Training, Transitions and Tablets – Oh My

Sorry, it’s the holiday season and the Wizard of Oz seems to be airing non-stop. Actually, this post is about training and transitions with a side note about tablets.

I was speaking to a friend who teaches at one of Connecticut’s state universities about our in-house training program (CLiP). Over the course of our conversation he asked how long our sessions are, and I said “an hour”. Then he asked how many topics I cover, and I said “too many”. Actually, we only ever have one topic, but I divide the session into five learning modules.

He suggested I reduce my sessions to four modules, and use the time to add a transition segment between modules. He said he started doing this in his classroom and it helps keep his students engaged. I’m going to refrain from using his examples in case I can convince him to join us as a guest blogger but I’ll share my plans for how I hope to follow his advice.

I am primarily teaching technology subjects; how to use some feature of Office, or SharePoint, or eMail or Social Media, or, well you get the point. I’m constantly guessing what people will want to learn and, while I often get the subject right, I frequently miss the reason. For example: our next training session is on SharePoint Custom Lists. If you’re not familiar with SharePoint, see my other blog or just imagine something that lets you easily build a very robust means of keeping track of items you’re interested in. I know four things people should know about Custom Lists, and I can cover those four things in 40 minutes. What I don’t know is why they might care; what context might help them connect with the need for a Custom List of their own.

I have tons of examples of Custom Lists, but they are the things I want to keep track of. So, in this upcoming class, I’m going to stop and ask questions before each topic, to try and surface the things they care about for each topic. I have tried to make my training material somewhat flexible, so I can change course (within reason) on the fly. In a future blog, I’ll let you know if this worked - now what about those tablets?

I’ve been using a Tablet PC since they first became available. I have never tried to use them in conjunction with training because I always prepared the training ahead of time and just presented it. Now that I’m planning to ask some questions, I thought it would be great if I could capture the answers using the Tablet’s pen. My first thought was to see if I could integrate OneNote into PowerPoint. That didn’t go so well so I looked to see if there was an add-on I could buy, but nothing jumped out at me. Then I decided to simply write on the presentation using the pen as PowerPoint’s Pointer. I figured it would be enough to show the comments on the screen, even if I couldn’t save them. To my surprise, when I exited the Slide Show, I was asked “Do you want to keep your ink?” – Wow, built right in was the feature I was trying to find; who knew?

The moral of this story is that there are always ways to improve our approach to training, our content, our technique and there’s always more to learn. See, you thought I was going to end with “there’s no place like home”.