 Welcome to TechSoup Talks. Today's webinar is Designing and Delivering Technology Workshops. Our presenters are Stephanie Girding and Brenda Hald. Before we get started, I want to tell you a little bit about TechSoup. We are working towards a time when every nonprofit and social benefit organization on the planet has the technology resources and knowledge they need to operate at their full potential. For those of you who are new to the work that we do and our website, here's a quick screen grab. The things I'd like to point out are our learning center where you can find articles and a link to our webinar program. The library's program, which many of you are calling in from libraries today, we've got special information specifically for public libraries. We take software donations from companies like Microsoft, Adobe, Symantec, and redistribute it to nonprofits and libraries for a very, very low cost. And you can find out what we provide here on the right-hand side of our website. There are two newsletters that go out on a regular basis by the cup is weekly, and New Product Alert goes out once or twice a month. Please subscribe to these if you'd like to stay in touch with what we're doing. So now I'd like to introduce our speakers and thank them so much for putting together such a great presentation. So I'm just going to have Stephanie introduce herself and then ask her to then introduce Brenda. So take it away, Stephanie. Hi, this is Stephanie Girding, and I'm an independent library consultant. I do a lot of work with training and technology and grants, and I'm also a training and outreach specialist for TechSoup for Libraries. Brenda, I'll let you introduce yourself. Okay, thanks Stephanie. My name is Brenda Howe, and I feel like I should put a red Rudolph nose on that photo. I have a cold, I apologize. I'm drinking tea and eating honey and cough drops too, so hopefully we'll get through this and it won't be bad. I work at the Northeast Kansas Library System. We're headquartered in Lawrence, Kansas, but we work with libraries throughout the whole northeastern part of the state. So Stephanie, did you want me to, you're taking it away? Yes, I think we've got it. Thank you. And I think Brenda is going to start with our objectives. Yes, we have three objectives today, three things that we are hoping to do. We'd like everyone to leave with some training tips. Those I think will come from us and then also looking through the list of attendees. I see lots of names I recognize, other people who are involved with technology training too. And so we'll have opportunities for you to share some of your ideas, some of your best practices. So that will be a way for us all to learn from one another. Another objective that we have for this session, we have a training cycle that we'll talk about and a workshop plan, a template for putting together a workshop. And those are things that can help you organize workshops. And then a big part of this session, something that is very important to Stephanie and I, we'll talk a lot about interactivity and how important that is in technology training, making the learning active not passive. So we'll talk about lots of specific examples of activities that we've used. And again we'll hope to hear from you too if there are things you have done that have worked well for you. And I know from looking at the registrations a lot of you talked a little bit about what you wanted to learn in this webinar. And that went along well with the objectives. I wanted to start off sharing some rules that I use sometimes with technology training that are a little bit funny. But I know a lot of you mentioned that you're doing training for people that are new to computers. And a lot of times they can be very nervous about going to the training. And that may be because they're nervous about using technology, or it may be that they haven't been in any kind of training environment since maybe they were in school. So these are a few that I use just to sort of ease some of the fears, but also help them start getting interactive as well. So the first one is ask stupid questions. And so this one is just, I remind them that if they're wondering something, probably other people are as well. So to go ahead and ask. And this can sometimes get funny where people will raise their hand and say, oh I have a stupid question and then you can clap for them or something. But just sort of to make it fun. And during this webinar too I encourage you all to ask any questions that you have. Just go ahead and ask those in the chat. We do see the chat as presenters. And we actually have a Google Doc document that's open where Sarah and Kami are helping us record all those questions. So if we don't answer them for you in the webinar, then we'll answer them either at the end of this webinar or also in the TechSoup forum. So we can get all of those answered as well. So if you have any questions that you think are stupid or if they're smart as well, go ahead and ask those in the chat. And the second rule is to cheat. And this is really just to do with it's okay to look on someone else's screen. It's okay to talk to each other during a workshop and during classes, but really encouraging them to connect and learn from each other that it's not like old school days when we couldn't do that sort of thing. And then the third rule is to just make mistakes. And I think this is a really important thing to encourage because often people that may be something that they're scared of that they're going to break something or do something wrong. So really encouraging them to go ahead and try things out that if they make the mistakes while they're in the workshop with you, you can help them fix them. But if they wait until they go home, then they won't have your guidance there to help them as well. So those are sort of my three fun rules for technology training. And some of you may be wondering, I wrote a book called The Accidental Technology Trainer. So if you're wondering what I mean by accidental technology trainer, I think a lot of you fall into this category. So no matter what kind of training you're doing, whether it's former classes in a computer lab, or if you're doing an online webinar like we are, or creating tutorials or information on the web that people can go through on their own, or just doing something as simple whether it's for the public or for staff members or coworkers, helping someone learn to use email or find information online or create a blog or any of the new social technologies. I think the big thing is a lot of us didn't plan on technology training being part of our work, and now it is. So if you accidentally come into this, this will be a great webinar for you to really just think a little bit about what you can do on a big picture, how to do the planning, how to do the activities. And if you have been doing this purposefully, or you've been doing it for a while, again please share in the chat any ideas that you have, and also we hope you'll come away with a few new things for yourself as well. So we're going to start off with a couple of polls. Okay, this is Brenda again, and we're wanting to hear from you. You're attending this webinar on technology training, so you're obviously interested in the topic. So we'd like to hear what topics you're tackling in your training, and it might be training that you're planning to do, training that you haven't done yet. So if you can use that text box in the middle of the screen, go ahead and type in some of the topics you're taking on and submit those. We'll see what people are doing. We'll leave this open for a little while, and then I think we can display the results back to them as well too. It looks like a lot so far, Brenda. I saw a question wondering if you're wanting to know what topics you're teaching. So are you teaching Twitter? Are you teaching email? Are you teaching basic Internet, basic computers, any topics that you're offering in your training? All kinds of things, basic computer literacy, how to find a job online, Facebook, manipulating photos, I think I need that one. Ebooks, fundraising? Wow, there's a little bit of everything, but we're still responding, so we're going to give you a few more minutes to finish typing these in. Someone's doing iPads and e-readers. A lot of the basic skills still too. I'm always amazed that it seems like, I don't know, we've been doing technology training for over 15 years, and I remember just thinking some day we're going to be done teaching everyone the basics, but it's still going on. There's still people that need to know how to use a mouse and how to type in word, all of those things. I think we're kind of getting to the end. We've got 200 responses so far, so I'm going to go ahead and close the poll in 5 seconds. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Okay, hit submit and I'll get it closed. Okay, oh, it doesn't put everybody's results, probably because there's so many, but 200. Did you see anything else there, Brenda? That was interesting. Yeah, I think something that is interesting is lots of different unique topics, but another thing that I'm seeing is that a lot of people are doing the same topics. And I think that something we're going to talk about later is resources that are available so that the line that we always use, you don't have to recreate the wheel with some of those topics. There might be someone who's already created a lesson plan, someone who's created some sort of resource for you. So yeah, I see lots and lots of the same topics, internet topics, office topics, some social networking topics. Okay, thanks for taking the time to do that. We have one more poll. So there are lots of different ways that training can be offered. You can do one hour face-to-face workshop or 90 minutes or two hours or a half day. You could do consecutive weeks. You could do online training. We just wanted to kind of get a feel for how long your training sessions are. You might be doing more than one of these, so you can just pick whichever one you do the most. Wow, and you guys are really fast at this. We've already got 175. And it looks like, who do you think our winner is, Brenda? I think it's going to be the one hour. Yep, it does. It looks like that's the most popular. It's almost a tie. Coming in for a second. You all go ahead and close this poll in three seconds, three, two, one. That one made a pretty chart. Yeah, I'm interested in hearing what other includes too. I'm guessing that might include some asynchronous online things maybe, so people are putting together courses that aren't a specific amount of time. I bet people are doing shorter training sessions now too. That's interesting. If you picked other in the chat, you can just go ahead and add that in. There's something other than the categories that we had, 30 and 15 minute ones. That's a great idea. And I had a quote that I wanted to talk about on this slide. There's a quote that says something like, if you were able to go into a room without anyone in it and deliver the workshop that you were planning on doing, then don't even bother to do it. I think that's really powerful and that's something that we're going to be talking about more today is just that you need to recognize the people that are in your training, whatever kind of technology training that you're doing, and really involve them and think about them as unique people. Even though we will talk about planning, I think there's something I call organized flexibility that you need to know what you're going to be talking about, but I think you need to be flexible enough that you take into account the different learning styles of the people that are in the room and the different skill levels of those people because often we don't know ahead of time what those skill levels are going to be. We'll talk about how we can use the activities to address that as well. Another thing that I think is really important in technology training is really letting them do it for themselves. I know when I first started doing technology training, that was something I really had to learn is to let go of the control and to give them time to just get out there and do it. This is an example of my daughter from this last summer. She was just about to turn three and we were out to dinner and she really wanted to use the chopsticks and I just thought this is going to be a big mess. I didn't know if I wanted to let her try, but I thought I'll just let her do it and she'll figure out that it's going to be difficult for her. And I'm not really going to teach her how to do it or anything, but just let her see what happens. And she taught herself how to do it. And I was really amazed that she was able to do that. And I think that that's something with adults as well that sometimes when we just let them on their own it can be amazing to see what they do. And I know Brenda, you're a big proponent of letting them do it as well. That's right. I guess I think of it as the golden rule of training, is that you should, when you're planning training, when you're putting something together, you should make it something that you yourself would like to attend. So thinking back to when you learned about the topic, what kind of training would have been useful for you? Often thinking about that list of topics that people said they're providing training on, lots of those things are things that people teach themselves. A lot of us I think didn't attend a class to learn how to create a blog. We just heard about it and then went to Blogger or whatever tool and tried it out. And I think that keeping those things in mind, how you learned about things, and then what kind of training session you would like to attend, what would be useful, I think those are the golden rules of training. Someone in the text chat said not a Vanna White kind of presentation, and I think absolutely not a Vanna White kind of presentation. We'll talk about that a lot more, but it helps that we are adult learners. So again, if you think about yourself and how you learned about technology, as Stephanie said, maybe it was 15 years ago that you started learning about some of these topics or even more. But if you can remember what that feels like, or even now just if you notice when you're learning about something that's new to you, how you do that. You like to be self-directed and have choices. You like things to relate to your experiences, to be relevant to your life, to what's going on in either your personal or your professional life. So thinking about people's learning needs and their motivation, where that motivation comes from. And that people just need time often to practice and reflect and to think and to share with one another. That can often be what the training environment provides, that opportunity to share with one another. What are you learning? What's worked for you? How could this be effective? And then also when I think providing training for adult learners, it's always important to think about those basic needs, just people's comfort level. I really like those three things you shared in the beginning, Stephanie, the cheats and ask stupid questions and make mistakes. It's a vulnerable thing for adults to learn, to admit that they don't know things. And for some reason technology seems to make people feel especially vulnerable. They somehow feel like they're supposed to just know these things. So I think really creating a relaxed environment, a comfortable environment where people feel free to do some practicing. I think that's what it's all about. Definitely. Let's talk a little bit about, I just kind of threw this together as a training cycle to try for us to look at the big picture when we're thinking about doing some of this planning. And in the middle you see I've got some people on a raft. Because sometimes that kind of reminds me of doing technology training that you sort of never know what you're going to get into on that day, whether it's going to be the people that are involved or the technology that's been involved. You kind of have to be prepared for anything and then just kind of go with it and see what happens. So thinking through doing training, I think one thing that's really important is to start with some sort of plan. And if you're doing staff training or training for the public or both of these, I think it's good to have some sort of plan in place, just really thinking through what you're going to be doing and if you need a budget for these things, any of those kind of things. And today we're going to talk more about the workshop planning and the learning objectives and the learning activities and sort of the whole experience of the workshop itself. But I did want to just touch on for a moment the needs assessment and competencies because I know that's something that's sort of a hot topic right now and I couldn't really resist it. But we're mostly going to be focused on those three areas, the workshop planning and objectives and activities. But I wanted to include just a slide about some technology competencies that have been developed that can be really useful if you are doing training for your staff and you just sort of need to figure out what training that's needed for your staff. So there's been some really great things that have been developed recently. So I've just shared those and will include those as well in your follow-up email so you can look at those more later. And then also just some online survey tools and these have free versions as well as paid versions. And someone did just ask if the PowerPoint will be available for download afterwards and it will be. You'll get a link to that as well in the follow-up email. So just sort of some tools. But thinking about the workshop plan, this is sort of what I mean by doing a workshop plan. And I think that this can serve several purposes. One is it's really good to just get it down in writing what you're going to be doing. But this is also a great way to share as well whether you're sharing with coworkers or if you want to share with each other. And later on in the webinar we'll share some websites that collect all kinds of training materials and training plans. But I think that that's something that can be really useful as well. So not just for you as a trainer, planning everything out, but also being able to share it with other people I think is important. And for myself I know sometimes I'll do a workshop and then not do it again for another year or so. So it's even been helpful for me to go back and look through what I did in the past. So just trying to break it down, having a title, and that can be something that's creative, but you also want to make sure it's something that easily conveys what the topic is. And then thinking through who your target audience is, who are you going to be training, how long is this going to be, what's going to be the major goal of the workshop, and then the learning objectives which we're going to talk more about in just a moment which I think is really important and has really helped me the most when planning technology training. Just really thinking through if I'm doing an hour long workshop what are three things that I want people to really understand and to get. And then writing down a description of the training, and this can also be used for marketing purposes which I think is really good. So for this webinar in itself with the marketing we included the learning objectives and the description. And I think that's another good rule to keep in mind too, just so you keep things consistent. People know what they're signing up for. Then you use those same objectives again just like we did at the beginning of this webinar. So making sure that you're keeping things consistent for yourself and also for your learners I think is important. And then we'll talk more about modules as well. But this is just sort of breaking your information in your class into chunks so that people can deal with it easier in their mind as far as learning is concerned, a lot easier to have sort of 10 or 15 minute or even 20 minute chunks of information at a time. Evaluation is something that's also really important with doing any kind of technology training whether you're evaluating just how that class went or how your training program is in general. Just having even a few short questions where you ask them what they learned and how they're going to be able to apply it can really give you some valuable feedback. And then also just thinking through what materials and supplies that you'll need as part of that individual workshop. And some of you are doing one-on-one training but I've also been seeing some organizations that are using this kind of planning for that as well. Just sort of thinking through if you keep getting the same questions on something or on a certain software. Just sort of thinking through what are some easy things that I can show them quickly just again to kind of help with that consistency. So here's an example of the workshop plan sort of filled out like I've used it before and this was for a day-long training that I did on the Accidental Technology Trainer. So just thinking through those things, putting the objectives of the description. I just used a little chart for my modules and timing thinking through what everything is going to take, how long. Again, trying to chunk that information using those objectives I think is really important and really helps me when it comes to doing the modules and planning the activities, trying to have a different activity to meet each of those learning objectives can be an important part of that as well. And I know Brenda is a big fan of learning objectives as well. I don't know if I'm a fan. I do consider them necessary though. I feel like lots of pieces of what we're talking about today could be whole webinars and definitely there could be one on creating the learning objectives. So this is just a quick intro to learning objectives. But I think they are really important because everything else in your planning for your training stems from these, all the activities that you plan, the marketing or promotion you do, or who you target with your workshop that's all going to depend on these learning objectives. So it's just breaking it down what you plan to do, what are the outcomes that you would like to see. So as a result of attending this training what will people be able to do? And objectives use action verbs. So you can see this example here, explain, define, explain, practice. Action verbs that explain what people will be able to do after the workshop. One thing that I want to point out here that I think is important is not to get hung up on only teaching skills. And what I mean by that is with technology topics I think as I mentioned earlier a lot of us have learned different technology things on our own. And people could do that. They could learn about Blogger. They could learn about different tools on their own. But I think what the training atmosphere with having multiple people together, working on learning something, there are a lot of benefits to that. And I think one of the things that people get from that is a sense of what it could be used for. Why might they use this tool? I think that's an important thing. So it's not all just about the skills. Here's where you click. Here's how you do this. Here's how you make it look this way. But really remembering to focus on why. Why might you use this? How are some different ways that you might use this? And then I also always try to get myself on these objectives to think about what happens after this session. One of the outcomes has to be that they can take this and do something with it after the session, after their training session with me. I don't know if any of you read the Blue Skunk blog. Stephanie, do you read that one? It's Doug Johnson. He writes, he's a school media specialist in Minnesota, but his blog is great. It's one of my favorite blogs. But he posted about technology training, and it was about a woman who had gone to a class and learned about Google Docs. And the trainer received an email asking saying, oh, I can't remember how to do this. I want to save my Google Doc to a disk so that I can take it and work on it at my other computer. It was computers that were networked. Those of you who use Google Docs, one of the almost miraculous things about it is how awesome it is not to have to worry about saving it to a disk. You can open that up anywhere you can get to the web. So that key piece of information I think should have been emphasized in the training, but it's so easy as a trainer to forget to step back and do that. So I think objectives that aren't just focused on skills, but on the why, the how, the bigger picture, that's important. Brenda and I were both trainers for the Gates Foundation Library program which rolled out all of those computers to the libraries years ago. And I can remember sometimes we had to do two-day long trainings, and we were supposed to teach everything about the computers, how to maintain them, how to turn them on, how to use Word. And for some of the libraries, these were the first computers that they received ever. And I can remember just that even though we had all these other objectives going on, one of the key things was, okay, if we leave, will they know how to come in in the morning and turn them on and log in and then turn them off at the end of the day? So sometimes you do have to remember just to make sure that they can do the very basic thing that you want them to learn to do as well. And that also reminds me of, I did workshops like this, three-hour long emerging technology workshops. And one day I did it twice, once in the morning and one in the afternoon. And it was really interesting because the morning one I started off by showing them some of the technology, so showing them blogs. And the class was very interactive, so I had people that, you know, I would show them a blog and they would say, oh, I know this other blog. Can you show us this? And so we just kind of were doing a lot of learning together going along like that. And the end of the class I had planned on them taking time to create their own blog and to explore on their own. And so in that class we didn't have as much time doing that, but it was still a really good class and the feedback was good and everything. But then in the afternoon with a different group of people, it was very interesting because they didn't talk at all at the beginning. And so we went through that part of the class very quickly. And we ended up having more time left at the end for doing the practice session, which I don't know if it was because maybe they were more beginning level class or just the social dynamics of that class. But it ended up being a really great class too. We ended up doing a show and tell at the end where we looked on each other's computers and they showed us the blogs that they made and that showed us the most interesting thing that they found, that kind of thing. So I think that that kind of goes along with my organized flexibility that you can have the same objectives and have two different classes go very differently just based on looking at what the needs are for the people that are involved. Yeah, there's a lot of good discussion in the chat and Sarah is working hard to make sure those ideas and tips are all shared with everyone. I saw one, I think it was from Sarah Thompson and she said that what she felt was needed for her campus was just a let's play session. And I think that's really so true, like you were talking about competencies, Stephanie, and there can be this whole list of skills that you need, but that's going to change. And so what people really need is to kind of develop a fluency or it's helping them become fluent, helping them get ready to learn whatever the next new thing is. And that's challenging, but I think it's the way it's got to be. So let's keep going with this learning objective idea. So when Stephanie and I have done lots of training together, lots of putting sessions together and when we do it, we come up with the learning objectives. And then for each learning objective that we have, we develop some sort of activity. And here's the next example of one. I'll start talking about this and then you can add more, Stephanie. This is Bingo. We played this with a group of librarians in Arizona and I think we may have done it other places too. But the point, the objective was for people to talk about different social networking tools and how to use them personally and in the library context. So what we did is we created these Bingo cards with different social networking tools like library thing and Goodreads and Second Life and those sorts of tools, Facebook. And then we would draw whatever the resource or whatever the tool was, draw that out of a hat, and then someone from the group would have to be able to define it and then talk about either how they used it or how they used it in a library context. This was for a library group. And it was really fun and somehow that activity helped make it more interesting, helped keep people engaged. Yeah, I thought it was really interesting because a lot of times I felt like their examples and their definitions were better than what I would have said myself. So I think it was a great way for them to share and for us to all learn from each other, definitely to see how people were actually using it at their organizations. So that's just one, that Bingo game. And there are online tools where you can make Bingo cards, free online tools where you can make Bingo cards. So those are great. I don't remember the name of that Bingo card site off the top of my head. I think I usually just Google free Bingo card. I can never remember it. It comes up as one of the first ones. But it's a really easy one because you can just put the terms in and it will do it and then it reshuffles them so you can print a bunch of different ones. So these are some examples of other interactivities that I think that you could do in your training. And we'll just talk about some of them. Stephanie, should we go through these in order, or do we want to just pick the ones that — Let's just do our favorites maybe. I'll talk about Book Club because that's something done with TechSoup. So later in this session we're going to talk about some cookbooks that were created by the TechSoup for Libraries. They have chapters on lots of different technology topics. So what we did is people would read a chapter and then come together — this was in an online setting — come together and talk about what they had read. So they would ask questions and share with one another what they were doing, how it related to what they had read about in the chapter. And that ended up being really effective. So I think if you can treat it in that book discussion way, I don't think you'll probably often want on a technology topic people to have read an entire book. But just some article, I know some of you said you're doing e-reader training. This would be a way — you know, if there's some good article that overviews e-readers, and if there's a way to make it a prerequisite for the workshop that people will have read that, that can really kind of get you to a common ground because everyone who's done technology training knows the big challenges that people come into a session all over the place. You know, no experience, lots of experience, and everywhere in between. So having that shared thing that you've read, even if people understand it on different levels, I mean, I think that gives you a place to start. Definitely. I just saw in the chat — let's see if I can get back there — Jonathan who shared that sometimes seniors are better at teaching each other and so maybe pairing them up. And I think that's sort of what we need by the payors' chair or the learning partners, is that you can pair people together, even participants. And this can be a good thing for dealing with different skill levels. I've also seen in some libraries where they've paired teams together with older patrons, and I think that can be a great thing too because sometimes the teams are excited about it and know a lot about it. And then also even for ongoing, having staff paired together, I've seen that in some libraries as well where they learn, and even doing things like when you come back from a conference sharing with each other what you've learned and that sort of thing. So I think that can be a good one. Another one is the question sharing. And Brenda, you were talking before, we were talking about how sometimes it can be hard for people to admit that they don't know something and that this can be a good way to do it. So what you can do is you can collect questions from people, give them some index cards, and let them write a question that they have, and then collect those and answer them throughout the workshop. Or I've also done this where I've created little groups and had them answer the questions, handed them back out to them and answered the questions or have them develop a quiz that they have to share with each other. Any of those kind of things I think can be good ways of sharing questions in a way that's not so intimidating. Stephanie, I noticed in the text chat that Jessica challenged us to put together little descriptions for each of these. And I think that probably is a good idea that we could do is to come up with little descriptions and also just examples of how we've used them. Why don't we do that and we'll do a blog post on text. That's good. Yeah, so we'll put that on the text site. Okay, good idea. And I know somebody asked about the snowball fight and the chocolate hugs and kisses. Okay, I'll let you do chocolate hugs and kisses. Okay, chocolate hugs and kisses is just one that had a trainer share with me, but she just keeps those Hershey's chocolate. They have kisses, and I think they have hugs too, which I'm not a big chocolate person myself, so I don't know which ones the hugs are. Are they the blended ones or nuts, or I don't know something. But she would do a bowl of those. And throughout her training session, if somebody got stuck with the computer or made it deep, or any of those kind of things had trouble, then she would give them a chocolate hug or a chocolate kiss to just kind of keep things friendly. So it was almost like you kind of wanted to file up so you could get a treat. And Julie says that the hugs are the white chocolate ones. She would know. A snowball fight is one that is fun. I think it's become one of our favorites. Give everyone a half sheet of paper, and then at some point in the training, we often use it as a review. So if there's still a question that people have, have them write it down on this half sheet of paper, and then crumple it up. And then you tell everyone, okay now it's time for the snowball fight. So they start tossing their snowballs around, and then they have to go grab a snowball and then go around and answer the questions or do some research and find out the answer to the question that another person asked. So that's one way to do it. Every time we do it, we worry that people aren't going to play along or they're not going to like it. But I think people are glad for it. They're glad not to just be sitting and listening. They're glad to be getting a little bit more active. Good energizer. Good energizer for people who've been sitting for a while. I've also used it sort of near the end as a write down one thing you want to remember or one thing that you want to share, kind of a sharing tips and helping them kind of reinforce what they've learned. And that's been a good one too, because sometimes by the end people are ready to move too. Okay, anything else you want to share on this one, Brenda? The petting zoo, an idea that I see more and more of that is gadgets. People mentioned that they're doing training on e-readers, and so that would be an example to have a petting zoo would be to have examples. So have someone have a nook, have someone have a kindle, maybe an iPad, different tools. And let people actually get hands-on practice with them, just a little bit of experience. So we'll work on that. We'll work on creating some descriptions of these. That's a great idea. We'll share it in a blog post. Yep, stay tuned. Okay, so just a little bit again about those modules, sort of making it bite-sized information for people, which is one of my favorite things anyways, because I'd rather eat a lot of appetizers than a full entree. But thinking through the way that people learn best, it's hard for us to remember a lot of information, especially with technology training. I think it's easy sometimes for our brains to get full. So just as you're going through and planning your workshop, even just saying, okay, for 15 minutes I'm going to address this learning objective, and I'll do that with a five-minute exercise, and give them 10 minutes on their own to explore whatever you're going to do, but just sort of breaking it down that way I think is a really important thing to think about doing. So hopefully some of these pictures will help stick in your mind about making that information bite-sized. Okay, I think another important idea is to think of your training session as a learning community. And there are different ways to do that. People throughout have mentioned how, someone mentioned earlier with seniors, that seniors often learn better from one another. I think anytime you create a situation where the participants can share examples, share information, help each other, do that sort of thing, it makes it more of a learning community. It also makes it possible when you are one instructor and you've got maybe 15, 20 people that you're trying to train, it makes it possible for people to be learning a lot more if they're learning from each other as well. So I guess that's part of what I mean by creating a learning community. I also think it's nice anytime with training, and this all depends on what type of training you're doing, but anytime there can be follow-up after the training, a place where people can discuss, a place where people can come back and ask questions again. I think that that can help create that sense of community too. Just a little thing that can start a session off in this way is by doing introductions, going around and having people say who they are and what they're hoping to get out of a session. In a group with 200 people that's not possible, but smaller size groups I think that can be really valuable, worth the time that it takes to do it. Definitely. I think there's something about if somebody speaks one time then it's a little easier to speak again in the class. And we even did that a little bit here on our chat. Okay, we just wanted to touch briefly, and again this is one of those things that could be a whole session on its own is the idea of how can using what are called 2.0 or social networking using those types of tools to facilitate participatory learning. I think there are different ways to do that. And as I mentioned on the last slide, I think any time that you can have impact beyond that one session, so whether you can connect with people before a session, connect with them afterwards, that's really valuable. And I think that's where some of those tools can be used. Discussion boards or a blog post that you'll post refer to comments that are made in that, or respond to comments. Stephanie, any ideas you have about this one? I think maybe on the next slide we've got some topics that might go along well with it as well. And these are just some workshops that I've seen people do that we've seen people. And if you want to chime in, if you have any topics that you're offering as well that are sort of innovative like this. But this first one I really liked, I just need three sources by tomorrow, and then it was a university library that they get that question all the time from students. They don't really want the training. They just need the three sources for their paper the next day. So they actually have developed a class, and you don't have to sign up for it ahead of time. They can just fit you right into these classes and that basically goes over all of that sort of information. So I thought that was a great way of really looking at what are the needs of the community that we serve, and how can we really help them instead of just sort of getting tired of getting this question all the time and telling them that they needed to sign up for a workshop, instead really sort of turning things around and doing something that would feed that need I think is an important one. And fantastic freebies for everyone. I think this was Princeton Public Library that does this one, but I think they were even doing them on Fridays to get another F in there. But just going over every week I think they have different free websites or free online tools or whatever it is to showcase just sort of as a fun thing to do by kind of getting people involved and seeing how easy some of these tools things are as well. And I know in the chat people have talked some about 23 things. I've also heard it in school libraries. I think there was a program that was called All Together Now instead. But for those of you that aren't involved with libraries, you might not have heard about this before. And it's really, I know Brenda, you all did. In Kansas you did your own version of this as well. We did a statewide project. And I think if you're involved with technology training and you have not heard of 23 things, make a note and Google it right after this session is over because it's had such an impact on technology training in lots of places all over the world really. And it was really a self-paced training. They set up a website that their staff could go through and there were 23 short things that they could explore. So everything from blogs and wikis to all sorts of social technologies. And then each staff member had to set up a blog and through that blog would talk about what they did for that thing. And then all the blogs were connected together I think as well so that they could read what each other was doing and learn from each other. But a great way to just go about that learning process that I think is really nice at its self-paced. They also I think won prizes at the end too. So some of these other ones are pretty self-explanatory. But something else I saw that was interesting that some people are doing and I think Brenda you've done this some too is just having authors or guest speakers Skype in or come in by webinar or that kind of thing can really add some interest. And it also reminds me of Brenda I remember you talking about doing this a long time ago at a public library where you had experts come in and help do some of the topic-driven technology sessions which I think is a great idea. So having somebody come in that can talk about doing your taxes online. I also talked to a library recently who had Best Buy come in and do something along the lines of the technology petting zoo. But the Best Buy person brought all the technology with them and talked about it. And they said it really wasn't a sales pitch that they did a really good job about that. And I see here in the chat that Ann says that Barnes and Nobles and Borders have been good about sharing their e-readers and sending people to the library to talk about those as well. So I think that's a great idea. So lots of ideas for innovative topics for sure. And I know some of you are interested in doing more with online training. Brenda has done probably hundreds of webinars in her life. Yeah, just a few thoughts about online training that several people mentioned that that's the type of training they are working on creating. And I think a lot of the same ideas that we have talked about kind of with thinking of them as face-to-face sessions, they really are the same in the online environment needing to come up with your objectives and give people the big picture. Don't forget that part. Make sure they've got the big picture of the context for the technology that they are using and give them exercises and things so that they are trying things out. An example of online training that I just love that I'm guessing most of you are familiar with, the Common Craft videos. Are those familiar to you? Common Craft videos? We did a webinar on those. Oh good, TechSoup did. Yeah, so if you go to the webinar archives you should be able to see that too I love their approach to technology training. I think that so often what people need is just to understand what a technology is, how it could help them. And then once they have that incentive, that motivation, they'll go in and explore it or work through learning about it. And the Common Craft videos are just excellent at doing that. I think they are a good model for online training. I think also when you are doing online training, if it's possible a learning community can really improve the experience for people. So if they are able to have discussions with people, even if they are not real-time discussions, even if they are happening on a discussion board, somehow being able to ask people questions whether that's an instructor or other people who are doing the class, being able to have discussions really adds to it. So somehow with your online training having a component that is that sort of learning community I think can make a big difference. Okay, and I wanted to just talk for a moment about handouts. I know someone in the chat had asked about handouts as well that we can address now, but I thought that this was just a funny image when I went to search for a handout image. This is what came up. I thought that might be a pretty good handout to have. And there are a lot of different opinions about handouts. I know I've been in sessions where the presenter said, I'm not going to give you the PowerPoint ahead of time because you'll just look ahead and that sort of thing, but I always think it's kind of good to give them something just so that you don't have those people that are trying to write down every word that you say I think can be important. But I also think that the less handouts the better a lot of time. I know somebody in the chat said that what they do is they email the handouts to people afterwards and let them print them out themselves if they want to, which I think is a great idea because that could really help save some trees, but also somebody could just read it on their computer if they wanted to do that. And there's also a lot of handouts that have already been developed which will share some links to some of those in just a little while. But I think sort of moving away from that step-by-step handout that I know we used to use a lot where people had to follow along in each thing they did, but instead really trying to get people to think through what they're doing during the workshop and just looking at the screen themselves and trying to figure it out. I think otherwise when we do the step-by-step sort of things people don't really experience that. Just trying to sort of figure things out for themselves how to do it. There are a lot of great resources for free handouts too, so I do think that's another good way where we don't have to reinvent the wheel. And also the cookbooks that Brenda mentioned earlier are available on the TechSoup for Libraries website, and these are PDFs that you can download. There's three different ones that have all kinds of different topics in them. And this is something I know Brenda did this as a webinar series as her sort of book club as well that she had a chapter that was discussed every week, Brenda, every month. I think it must be every month. I think it was once a month, yeah. And I think that's a great idea to use those too, so all kinds of great ideas. And even though these were written a lot of great information from libraries, it's really a lot of it is applicable to all kinds of different organizations as well. And this is just some of the links. Again, we'll share these. These will be available to you in the follow-up email as well, but just some great sources for free training materials. Web Junction is a nonprofit, and there are a lot of classes that are already up here with training PowerPoints and handouts, and you can also add to those yourself as well, and you can join free as a member. On the TechSoup blog, I did a post recently with a lot more of these technology training materials, and we've got some other great links too, and as well, we've got Kami on the line here from TechSoup who in her other job, runs a nonprofit. And Kami, do you want to jump in for a second and tell us about those resources that you all have? Certainly. So it's a collection of materials made around the country. In fact, to connect to your community, those lesson plans are listed on the CTN Bay Area website. So it's a collection of resources that have actually been tagged using delicious bookmarking and taxonomy that I developed with about six other people over the last year. So it's a way for us to continually tag resources using delicious and then have them feed into this website where they can be searched. So it will grow as time goes on. Wonderful. Thank you. Well, we'd also love to hear what training materials and resources you all recommend. So if there's things that you've used, again, trying to share what we've already got instead of all of us creating our own workshops from scratch, again, just type those in the chat and we'll collect those as well. And I can add those to the blog post as well from our previous one with our technology training materials. So just sort of as a little recap here, one of the books that I really like that has been useful for me as a trainer is Mel Silverman's Training the Active Training Way. So again, trying to keep things very active. So some points to remember. One thing that he talks about is that beginning and endings are important because that's what we remember the most. So by doing those modules and chunking that information, we have more of those beginning and endings. But also just making sure, like we said before, starting off your class so that people really feel comfortable, are ready to learn, and then making sure that you're ending your training with something that they can kind of come away from or giving them some time to even think about what they've learned and share what they've learned can be really important. Being brain-friendly again, just thinking about how people learn, learning styles, all of those sort of things, making sure that you give time for them to just talk with each other and discuss these things and really engage with the topic with each other and with you as the trainer. And letting them learn from each other, letting them do it again, taking that time to just do some activities where they can experience and practice it on their own. And I know when I started this was kind of hard for me because I felt like, what am I supposed to be doing while they're doing these exercises on their own? But one thing I really found that if I walked around the room and asked them if they needed help and that kind of thing, they were much more likely to ask me for questions than if I just did in the front and waited for somebody to ask for help. So I think that's an important part of it as well, still being engaged even though they're working on their own. And then blending in the technology wisely. So sometimes we don't have to be on the computer the whole time when we're in a technology workshop but again giving them that time to learn and do what they want I think is a really important thing. And we just have a couple minutes left here. Yeah, so we'd like to hear from you. What is your best training tip? And people have been great about sharing a lot of things and we'll be collecting especially those resources. Stephanie, I don't know if you have a training tip. I have one that I thought of that we haven't talked about yet. And that is, I guess you did kind of touch on this a little bit that you sometimes teach the same topic but you, a year goes by between the times that you teach it. So I think that an important thing is to be reflective about the training that you're doing and then also to capture that reflection. So when you're in the moment of doing training or right after you're done with a training session, you have a lot of ideas. And I think capturing those can be really valuable. Yeah, that's a great idea. Well, one of the tips that I have is on the next slide. And I think I actually got this from you, Brenda. And that's just this quote about being the guide on the side instead of the sage on the stage, which I think is just a wonderful thing to remember is that you don't have to be that person in front of the room that knows it all. With technology nowadays I don't even think we can know it all. So instead just trying to sort of be the guide, get them to where they need to learn and then let them go, let them fish on their own, find the information that they need on their own, I think is a really important part of it. And we've got some good comments in the chat as well. And we have been collecting your questions as we've been going along. We're at the top of the hour so we want to go ahead and wrap up. But definitely we're going to go through those questions. Anything that we didn't answer is part of the webinar. We will be doing a follow-up blog post on that and you can also use the forum to continue the discussion as well. And that's a website that you can just go to and the community forum to ask more questions and then Brenda and I will answer those. I've also included a screenshot here. We've got the accidental technology training series going on as a series of blog posts as well that you might want to look at. And Kami, I think we have some more upcoming webinars. There are free TechSoup webinars every month. Kami Yeah. So this is a special series that we're offering that's different than TechSoup Talks. It's specifically on processes that our community might have some problems with so registering an organization, finding out if you're eligible, requesting that donation. So there's some things that trip people up. So we're doing some special webinars just on those topics and this one is on the 18th, so registering your organization. So Stephanie, I'm going to wrap it up if that's okay. Stephanie Yes. Thank you everyone for being so participatory and thank you Brenda. This was a great — Kami Sure. Thanks for having me. Kami Really great. I love all the interactions, so thanks for the participation. So this webinar was made possible by ReadyTalk which has donated the use of their system to help TechSoup expand awareness of technology throughout the nonprofit sector. ReadyTalk helps nonprofits and libraries in the U.S. and Canada reach geographically dispersed areas and increase collaborations through their audio conferencing and web conferencing services. So we want to thank you.