Virtually There Recap

Did you know that you have stories constantly running through your subconscious mind? It’s true! Without realizing it, you frame every interaction through narrative, creating underlying bias. Good, bad, or indifferent, your bias influences how you navigate the world.

This fundamental brain biology impacts professional relationships, too. Before every conversation or task, you anticipate how it will unfold.

Mobile learning’s on the rise, and for good reason.

Mobile technology, once a luxury, has become commonplace in our lives. We bank, read, socially interact, and more from a device that fits in the palm of our hand.

The Jetsons imagined a similar future, but did corporate training?

As technology evolves, our ability to learn anytime and anywhere changes, too. Now, our possibilities seem literally endless. Constant communication, the pervasive availability of information, and the ever-changing opportunities for social collaboration exemplify this new reality.

At no point, though, has critical thinking been simultaneously more important and less commonplace. As learners and learning architects, we struggle to discern the accuracy and efficacy of information on the internet. Thanks to web-based anonymity, how do we figure out who on the internet has any expertise?

Virtually There Recap

Think about your day-to-day role. Do you host meetings? Facilitate training? Give presentations? Whether you run these events or not, they represent an important part of our professional lives. Often, we see these events as time wasters, rather than important investments of our focus.

As learning professionals, team members, and managers, we strive to engage and involve our audiences so that they can remember the information we share with them. We hope to take them beyond listening and towards true learning. With the right approach, we can achieve that lofty goal.

Brain-based learning expert Sharon Bowman shared her presentation model and guided our Virtually There participants through a process for getting the brain to pay attention.

As learning managers and leaders, your responsibilities extend beyond the modern classroom. Creating unity and trust within your team increases the success of your short-term projects and long-term goals. Guest contributor Jenny Holt provides guidance on how to build a sense of community within your department and connects the process back to what we do best: ongoing professional development.

If you’re not convinced of the effectiveness of team-building activities that allow your employees to develop professional skills while also learning more about the company and their colleagues, then you’ll be interested to know that poorly managed work groups are on average 50% less productive and 44% less profitable than well-managed groups.

Have you ever watched The Magic School Bus? What about Bill Nye the Science Guy or Schoolhouse Rock?

These entertaining childrens television programs have an important common approach to education: they explain complex subject matter in easy-to-understand ways by using likeable characters in fun narratives.

Think about the last time you needed to learn something new. Were you sitting at your desk in your office? Standing in your kitchen trying to make dinner? Driving down the road when a new warning light popped up on your dashboard?

Like many people, when this happens to me, I ask a trusted source for their wisdom. Sometimes that’s my mom, other times it’s a colleague who seems to know the ins-and-outs of every nuanced process for my company.

This daily life process proves that humans learn socially. If we can incorporate that into our training, we not only appeal to Adult Learning Principles, but we also support learner success.

Gamification is a term that is frequently thrown around in the training industry. It refers to the application of game elements and principles in learning sessions, and is a popular approach used in eLearning and company training sessions. In fact, the 2016-2021 Global Game-based Learning Market report stated that game-based learning products reached a global revenue of $2.6 billion in 2016.   

Are you interested in a work from home opportunity? Are you computer literate and a detail-oriented person? Do you have experience supporting WebEx Training Center, Adobe Connect, or any other virtual classroom platform? InSync Training wants to learn more about you! 

Picture this: you’re facilitating a live training session for your organization, and it comes time to ask for learner input. You open the floor for contributions with the common phrase, “A penny for your thoughts?”

And you get crickets. Your previously lively cohort goes silent. Some participants look utterly confused.

What happened? Your figure of speech may have confused your global learners.