training

It seems sometimes like the best web sites for technology trainers change location every hour. I have trouble locating sites that are persistent and reliable with regular updates and new content. This is a shame, because technology trainers in schools, libraries and community technology centers don’t have time to recreate the wheel every time they teach Introduction to Microsoft Word, when hundreds of colleagues around the world have already written that lesson plan.

Kami Griffiths, my co-worker and training facilitator par excellence organized a Meetup last Friday at the San Francisco LightHouse for the Blind, which I was fortunate enough to attend. The presenters, Patty Quinonez and Shen Kuan were both power users of assistive technology themselves and experts at training others. Patty demonstrated ZoomText, a powerful screen-magnification application, and Shen demonstrated JAWS, a well-known screen reading program. The key take-aways for me were:

I coordinate the NetMaster program for the King County Library System. NetMasters are volunteer computer instructors who lead classes in the community libraries based on existing curriculum. Potential volunteers apply via our website and I contact them for orientation and training—this process is manageable, but does keep me pretty busy. Here is how it goes:

According to Liz (our system administrator), everything good comes from Lifehacker.com...and that is where she found Jing (http://www.jingproject.com/).  As the Web site says, "Use Jing to capture anything you see on your computer screen and share it instantly...as an image or short movie."  

Lori Reed is most likely a familiar name to you. She's a regular contributor to TechSoup for Libraries and MaintainIT. She recently facilitated an online class for NEFLIN, "Gaming in Libraries", which was based on content from the MaintainIT Cookbook, Planning for Success. I talked to Lori after the session and asked her how it went. Here's her reply.

Jean Montgomery, the Network Administrator at the Superiorland Library Cooperative in Michigan created a nifty flash video that chronicles how her cooperative supports libraries distributed over the Upper Peninsula. Jean covers many topics, sharing how her organization uses a range of tools to keep in contact and offer services without breaking the bank or spending time behind the wheel.

TechSoup's GreenTech Initiative is hosting a month-long event on reducing travel without breaking the bank. The focus this week is on online training, and since the MaintainIT Project has spent a lot of time on this topic, I thought I'd take this opportunity to gather some choice resources, webinar archives, and articles in one place.

Earlier this week, I blogged a bit about my week in Kentucky and I have a few more posts from that trip in the works. I was there to provide "Taking on Technology" workshops with Kendra Morgan (TechAtlas). One of the things we talked about during the day was 2.0 technologies. We played 2.0 Bingo (something I've blogged about here before) and we also introduced groups to the Common Craft videos (on RSS, on Twitter, etc...). 

We had another fantastic train-the-trainer webinar today facilitated by the amazing Brenda Hough.

Today I played BINGO at work!