LearnKey Blog

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!

A+ Certification 2012 released

We’ve been teasing it for a while, but our A+ Certification 2012 course is now available! A+ is one of our most popular courses, so of course Tom Carpenter and our production teams went out of their way to make this version both entertaining and educational.

Course Clips:

Looking inside a computer
The Motherboard
Mini-ATX and Micro-ATX
Installing a CPU

An A+ Certification is one of the core requirements for many tech support and computer service jobs, and is the gateway to more specific career paths. If you’ve been looking to get started in IT, or if you’re expanding your tech knowledge, this course is for you.

Visit the Product page for more course information

A look into filming for LearnKey

How many wardrobe changes are needed for a short 3 minute promotional video? Well, in the case of David Clemons it took three. Three different shirts, two backgrounds and glasses off, just to get the best video that we could capture.

Being in the film studio is always an interesting experience. I realize every time how diligent and detail oriented our Salt Lake City crew can be. David Clemons and his colleague Oliver were in town for short time on a Monday morning. We had about three hours for Oliver to shoot a testimonial for LearnCast, and for David to shoot his version of LearnKey’s history.

Oliver’s shoot went off without a hitch; he was filmed in front of the blue screen as the crew already had an office type background picked out for him. Elizabeth McUen, or Liz our new production manager, was prepared with a barrage of questions that she directed at Oliver. He then responded with amazing detail and eloquence, he was such a great speaker that I was tempted to take notes. At the end of the shoot David added a few more questions for Oliver, we filmed for five more minutes and it was a wrap. The crew and Oliver made it seem so easy.

Then it was time for Dave’s History of LearnKey, a marketing video we requested to help promote LearnKey’s 25th anniversary. As Art Director of the marketing team, I had some input into how the shoot was organized, so I requested a different background. I wanted a white background “Apple-style”, instead of the blue screen. Dave’s cream colored shirt had looked great in front of the blue screen but seemed washed out in front of the white, luckily he was prepared with a few wardrobe options. I got the feeling that he’d done this before! He quickly changed into a black dress shirt and we started filming, filming… cut. The crew in the booth noticed that his cuff links were very distracting. Kudos to the crew! David graciously removed the cuff links and rolled up his cuffs and once again we start filming… cut. Five minutes into the take the crew decided the the stripes on the rolled up cuffs are distracting. So it was off to change to the third and hopefully final shirt, which luckily was a winner!

David was dynamic in front of the camera and shared some interesting insights into the birth of LearnKey. In fact he gave us 35 minutes of raw footage from which we’ll create a 2-3 minute video. Thank you David, for being such a great sport.

It’s a wrap, or at least the filming is finished. There is still a lot of work for the Salt Lake City crew to do before they send the footage to the marketing team in St. George. Once we receive the footage on a drive, Hyrum from the design team will spend many hours cutting and editing the film to create a nice little marketing piece for our 25th anniversary. I can’t wait to share the final product with all of our customers, and maybe Hyrum will blog about his part of the video making process!