Category: Insights
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!
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!
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.
A Painless, Paperless Conversion.
I found myself frustrated one day at the amount of paper, notebooks and files that I had lying around. As a hopeless workaholic, I felt the need to constantly carry many of these documents and files with me for the slight chance I may be able to work on them at home or wherever I ended up that night or weekend. That often left me with a fully packed backpack which was very heavy, or overflowing binders of notes, flyers and documents. People often commented about my overflowing binder. I often commented at what a pain it was to carry around, and how carrying it could replace a gym workout each day. I always reveled in the days I could clean out those files and consolidate my paper documents. It was great once in a while to look organized. That never lasted long with paper documents piling up daily.
Dallas Trip – Big Hats and Big Hearts
Dallas is one amazing place! I have fallen in love with Texas and had the pleasure of working with amazing people again this last week.
Monday – Airport Re-Route
I had an exciting start Monday night with only 30 minutes left until our arrival in Dallas-Ft. Worth; we received an announcement from the pilot that the airport had been closed due to bad weather! WHAT? Well we quickly stopped for gas in Wichita Falls and finally arrived in Ft. Worth around 12:40 AM, only to wait in line to allow all planes to drop off passengers all at the same time. I finally deplaned around 1:40 AM and then made a mad dash to the Rental Car center…
I have a picture of LEO the Lizard on the dash of my rental car at 2:05 AM in a line of about 15 cars trying to leave the airport rental check out.
With Our Talents Combined…
LearnKey has talent; TONS of talent. As one of the senior designers for the Cedar City branch office, I get to work with seven other designers directly (each of which has his/her own brand of super power so to speak). If we aren’t collaborating, then we aren’t working. Until recently, the Cedar City branch really hasn’t had too much interaction with our corporate office in terms of working with the awesome group of designers in the marketing department. Our new CEO, Jeff Coruccini, approached me about a two months ago and asked that I work with Trevor Hinton to design and a develop a website for the company.
Web design is my forte and I bleed CSS, so I jumped at this opportunity. Jeff asked that the site be built on a WordPress back end. This was going to be a learning experience for me as I have never designed for WordPress. Luckily for me, Trevor is a WordPress guru. Once I completed the design and had coded the site in HTML and CSS, I packed up my trusty iMac and headed down to the St. George office.
Working with Trevor was a great experience. We were able to bounce ideas off each other, learn new tricks and techniques, and build a relationship between the two different design teams. Now that we know that there is an even deeper pool of talent in the LearnKey family, we are now enabled to take our products to the next level. LearnKey is not just satisfied in training clients, but they want their employees to learn and grow as well. I’m looking forward to working more closely with our marketing team, because I know together we can make something amazing!
LearnCast Technologies
Hello, I’m back and for those of you who don’t know me I am a web developer here at LearnKey. Just recently I had an amazing opportunity to meet with the CEO of LearnCast, David Clemons, from whom I received an in depth introduction to their mobile learning platform in hopes to see how we could utilize their technology, and what they had to offer LearnKey.
What LearnCast provides is a platform where an educator or business manager can easily take video, audio or any kind of learning material and create their own course with quizzes, exams, and polls and then push them out to participants via SMS messaging or email.
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