LearnKey’s Gregg Akin – always doing his job!

Some of the greatest leaders in the world use the same phrase to describe what they need their team members to do, which is to “just do your job and trust that your other teammates will do theirs”. You hear it time and time again, just watch a Patriots game and you will see their head coach Bill Belichick screaming that phrase to each sub team (i.e. offense, defense, special teams) when they are on the sidelines. Sounds so simple, however, staying focused and reassuring each team member that if they “just do their job” and trust their teammate to do their job too – they will win.

When you have high performing teams, TRUST is the key ingredient to success, which is why it is one of or core values. LearnKey’s Gregg Akin, who is our newest employee of the month, is a perfect example of someone who comes in and does his job, day in and day out. That is why his manager Scott Walker nominated Gregg and had these comments to say about him:

“Gregg has demonstrated our Core values in many ways. He has brought Value to Learnkey by providing a great work ethic, following up with clients that could have easily been lost. He has taken a huge load off of Client Services, by importing thousands of students in the past several months, training teachers and helping them with the ease of OnlineExpert. You can trust him to follow through with any tasks until they are finished – he gets results. He understands the importance and value of our clients. He is very Easy to receive instructions and complete tasks assigned to him, then goes the extra mile to accomplish them to get results.

Gregg is a great asset to LearnKey, and his dedication and hard work show his team members not only is he doing his job, but he is trusting that his other team members will do their job (i.e. selling, creating and producing great video based training).

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ACTE 2012 Recap

The ACTE conference in Atlanta was a huge hit For LearnKey. Jeff, Lori, Kim, Scott and I were able to re-solidify the fact that we are on the right track. The track of preparing teachers first for certifications and then taking that knowledge gained and marrying it with our award winning full motion video, hands on projects created by teachers that align directly to Adobe and Microsoft objectives, mobile technology alerts and the constant mentoring of teachers so that they are up on technology as well as behavioral assessments to best pinpoint career pathways for students. All these lessons learned over the past 27 years are now a road map for teachers to make sure that each student is successful in their life quest.

It was so good to see school district administrators and teachers embracing the fact that businesses and community partnerships are valuable in many different ways. The more involvement that you have with people from a broad spectrum of knowledge, the better the result is for the students. New and innovative ideas are what is going to drive success in the classroom and ultimately engage and empower the student to go on and do great things.

It was great to see how “Team LearnKey” interacted with partners and clients as well as with one another to bring digital literacy into the classroom.

Oh yeah, we ate a lot of great food and also went to an Atlanta hawks basketball game and had a good time. We were able to sit behind Danny ferry, the Duke “hall of famer” who won the Naismith College Player of the Year and Oscar Robinson Trophy award winner in 1989 and his #35 jersey was retired after his senior season in 1989.

LearnKey Hits the Road

Sleeping off a Thanksgiving food coma will definently be just a dream for many LK employees this week. We will be in three different states and at three different shows. Here is our schedule so you can stop by to see us, if we are visiting your city.

November 26-28, 2012
Louisiana Association of Computer Using Educators
New Orleans, LA

November 28-30, 2012
Illinois Education Technology Conference
Springfield, IL

November 29-30, 2012
ACTE: CareerTech Vision 2012
Atlanta, GA

If you’re attending any of these shows, stop by and see what we have to offer!

Home Sweet Home

Atlanta, New Orleans, Indianapolis, and…St. George, Utah? You may be wondering what St. George could possibly have in common to be included in a list with these large cities. Well, before the end of the year LearnKey will be in each of these cities attending trade shows and sharing our training with local teachers and administrators.

Today and tomorrow we are in our hometown St. George, UT! We don’t often attend shows in Utah, let alone in St. George, and we have a new booth design and will be doing presentations today and tomorrow – so stop by Desert Hills High School and check us out.

Presentation Times

Saturday

9:00 am Mobi Mentoring in the Classroom
11:00 am Leveraging Classroom Behavior
1:00 pm Industry Certified or Career Ready? LearnKey Can Do Both
3:00 pm Mobi Mentoring in the Classroom

Hot as a Billy Goat in a Pepper Patch

This week I had the opportunity to go to the great state of Texas and attend the Texas Career Education Conference. I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Texas so y’all may find that some Texas talk made its way into this post. Jared Baker, one of LearnKey’s “road warriors”, was nice enough to let me go to the show with him for the week and really help me see what happens on the front lines. Thinking back on this week, three things come to mind: Hot tempertures, tasty food, and amazing people.

Coming from Southern Utah I didn’t think that the weather in Dallas would be anything to blink an eye at, but when we walked out of the airport it was hot–darn hot! Heat I am able to handle, but mixed with humidity made being outside downright uncomfortable.

Not much can compare to the bbq, mexican food, or creole food that has been perfected across Texas. But one thing that is a secret to non-Texans is Blue Bell Ice Cream. I had this for the first time this week and I can honestly say that it is the best ice cream I have ever had.

The highlight of my trip was not the food and definitely not the weather – it was the great teachers that I was able to interact with at the show. The first day of the show was on Tuesday and I was scared as a sinner in a cyclone to talk with the teachers. Luckily for me I realized that I had no reason to worry and I had a fantastic time. I loved hearing about how teachers are using LearnKey in the classroom.

How do you use LearnKey in the classroom? Let us know in the comments or on our Facebook page!

Sweet “Temporary” Home Alabama…

I recently had the opportunity to travel to Alabama with Justin, our newest member of the sales team, to attend an education conference and meet with teachers interested in eLearning and industry certifications. Here is a brief overview of our travels:

Wednesday

Beautiful weather in Bessemer, Alabama where we stayed. We spent some time in Tuscaloosa, meeting with a teacher working with students and passing the CompTIA exams like A+ and Network+. We showed him the teaser clip to our upcoming A+ 2012 release and he’s really looking forward to it.

We also had the pleasure of visiting The University of Alabama, which has a beautiful campus. We found a great place called The Mellow Mushroom, and had some of the best pizza I have ever eaten. We had a Cesar Salad pizza…yes I know salad on top of a pizza, and yes it was amazing!

Thursday

The first day of our education conference and 2 hour workshop for teachers went really well. The conference was hosted at the Mercedes factory located in Vance, Alabama. This location is the manufacturing facility where the M-Class, the R-Class, and the GL-Class are built. Our conference was located in the training center for the employees, the landscape is so beautiful and we had a chance walk through the visitors center and gift shop where I picked up a few souvenirs.

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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:

ACTE 2011

Well, it’s that time of year again. No, I am not talking about the Holiday Season, I am talking about the Annual ACTE Conference. This year’s conference is taking place in St. Louis, MO November 17-19, 2011. It might seem like we are early writing this blog post, but we started planning for this show a couple of months ago and I am starting to get really excited about it. We have exhibited at this trade show in the past and it is always a fun and rewarding event to attend.

If you have never heard of ACTE before, it is the Association for Career and Technical Education. They hold an annual convention every year that draws over 4,000 educators and over 200 exhibitors. The highlight of the conference will be that Sir Ken Robinson will be speaking, if you have not heard him you should check him out on his website. This animated video created from one of his speeches is a particular favorite of ours.

If you are going to attend this years ACTE conference, be sure to come see LearnKey at booth 428!

Dreamforce 2011

This week I got the great honor to attend Dreamforce 2011. For those of you who don’t know, Dreamforce is the annual conference that Salesforce holds. The conference takes place in San Francisco where Salesforce is headquartered, and this year it drew a crowd of 45,000+ attendees. This is a fun, but long week with classes filling your days and exciting networking events taking up your nights.

The highlights so far: Metallica concert (I won’t be able to hear for a month), the exciting new Salesforce innovations that were announced at the conference, and the breakout session Set the Social Road Map for Your Company (Gary Vaynerchuck of VaynerMedia was refreshing). I am really excited about all of the great things I am learning here, and I am looking forward to bringing back some great ideas to LearnKey.

LearnKey’s End of Summer Event Schedule

It has been a busy summer here at LearnKey, and the next couple of weeks are going to be even busier. A while ago we posted a list of the events we would be attending this summer; 6 of those events have already passed, but we still have another 5 to go!

Here are the upcoming events and shows we will be attending:

2011 Missouri ACTE Summer Conference, booth #E72

July 25-28, Springfield, MO

FACTE 45th Annual Conference & Tradeshow,

July 25-28, Clearwater Beach, FL

2011 All-Ohio Conference, booth #10

July 26-28, Columbus, OH

Nevada ACTE Conference

July 27-29, Lake Tahoe, NV

44th Annual Oklahoma Career & Technology Education Summer Conference, booth #108

August 1, Tulsa, OK

Be sure to stop by and say hi to our reps if you’re attending these shows (and be sure to tell them you found out about it through our blog!) They love meeting you all and being able to show you all the cool stuff we’re doing, and they may even have some freebies available, depending on when you see them. From what I hear, sometimes the free stuff disappears so fast you would think we were attending a Ninja convention, so stop by early!