm really excited about is using a tablet as a part of what we do. One of the things that we turn the storyboard, once we have the drawings done we actually use PowerPoint to set up a storyboard. So we digitize the images and make them into something you can insert into a slide and then create a PowerPoint presentation that has the script at the top and then the storyboard pages on the bottom. You can see an example here on this page of what a scene would look like. And then when it comes time to make the video we really actually hit print on the PowerPoint presentation and cut out the pieces of paper and color them for the video. And that also makes the storyboard easy to share. If we need to get feedback from someone we can send them a PowerPoint presentation and they get a pretty good feel for the story that we're trying to tell. In this example this is just a shot of like all of the paper materials that we put together to make the video electing a U.S. President. So we take this into our studio and start assembling it on the board for each scene. A little joke, we just shot a video last night and we used a lot of putty to paste things down on the board because things have to be very consistent. And if I had an assistant that's what I would want to have them do is to put little pieces of putty on the pieces of paper because it takes so long to do. You need a preschool class to help you out. That's right. We have a name for it, it's a putty A. There you go. So this is what our studio looks like right now. Please forgive the yellow. Your high tech glimpse. Let's sneak peek at your high tech studio. Yeah, that's right, our high tech homemade studio. Obviously in a former nursery, the yellow and white walls. You can see here we have a camera hanging from the ceiling. Sunglasses, the lights are really bright. And I actually wear sunglasses when we're moving the pieces of paper around because it's so bright. The screen here is hooked to the camera so you can see what's on the screen. So that helps a lot in us laying out what's on the video. What ends up in the video. And obviously the whiteboard there. Here's again our homemade sound studio with quilts and clamps and hooks holding everything together. Yeah, we feel really, I don't think we need all the big crazy infrastructure to do what we do and we're happy about that. Are your wife in the photo? That is, that's Sachi. We're a reluctant model for them I think. So in terms of actually making the video, what we do is record the voice separate from the video. And then Sachi is our head, our chief editor. So she edits the voice part of it down to exactly what's going to be in the video. So we have that. And then we take the audio, we take the video, I'm sorry, I'm getting confused in audio and video. We put the voice track down to make it exactly what's going to be there. And then we put the video on top of it and edit the video to match the voice. And part of what we do is try to make the timing right as we do that. And we use GarageBand for editing the audio and we use Final Cut Express for editing the video and audio together to make the video. And it's all available. You can see everything we've done at CommonCraft.com and learn more about us and everything else. And we're always happy to hear from you too. I don't think there might be some contact information in the email, but I'm Lee at CommonCraft.com. Okay, great. Lee, we've had a few questions in the chat box. And if you have other questions, people that are listening, go ahead and type those in the chat box. We are keeping track of those. So one thing that was asked is do you use a condenser mic? This is going to show off my lack of real knowledge of a lot of stuff we do, but I'm not even sure if I know what a condenser mic is. It's an AudioTechnica mic. I know that. But yeah, I don't know that it's a condenser mic. Okay, you just know it works, huh? Okay, and any other mixing software that you use? No, not really. I think we use a little program called Levelator that makes the sound evened out, but really it's just GarageBand. Okay, and this is a question I think that came from when you were talking about cost and licensing. I want to ask if nonprofits also include higher education. Yes, in terms of the discount code? I'm not sure. Yeah, that might be something. If it's related to discount code, then yes. That includes schools of all types. Okay, and Andy, if that didn't answer your question, just type in the chat again. Make sure that we answer that. Oh, for free use. Yeah, Andy says free. Yeah, definitely. I think that the educational world in general, including libraries, nonprofits, we're less concerned about people using whatever's on YouTube. If it's on YouTube, then we really can't limit anybody's use. We put it there for that reason and for our own sort of marketing. We're really only concerned when a commercial organization is trying to use the videos to sell their product. For education and things like that, we would love it if you were customers, but we put it out there so people can use it. Okay, great. And Jason asked what platform you use to offer the licensed version of the video for a fee. Interesting. In terms of doing the digital downloads, which may be the question, we use a service called eJunkie. It's e-junkie.com. And that's a combination, and that also works with PayPal to do the credit card transaction. Great, okay. And Debbie's asked, is it possible for an academic library to purchase the videos on DVD and circulate them to the students? That is a possibility. We don't currently offer the DVDs, but if you were to purchase a site license for the videos, then you would be free to distribute them via DVD to students. And let's see. Ann asked if you've met the folks from FastDraw on CBS. No, we do have relationships with a lot of people that are sort of in the same genre as we are, but we have not met those folks yet. And Patricia asked, can we suggest topics for free videos? Of course, of course. We always appreciate that. Our contact form on our website is always a good place for that as well as like I said, Lee at CommonCraft.com. Okay, great. And someone also asked if you plan to translate the videos in other languages, and I think you've already done that with some of them, right? We have. We're planning to do others soon. We have our social media 9 pack that's translated, and I think we're probably going to do our computer basics pack soon which has six videos. We do the five languages, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and German. Do you have any new videos that you're planning already? Yeah, I think that our focus over the next few months I think is going to be net safety. So we've done a video called Fishing Scams in Plain English which hopefully helps people understand how to react to those emails they get that try to get them to put their password in there. Yeah, I actually watched that one today and I was thinking I need to forward it on to my in-laws. Yeah, I think that there's a lot we plan to do there. An example is secure websites, understanding what it means to have a secure website and how to tell. Another example is helping mainly younger people understand the consequences of what they put on something like Facebook in terms of pictures of people drinking and things like that. Okay, great. And do you have any timeline like how often you come up with something? We try to publish one video a month. This year I think we'll probably have done 14 or 15 of our own videos over the course of the year. Can you do widgets? You know, we haven't looked at that very closely. I think that could be a possibility for the future but we don't have current plans. Okay, great. And Mary-Anne asked about tips for trainers who are listening on simplifying tech for our students. I think that's something you're so great at in those analogies. Yeah, thank you. I think that one of the things that, and I mentioned this a little bit before but one of the things that we really believe in is telling a story, not just using bullet points and sort of tactical click here kinds of things but telling a story that allows someone to see themselves in the story and then making them say, oh, that's me. And then presenting that character with a problem that makes the viewer say, oh, I have that problem. And then when you present the solution, the solution makes a lot more sense to them. So that's really basic outline of the way we look at our videos. Okay, that was a great last question. And we're going to move on. If we have some time left and we have new questions come up, then Lee, we'd like to hear back from you then. Of course. Thank you so much. And so now we're going to talk with Carolyn from the Cumberland County Library System in Pennsylvania. And she's been using the Common Craft videos a little differently more in person workshops which, you know, it's always interesting to have speaker. And I think Carolyn kind of managed to do that by using Lee as her co-presenter. Carolyn, can you tell us about how you've been using those videos? I went too far with the slides. I think, okay, thank you. That was a perfect explanation of what I did, Stephanie. I had been asked by Commonwealth libraries to do a presentation, just a one-hour training presentation to people who had little or no experience with Web 2.0 applications. They were actually friends and trustees of libraries. So they had some specific objectives, and you can see those on the slide here, RSS feeds, blogs, wikis, social networking sites, photo sharing sites, and social bookmarking sites. They wanted to learn all about these. They wanted to know what each one was, where they could get started using selected tools. And they also wanted to see examples of these tools being used effectively by libraries. And when I saw Marianne Lennox's question on there about simplifying tech for our own students, this is kind of where I was. I had people who had little to no knowledge at all of these tools. They knew they existed, and they needed to start at the very beginning. And so I worked up a PowerPoint slide show that I did with them, and there was quite an introduction describing what Web 2.0 is as a concept. And then I mentioned that here are some of the primary tools we are going to learn about today. And I would begin by introducing the concept through a video. I would just very briefly say next we are going to learn RSS, which stands for really simple syndication. And while I could go on and on and tell you about it, and I didn't tell them this, but my big fear was I may miss a few points. I said, I'm going to have my co-presenter, Lee Lafever. I know you can't see him in the room, but here he is. And I would click on that link and the YouTube videos would come on, and I would show the video. I did the workshop a couple of times so it provided a lot of consistency in my message. Again, not having to remember to say all the same things. The videos are so short, but they get all the main points out there. And they really do simplify the concept for everyone in a fast-paced, humorous, and memorable fashion. And people really caught on to the style of Lee's style. I actually noticed in the tweets that Stephanie Zimmerman said that she loves the yay and the boo. Everybody does. People were yaying and booing by the sixth video. They were going right along with them, right on cue. They loved his style. And there were a few other quirky little things that they caught right on to. So that was super. So the humor really made a big impact and kept it fresh and alive for them. And then I followed up that video with a couple of bullet points that would reiterate mostly points that were made in the video. Some of these I related straight back to libraries. And one of the things that is done in each of the Common Craft videos on technology anyway on the Web 2.0 applications is best sites are given out. So I put on some of the most ubiquitous sites. They are all straight from the videos, some of them were my own. But here you can see an example of where I gave sites for free RSS feed readers. Another slide would again reiterate some of the points made in the Common Craft video but also move into practical application for the people that I was training. So for the specific audience I put in that they might want to, I guess these would apply to other nonprofits as well, but calendar of events, latest news items, and newsletter articles, these were ways that you could, or things that you could feed to reiterate what he taught there. And then finally I followed up with best practices for common real-world examples of Web 2.0 applications that were being used in libraries. So each time I did the presentation I tailored the sites so that they either match the geographical or the topical interest of the audience. And for every one of these presentations I gave a handout, and on that handout I had not a whole lot of information but one of them was a link to a wiki where people could go back and watch the Common Craft videos. They could find the links that were given in the Common Craft videos and they could find the best sites again. Wonderful. Thank you for sharing how you did that. Sure. I think that's a great way to really incorporate those into your workshops. We have a couple of other examples that I'll just talk about really quickly. And one is from the University of Minnesota. And you can see in the upper right-hand corner of this website that they've got a link to the Google Docs in plain English. And Denise gambles how they have incorporated the videos really in a lot of different ways using them in person workshops. They've included the links to the videos and emails to staff just trying to educate them that way quickly. And they've also linked it to in-house online training modules and then they've used it one-on-one too. So really using it in a lot of different ways to help train their staff. And then this last example is from the Idaho Commission Libraries and Shirley Billidoo, which I think is a great example. This is Splat which stands for Special Projects Library Action Team. And so they've really used the videos as part of a self-paced online course and focus on six different technology-based resources like blogs and wikis. And so again, really incorporated the Common Craft videos into their training. And I think one thing that's really important about looking at these videos, I know some people have questions and are thinking about making their own videos. And I think one of the things about Lee is he makes it seem like it's really an easy thing to do, but I've tried to do some of this myself. And it's really true that the post-production takes a lot of time. And I know one of the questions in the chat, Lee, someone asked, how long does it take to shoot one of the three-minute videos? Can you answer that question? You know, the actual shooting, and like I said, we just did one last night. If we were to sit and just do it the whole time, it would take about four to five hours. To shoot it, and that's not counting doing the voice-over or editing. To do a whole video, that's another question that people have is like, what about a whole video from start to finish? And each one is different. And we iterate so much, and also kind of working from home. Our work and home life sort of gets wrapped up together, so it's really hard to know, but we estimate maybe 80 hours or 100 hours or something for a video. Wow, that's amazing. Of course, it also takes a lot of storage space up. That's something I've seen as well. Some of those audio files can get really, and video files can get really huge. So I think this is a great thing that you've provided to us that we can just use your videos instead. And you've already got your studio set up, so you've got your good audio as well. We just wanted to share a little bit about some best practices. And I think Mary Beth gave us this slide if you want to talk for a second, Mary Beth, about training best practices. Sure. I just wanted to talk a little bit about some things as a trainer that you might want to be thinking about when you're working with staff with these sorts of technology trainings and other kinds of trainings. The first thing is related to content, and you want to be able to provide an environment for staff. In addition to physical environment, you want to make sure that the person is not disturbed when they're working on this sort of self-directed learning. But also you probably want to be working with your IT department and make sure that staff have access to the things that they need. I know that sometimes people aren't able to have access to YouTube videos, for example, and things like this. And I think it's important as a trainer to actually try to relate with IT on these things and talk about what's valuable about this and why it would be that staff should be able to, for example, download an application in order to learn it, etc., also in terms of content, just supporting and mentoring staff when they have questions and then helping them with some sort of reflection piece, some kind of assessment. In addition, I think as a trainer or manager creating opportunities for staff to apply what they've learned and supporting that application in the workplace is important. So not just look at the video, figure out how this works, look at how other organizations might be using it, but actually taking it into the workplace and applying it in work and doing that soon after somebody takes the training so that they're able to apply it right away and it makes sense. People will tend to forget if they're not applying it pretty soon. And then also really good practice is to allow staff to share what they've learned and for you as a trainer or manager to facilitate that sharing out. And so whether that's that you have staff do a brown bag about what they've learned or create a tip sheet or something like this, but somehow allow them to share and teach it themselves and that really helps to make learning stick. Great. Thank you, Mary Beth. And Carolyn, did you have anything you wanted to share too? I did have some best practices here for, they really were for in-person training but they also work very well with online training with providing some kind of asynchronous learning. The training best practices identified were defining the competencies, first making sure that you know what people need to learn, what's going to be the outcome of the work that you're doing with them, and then scaffolding, which is a term I use for starting where the learner is or where the majority of the learners are. And if they are at a very basic level or absolutely don't know anything about the subject, this is where again those common craft videos really came into play as a great introduction to start where my learners were. Then through differentiated instruction providing diversity to your training so that there's a little bit of video, maybe a little bit of group work, maybe some individual thought, some writing, providing them different ways to learn because obviously everyone learns differently. And project-based learning is really important for reinforcing the points. People enjoyed watching the videos. People appreciated the amount of information they were given but they needed a task at the end and in most cases they do. So they need something to do, something hands-on that reinforces everything that they've learned. Wonderful. Thank you. And you've also got some resources for training videos as well. I think this is a combination of things that Mary Beth and I both submitted. I know the ones I put in here were great resources for other videos, some of them not quite as simplistic, some of them not in plain English, but some of them they were some of our favorite places to go to get videos that you could show in full or in part. Some of them come with handouts that can help reinforce the learning. I don't know Mary Beth, do you have anything more you want to share about them? Yeah, I will just mention that a lot of the content in SchoolTube is geared, I think more toward a K-12 environment, but SchoolTube tends to be a video site that is not blocked by organizations where YouTube often is. And these videos on SchoolTube are considered safe. They're sort of vetted for content. The Merlot site, I know for those who are working in library environments and who are wanting to develop training material for database searching or information literacy and things like this, the Merlot website has a lot of training material that's actually peer reviewed that people have already created. And this is for online teaching, which again you can use that in a face-to-face environment just with a computer, but might be something that folks want to check out. And the other ones there are pretty self-explanatory. But I think that in the library world especially, we're really good at reinventing. And a lot of times we might not have to. And so I think as you mentioned Carolyn, it's a good idea to kind of see what's out there and see what it is that you incorporate because we don't have the resources to be always doing this ourselves. I was just going to say that if anybody's been following along on the chat, Beanit got taken off the list. It's kind of at the last minute and I think we're going to add that back on. That's one that has again varied, they're under four minutes, things like email missteps and flash and Hulu and different things that some of them are technology oriented and some of them are personal interaction oriented. Virginia mentioned Teacher Tube in the chat. That's one that's much like School Tube. I think in both cases, if your school or library organization has YouTube blocked and maybe blocks similar sites, if you contact School Tube or Teacher Tube they can send you materials that you can give to tech administrators or whomever sort of holds those strings that gives them their policies and what they need to do to be able to open up those video resources. That's great to know. Good. Well, thank you for sharing those resources, everyone. I think we have a few minutes for questions. If you have any questions for any of our presenters you can just type them in the chat. I did have one for Lee from Garrett. He asked, have you ever received feedback regarding the pain of your videos and their effectiveness on different age groups? We have heard feedback about that. I think that if you look at one of our more recent videos compared to our early videos like RSS, Wiki, Social Networking, we have tried to slow down the pace more. I think that young learners are one thing, but also our videos are often used for teaching English as a second language. And that's another thing that we try to slow it down some for. And something you might notice too is if you compare the version of RSS in plain English for instance on YouTube to what we show on CommonCraft.com, we've actually redone the audio to make it a little bit slower. Okay, great. And let's see, Debbie's asked if you or if anyone else on the call has used GeneProject.com to create free videos of screenshots. Well, I have used Gene. Some I primarily use Adobe Captivate and I've also used Camtasia, but I know a lot of my colleagues use Gene and they use it because it's freeware. But that's often good for doing the screen casting type online training. And it looks like some other folks in the chat have also used Gene. Was there a particular question that you had about, or you're just recommending it? It looks like Stephanie is recommending Gene as an online tool to create online training. I think it's a great idea. Yeah, that came out just shortly after we captivated our library system and I evaluated it and thought, if I'd known then what I know now. Yeah, I think isn't it like the free version of Camtasia? Yes, it is. And I think sometimes you get what you pay for. And so some of the ones that cost have a little more in the way of features. But I think that if you're on a budget and you have to pick and choose where your resources are, I think it's fantastic. And that's really great if you have something very specific that you need to create at your own business place, your own library. But again, when I heard Lisa I wrote that down, 80 hours it takes him to do a video. Well in terms of staff time, that's two weeks of work. And so it's really important to sit down and evaluate, is it something you need to create yourself, or is there something free and handy out there and perhaps done more professionally than you could possibly do it? Yeah, and I want to stress too that that's two people's time doing it. So it's not 160, I'm saying that's total man hours, so across both of our times and it varies a lot. But there's a lot of things that we do that I don't think are necessary for everybody to do in making a video. I think that that's part of sort of our business is taking it to kind of a different level. I guess because we're trying to make a business out of what we do versus just getting the message across. Great, I also saw a comment from Mary Ann Linux that she asked, can somebody please write the accidental instructional designer? I'd love to write that book. I'll get on that right away. Okay, go ahead. We'll talk later. I have an editor I can hook you up. Okay, any other questions? I know there's a lot going on in the chat sharing different platforms that people have used, pros and cons. Any other questions for our presenters? Okay, well I think all of you, this has been a really great and fun webinar. And I do want to reiterate that these slides will get an email that will have an attachment of the PowerPoint and the links that we've talked about and also a link to the archived version. And I think that's about all of our questions. So Kimi, do you want to go ahead and talk a little bit about other webinars coming up and how we can continue these great conversations? Certainly, we actually don't have any upcoming webinars planned, set, and stones. I can't really share that information, but link to the page on the TechSoup site where you can find this information is techsoup.org forward slash go forward slash webinars. And that link of course will be in the follow-up email. But I did want to talk about some previously recorded TechSoup webinars that are somewhat related to this topic. In the question that you all answered, what are you hoping to gain from this webinar? People are talking about podcasting and making videos, and how do I get the word out? And we've done webinars that talk about these topics, and other people wanted to do webinars themselves. So here is a list of some of the webinars we've done that are directly tied to this overall idea. And there will be links to these webinars in the follow-up message. They are all 60 minutes long. They are all free, and they are all set up in the same kind of format. So along with the webinar, our links to more information so one question someone had was, where do I find music that I can include in my video? And in one of the webinars that we did, there is a link to the different places where you can find free or royalty-free music for your videos. So I have been seeing if there are additional questions that have come through the chat, but if we didn't answer your question, and if you have more questions that you would like to ask of the presenters or about this topic, then let's create that conversation on our TechSoup community forums. And I'll include this link in the follow-up message, but this tiny URL goes to a topic that I started just for this webinar. So a little bit more about TechSoup for those of you who may be new to TechSoup, and this is your first webinar, or you're not sure what we do. We have discounted software donations from Microsoft Adobe Semantic to name a few. They donate their software to us, and we redistributed to nonprofits and libraries at a greatly discounted price. We also have articles in our Learning Center that talk about different technology topics, and we have a section for free downloads, and of course our webinar program is listed in the Learning Center. And our community forums is a great place to post your questions, whatever they may be, and have them answered by volunteers who watches those questions. We list upcoming events, and we also have a special website just for libraries. So TechSoup for Libraries is a place where you can download one of three maintain IT cookbooks which are a really fantastic resource for organizations with public computers. And I wanted just to, before I wrap it up completely, Stephanie, were there any other last-minute questions that people had? No, I really didn't see anything come through new on the chat. Okay, well then, I would like to thank ReadyTalk for sponsoring this webinar series. ReadyTalk has donated the use of their system to help TechSoup expand awareness of technology through the nonprofit sector. ReadyTalk helped nonprofits and libraries in the U.S. and Canada reach geographically dispersed areas and increase collaboration through their audio conferencing and web conferencing services. So this slide lists the special training that they offer to TechSoup customers. And I want to make sure that...