LearnKey Blog
21st Century Tools Put Students in Charge of Their Learning
As most educators now know, using technology can increase student engagement in your classroom – but how can utilizing these tools in your classroom put students in charge of their learning? There are so many free tools available over the Internet that can be utilized in the classroom to empower students, and selecting the right tools will be dependent upon what tools your students are interested in, and what your goals are for particular lessons.
The great thing about using online tools is that everybody’s voice is the same volume, which creates the feeling that all ideas are equal. This can inspire students to share openly. Students may be more active in online forums because they feel more comfortable using them. They might make some students to share and actively participate in discussions that they may not take part in if it were an in-person discussion. These tools are the tools that students use outside of the classroom, so why not find a way to use those same tools in teaching?
Blogs and wikis are both great tools you can use to empower students. These tools are great because they are collaborative and students get the chance to have their voice heard. In one of my classes we use both blogs and wikis. We have small groups, and each one of the group members had to create our own blog. Each week we have a big idea question we have to write about on our blog, then we visit each one of our group members blogs and comment on what they posted. Our class wiki is created with the idea that students will reference the resource throughout the course. To build the wiki each student is responsible for finding five resources on a particular subject and citing the resource as well as summarizing information from the resource. Both tools have proved to be very beneficial from a learner’s perspective.
Salt Lake City Trip
I recently had the opportunity to travel up to our Salt Lake City offices to see the production studio. I had heard stories about how impressive our blue screen was, but really I had no idea just how big it really was. I have heard that our production studio has the largest blue screen in the Salt Lake Valley, and I can see why. I was only there for a short time, but it is quite the experience in our studio and I actually got to do a little bit of filming.
It is a full studio with all of the cameras lights and expected equipment. The Salt Lake Production team was great and made me feel very comfortable. The filming went smoothly and was a lot of fun, hopefully it turns out okay and they don’t have to do too much editing. You will have to stay tuned to see which course I am making a cameo in!
LearnKey Holiday Hours
Good news, everyone! It’s late December, which means it’s the time of year filled with food, family, holiday cheer, and odd business hours.
LearnKey’s Holiday Business Hours
While you can still access your OnlineExpert courses over the holidays, our sales and support staff will not be available outside of these times:
Normal business hours:
Sales: Mon – Fri 8am – 5pm MT
Support: Mon – Fri 6am – 6pm MT
Friday, December 23: Closed at 2pm MT
Monday, December 26: Closed
Friday, December 30: Closed at 1pm MT
Monday, January 2: Closed
We hope everyone has a great end of the year. Be sure to eat plenty of holiday snacks and drink plenty of eggnog, because pretty soon everyone will have to start their New Year’s resolutions to go on a diet!
Barbeque and an Arch – ACTE 2011 Recap
Recently I traveled to the annual ACTE conference that was held in St. Louis, MO. I traveled with all guys from our company, and it has been pretty interesting trying to keep them all on task and under control!
Travel
It was a great experience; we arrived on Tuesday afternoon and had a great evening relaxing after our long day of traveling that consisted of a two hour car ride to the Las Vegas Airport, about a minute train ride to the gate, then a three hour flight to St. Louis, a five minute bus ride to the rental car counter, and a fifteen minute drive to the hotel. Yes, you read that right; excluding a boat we pretty much covered all modes of transportation.
Set-up and event
The next day it was time to head over to the booth and set-up. Everything went well and thanks to Kari, our graphic designer, the booth we have takes about an hour to set-up. As we headed out to the parking garage, we noticed a sign that said cash only. Living in the modern age that we do it was shocking and of course we had no cash on us. Well we talked the nice parking attendant (I won’t name her just in case her boss by a small chance reads this) into letting us out on the honor that we would bring her back the two dollars we owed her. We went and got some supplies and brought the money right back to her.
That night we held a reception at our hotel; it went off without a hitch and everyone had a great time. So thank you to everyone who attended the event and to everyone who helped make it a success!
Show Time and chow
So on Thursday it was time to get down to business and start talking with all of the wonderful educators that made it out to this year’s show. It was a great show with a lot of enthusiastic people and a great energy. People were loving the giveaways, and of course gobbling up the Dots candies that we put out.
After a really long day on our feet, we all decided that when in St. Louis you better eat some BBQ. So we asked around and got a tip that Pappy’s Smokehouse was the best place in town, but that we better make it there pretty early because once they run out of stuff it is just gone. We got lost, but eventually found our way there and boy was it worth it. We ordered the Adam Bomb named after Adam Richmond from the television show Man vs. Food. It was a lot of really good food and we all ate way too much, but everyone was in consensus that they would recommend it to anyone who ever visits St. Louis. The food was so good that we ended up getting another Adam Bomb for take out on Friday.
We made our way back home and back to the LearnKey offices. Sad to leave our new friends and the great food, but excited to be back home!
A few pictures from the event:
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LearnKey Supports Fight Against Bullying
In our support of the fight against bullying, we are giving all of our education customers our Bullying: You Don’t Have To Take It Anymore course for free! Over the last few years a light has been put on the problems that young men and women face because of bullying. This light has given us an idea of just how bad the problem really is.
We are giving our support in hopes that this course will be used as a tool to help kids understand how they can help stop bullying in their schools. The more kids understand and know the more they will be able to recognize bullying and help put a stop to it.
*Edit 1/31/12*
Our current Education customers should already see our “Bullying…” course in their library. If you are not a current LearnKey customer and are interested, call 1.800.865.0165 or leave a comment on this blog (using a valid name and email address) and we’ll send you access to the course absolutely free.
Read the full press release here:
LearnKey’s Efforts to Support the Fight Against Bullying with Online Training
St. George, UT- January 30, 2012- LearnKey, an online training company based in Utah, has announced that all educators will have access to their Bullying: You Do Not Have to Take It Anymore course for free.
The company is showing support for the fight against bullying by supplying all of their education customers with the course for free. In addition if there are any educators that are not current customers who are interested in the course, the company will give you free access to the course as well.
In recent years the concern over bullying that is taking place in schools has been spotlighted by the media, and schools are responding with new programs to help eliminate bullying. LearnKey is hoping that, by offering this free tool, they are helping to do their part in the fight against bullying.
“Studies show child/teen bullying and cyberbullying are at an all-time high and as many as 160,000 students stay home on any given day because they fear being bullied,” said LearnKey CEO Jeff Coruccini. “We have a responsibility to support the fight against bullying and this is our way of supporting that cause”.
For more information about LearnKey or the Bullying: You Do Not Have to Take It Anymore course, please contact us at 800.865.0165.
About LearnKey
Established in 1987, LearnKey is self-paced online and offline training for corporate, education, government and personal users. LearnKey has decades of experience in the professional development arena. LearnKey offers interactive, engaging, and flexible training that is accessible anytime, anywhere. LearnKey course concentration areas include Networking, IT Technical, Web & Graphic Design, Leadership, Management, Safety and Compliance, Medical CE, K12 and Character Development.
When it comes to learning – Our employees lead the way
As you know, LearnKey is all about creating premium video course ware, so you could say learning is what we do. With that said, it’s always great to catch one of our very own employees learning something new.
Recently Sheena Chamberlain from our Cedar City office was named the November employee of the month for learning our new mobile technology with LearnCast. She was selected as part of an initiative to integrate our new mobile learning platform into LearnKey. In just a short period of time she has created two courses, Bullying: You Do Not Have to Take it Anymore and a QuickBooks demonstration. Again demonstrating our core values, Sheena quickly gained the trust of LearnCast’s founder Dave Clemons by jumping in and learning how to re-purpose content and distribute it to any device . Not only has Sheena learned this new technology, she also continues to do her other job supporting our technical writers and designers. For those of you that don’t know Sheena very well, we have asked her to answer a few questions that might give you a little insight into just the type of person Sheena is.
Continue reading “When it comes to learning – Our employees lead the way”
LK Designer by Day…Illustrator by Night
I joined the Design Team at Learnkey in 2009, and in doing so, I like to feel that I brought a new and unique approach the team. You see, although I work as a Designer that would be a secondary definition to my artistic strengths. I am primarily an Illustrator, and even more specifically a Comic-book Illustrator.
Comic books, graphic novels, comic strips, and the like are some of the best ways to tell a story in my opinion. Comics go beyond words on a page, and in some respects go beyond some of the limitations of film-making. It is a unique and treasured storytelling medium to me and to many others! I have illustrated many small comic books as personal projects, and have been commissioned to do illustrations for clients. You can check out samples of those works here at my personal website.
Veteran Certification on Veterans Day
Showing support at the 2011 St. George Veteran’s Day Parade
LearnKey has been working with the VA VR&E (Vocational Rehab and Employment) program for the last year. The VR&E program is specifically for those veterans who have partial service related disability and the goal is to help the veteran find suitable employment and careers. We offer a number of courses and bundled program packages for the veterans which range from Web design, Graphic design, Cisco Pro, Video production, SharePoint, Office 2010, QuickBooks, CompTIA, Project Management, Database design, Windows Server, etc. We even help the veterans to find jobs with employers where they will truly fit in with the company culture.
I wanted you to know that just yesterday, we had one of the veterans we work with certify in CPEH (Certified Professional Ethical Hacker)! Chris L. has been studying using his LearnKey program that was provided by the VR&E program at the VA. He has been working hard and that work is certainly paying off. He is the first veteran in our program to attempt the CPEH and he will soon take the CPTE (Certified Pen. Testing Engineer) exam. Great job and good timing Chris, you managed to get that certification just in time for Veterans Day!
Happy 11/11/11 – The Last Binary Day
Happy Binary Day. Today is the last Binary Day for the next 89 years! Now you might ask, “What makes a binary day?” Well binary consists solely of the numbers ‘0 and 1’. When a date is made up of only 1’s and 0’s then that is considered a binary day. There are only 9 binary days that occur in a binary year, and only 4 binary years in a century. We have had 36 binary days since 01/01/00 in the year 2000, but the thing that is crazy is that we won’t have another until January 1, 2100. So to all you machine language programmers out there, Happy Binary Day!
To see a full list binary days in the years 2010 and 2011, visit ExploringBinary.com
Word 2010 Certification Journey Continues
So I am still working toward my certification and have found time to finish up with session 1 of our Word 2010 training. I took the post test for session 1, and apparently I need a review. I didn’t do so well on it, but the great thing is that you get to print out a study guide that shows you the questions that you missed, and you can see what sections the questions are in so that you can go back to those spots and review the material.
After I picked my ego up off the floor, I started watching the training for session 2. The topics covered in this session are: Working with Templates, Formatting Text, Formatting Paragraphs, Organizing Data, Bulleted and Numbered Lists, Manipulating Page Layout, Manipulating Page Backgrounds, and Headers and Footers. I found a lot of information in this session very helpful, but one feature stuck out to me and alone is worth upgrading to Office 2010; it is called Autotext and it lets you save text you use regularly under the Quickparts section, then when you need it you can just insert it into any Word document. This is a great time saver, and when I am writing press releases this would be so nice to have for the About Us section.
Again, this session provides you with material that will be on the certification exam, but also gives you some great shortcuts that you can start using right away.