Course Release Celebration

What a crazy year it has been. Remeber back in May when I told everyone to be excited for the end of Summer? Well there is no place where that statement was more true than here at LearnKey. Don’t get me wrong we love the great summer weather here is Southern Utah, but over the past few months the LearnKey team has been busy creating and releasing our latest A+, Network+, and IC³ courses. These courses turned out totally awesome, and if you have not had a chance to look at them, follow the previous links to view their product overviews.

We also had the big release of our Career Readiness Bundle, which includes courses that offers valuable information to teens and those who are trying to enter the workforce. Take a look at the course overview.

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Network+ 2012 Certification released (with video)

Good news, everyone! We recently released the latest version of our Network+ certification courseware – Network+ 2012 Certification. Just like our A+ Certification 2012 course, it features course author Tom Carpenter covering CompTIA’s certification objectives, this time taking students beyond tech essentials and guiding them through the world of Networking.

This course covers the current CompTIA Network+ N10-005 exam. It includes 5 sessions and roughly 14 hours of training, tests, interactive labs, and projects.

If you want to see more, check out the promo at the beginning of the post, and after visit the product page for more info on the course including a full course outline and purchasing info.

Great People – Team Player stands out in Cedar City

There are a variety of different definitions around being a team player, but the one that stands out to me recently is the one demonstrated last month by Carole Heaton in our LearnKey video production office in Cedar City, UT. It is what made her our employee of the month for September 2012. Our team has just completed the roll out of: A+ 2012, IC³ GS4 and our Career Readiness bundle of courses (14 in total). At the last minute, we identified several ways to enhance the learning experience for A+ 2012 which meant we needed people to work overtime. When we needed help the most to meet our deadlines, it was Carole Heaton who stepped up big time.

Everyone in our Cedar office had been working overtime hours, everyone was tired. These projects needed to be delivered on time and Carole was willing to go the extra mile and work practically around the clock to help us meet our deadlines. Here is what her manager had to say when he nominated her for employee of the month:

“It seems like I can come into the office at just about any time, day or night, and find Carole either at her desk or online on my IM. She has put in more hours over the last month than any other member of her team. She is always willing to do whatever is asked of her as soon as it is asked, which has provided that level of Ease in getting fixes and files done on a tight deadline. I can always Trust that her files will look good and the fixes she is asked to do will be done correctly. She is always a positive force in the office, despite doing the lion’s share of work, and she can always be counted on to have a ready smile and a laugh available.”

Everyday in some way shape or form we communicate about our core values – Ease, Value and Trust. Carole clearly demonstrated all three of them by making it easier for us to meet our deadlines, valuing the importance of these courses and what it meant to get them out on time, and trusting the broader team that these improvements did merit being implemented for the benefit of our customers/learners. I thank you Carole for all your efforts.

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Career Readiness Bundle now available

We recently put together a new bundle which is perfect for high school students or people just starting out in the job market – the Career Readiness Bundle. This collection of courses teaches life and career skills important to succeeding in the business world. 12 new courses produced in partnership with Human Relations Media were released to be included in this bundle, and we added our previously released Know Your Talents™ course to the mix as well.

Included in the bundle:

Ten Easy Ways to KEEP Your Job
What’s Your Attitude? Getting in the Mood to Work
Communication Skills in the Workplace
Business Ethics on the Job
Making a Good Impression: Resumes, Interviews, and Appearance
Matching Your Skills, Talents, and Ambitions to a Dream Career
Think Before You Click: Playing it Safe Online
Workplace Etiquette: Why Being Polite Counts on the Job
The Seven Competency Skills for the Workplace
B Careful When U TXT: The Dangers of Texting and Sexting
Me and My 500 “Friends”: Staying Safe on Social Networks
The Dangers of Sexting: What Teens Need to Know
Know Your Talents™

Visit learnkey.com/careerreadiness for more information about the bundle and the courses included. As always, if you’re a current LearnKey customer, just give your favorite sales or customer service rep a call and they’ll make sure to get it added to your library!

Mobile Mentoring for Teachers

When it comes to using LearnKey courseware, most of our offerings have been student-focused, with tools for teachers typically being on the delivery side built into the LMS. In our goal to make our courseware easier to implement in the classroom, LearnKey has been working with our sister company LearnCast to provide more tools for teachers, and recently launched Mobile Mentoring – a tool that utilizes online and mobile technology to help facilitate learning.

Here are some of the features of LearnKey’s Mobile Mentoring:

Powered by LearnCast, a world-class mobile learning platform
Course-specific mobile instructional mentoring

Tips from author on key objectives and coverage of topics
Course-specific projects for students
Mobi Alerts ensure your lesson stays on track
Social engagement – interactive chat within each course
Quizzes and exams
Best practices for online learning

Teacher and student sessions delivered to any mobile device
Monthly polling and rapid feedback

If you’re interested in adding Mobile Mentoring to your teaching arsenal, give your LearnKey representative a call at 1-800-865-0165, or read more about it at learnkey.com/mobilementoring

Big Picture & Team Player – Sounds like Sarah!

When you merge companies you spend a lot of time educating employees and existing customers on the benefits and big picture as to why these companies have decided to come together. Its great to see when customers and employees really “get” the value and do see the big picture. In our company, there has been no better demonstration of that than from Sarah Blik, our August Employee of the month and Sales Champion for Predix. We call her the ultimate team player, or as her leader put it, “She will play on anyone’s team to help them with their goal our objective.”

Demonstrating our core values around ease, value and trust is something Sarah does everyday. Value comes from understanding the big picture and being able to demonstrate that to our customers – she does that with Ease and has earned the Trust of every BLS employee she comes in touch with. Patience and process is something you will always get from Sarah, and she demonstrated some serious patience when she and Lori Coruccini were staying in Nashville with the Gaylord explosion earlier this year. That experience enabled her to remove sleeping in the Grand Ole Opry for one night off her life “bucket list” too!

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Case study: Houston ISD

Not only do we love hearing success stories from teachers who found ways to implement LearnKey courseware into their curriculum, but we know that information also helps others by showing real-world examples of how the program works.

Margaret Williams from Barbara Jordan Career High School was kind enough to tell us her story about how implementing LearnKey courseware helped her students pass their certification exams in this case study. Here is an excerpt from that document:

All of my students, (100%) passed the Word and PowerPoint certification exams first try without books during the fall semester. The e-Learning online instruction helped me to individualize instruction. It is based on the students’ learning styles. It provides virtual, interactive learning with video (which includes certification objectives in an outline format), guided practice, and independent practice activities. It helps students to develop a thorough understanding of the Microsoft certification objectives.

Do you have a success story for us? Share it in the comments or post it on our Facebook Timeline!

New Products for a New School Year

Remember how I promised all you teachers out there that LearnKey would be releasing some really awesome new tools to use in your classrooms? Well consider that promised fulfilled, because we will be releasing brand new course projects and the A+ workbook, both made specifically for you and ready to use for the 2012/2013 school year!

As many of you know, our new A+ 2012 course was released at the end of July. We were excited to introduce Tom Carpenter as the new face and author of A+ 2012. Tom is a great fit for teaching this course because he has hands on experience teaching A+ to high school students, preparing them for the A+ exam. Tom also has 15 years of training, 20 years of work experience in IT and has also written 14 IT related books through McGraw-Hill and Sybex.

Included with the course is a new course workbook, and one exciting thing about the A+ workbook is that it was written by Tom Carpenter specifically for LearnKey. Teachers should be excited about this because Tom personally made sure that the workbook is mapped to our A+ course. Included in the workbook are application projects that provide learning opportunities that will prepare students for the A+ exam. The workbook also includes some bonus information not included in the course that expands upon concepts that are presented, and lesson plans which can be used as a guide to teach the course. We are really happy with the work that Tom put into the workbook and know that it will be a great asset to the A+ teaching experience.

Our next big end of summer release is the teacher projects, made by teachers for teachers. Much of the feedback that we were getting from teachers was that they wished we had more projects that were more hands on and really reinforce skills that their students need to receive their certification. We heard this feedback and are happy to say that since June we have had teachers who use our courses in their classrooms create projects that will be available to all LK teachers to use.

The team here at LearnKey has been working really hard all summer to make sure that these awesome new features would be ready to go by the time you go back to school. I am really proud of all of the work that has gone into these projects and I am positive that they will be a great benefit to your classroom.

When employees find better solutions- You know you have a winner!

LearnKey’s Colby Carter is someone who takes pride in his work and is always looking to make this better. That is why he is our July employee of the month! In addition to carrying a large workload the past few months, Colby made sure his internal and external customers were taken care of with each and every call. For those of you who don’t know Colby, he’s our technical support expert and member of the LearnKey client services team. His amazing patience and professionalism during this period did not go unnoticed. Demonstrating our BLS Core values loud and clear. Everyone in LearnKey, Trusts him because he does what he says he is going to do. Making it Easy for anyone who needs his assistance.

In addition to maintaining his cool while we were short staffed in technical support, he took it upon himself to explore a better way to deliver LearnKey content through flash drives, creating more Value in our distribution options. Here’s what his manager Kim Johnson had to say:

“Colby did not wait to be asked, he just did – coordinating calls with internal stakeholders and our IT support vendor. He was prepared, did his due diligence and paved the way for helping LearnKey continue to be a leader providing our learning content in many different ways. Because of his efforts there are potential clients in third world countries now asking for our content in that delivery method.”

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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!