Top 10 learning tools for 2012

Jane Hart is gathering votes for the Top 100 learning tools for 2012.
This is my top 10, in random order:
  • Twitter: the best way to generate your own “information streams” about various subjects
  • SharePoint 2010: Microsoft’s enterprise collaboration platform. Fan of the “My Sites”, that allow you to create your own “portfolio”; with Office 365, you can set up your own platform in the cloud for a very reasonable cost.
  • Adobe Captivate: although getting really complicated, still one of the leaders as far as software courses (screencasts) is concerned
  • Diigo: social bookmarking tool
  • Tweetdeck: invaluable for organizing my twitter stream. Like the fact that it is cross-platform
  • Google Reader: allows me to follow more than 400 websites or other information sources (RSS) in one single web-based application
  • Feeddler Pro: iPad app that connects to your Google Reader account and displays your RSS feeds on iPad
  • Microsoft OneNote: the best note-taking application on the Windows platform. Unbeatable in combination with SharePoint and a tablet pc. Now with an iPad app!
  • Instapaper: with the “read later” button in your browser toolbar, you can save interesting articles for later, and read them e.g. in the iPad app
  • iSpring Pro: a very powerful “PowerPoint to Flash” rapid e-learning tool.

Compared to last year, not much of a change, 3 newcomers only.

What is your top 10?

 

Screen rotation on the HP Elitebook 2740p

The HP Elitebook is one of the best devices I ever used, but it has some serious issues with the screen rotation of the tablet. If you turn the screen around to use the pc as a tablet, you should be able to change the orientation of the screen with the rotate button.

In some cases, the screen rotates automatically, sometimes it does not, and the rotate button does not always work as expected.

This is what solved the issue for me:

  • install the latest Intel HD video driver from the HP support site
  • install or reinstall the HP Quick Launch button drivers from the same site

iBooks, the future of course material?

If you are in the training and learning business, you know that course material always has been the subject of many discussions. Some say it is necessary, others say that they are never used, but most students want “a manual”. Entire forests disappeared because of it, the added value of it is uncertain.

What if you could avoid using paper, and make the manual really deliver added value? I spent some time playing with iBooks author, a manual in Word format about an IT application, and Adobe Captivate software demo’s, to see if this could be a valuable alternative.

The workflow to replace all your paper based manuals by this solution would be:

  • Get yourself a Mac :–)
  • Get yourself an iPad if you want to preview your iBooks
  • Download a copy of iBooks author
  • Import your Word document into iBooks author
  • Publish your Captivate demo’s as .mp4 (standard publish function in CP 5 and higher)
  • Convert your .mp4 files to .m4v with QuickTime
  • Insert the demos in your iBook using the Media widget
  • Add some interactivity if necessary, e.g. multiple choice questions
  • Publish your project
  • Distribute your iBook (via the store or as a file)
  • Get an iPad for all your students :–)

I will let you judge for yourself. This is the result:

How to publish a Captivate project to a SharePoint site

Microsoft SharePoint is an interesting platform if you quickly want to publish your e-learning content. These are the steps to publish an Adobe Captivate project to a SharePoint site:

1. Publish your Captivate project as Flash(SWF), and make sure that you have the option Export to html checked. This will produce a set of files: a .html file, a .swf file and a .js file.

2. Upload these files into a document library on a SharePoint site. You can start your project by clicking on the .html file.
If you are running SharePoint 2010 and the file does not open, you might need to change a security setting in SharePoint. Also, SharePoint has a default file size limit of 50 MB. Your system administrator can increase this limit.

3. Optional, but recommended: to make it easier for your users to start your course, you can include a link to the .html file on the home page of your site.

Watch the demonstration below for more detailed instructions: