Have you ever gotten the sense that people are distracted or multi-tasking when asked to read or listen to content, no matter how fascinating that content is? Have you ever struggled to keep people on task when discussing something they’ve heard or read?
Welcome to a tool called framing questions! Framing questions are presented to learners to help focus their attention and listen with purpose.
Many of us feel overwhelmed by the thought of needing to learn new technology. Many of us struggle to learn these tools, especially when it is online. However, from time to time a new e-tool or system will increase efficiency and effectiveness and is needed.
How much is enough? How do we teach a new e-system or tool when staff is busy and technology-averse? How do we maximize learning of new technology?
How many of you facilitators want to frisk your participants before a learning event so you can strip them of their iPhones (or Blackberries or Palm Pilots or . . . )? No more sneaking peaks at e-mail during the warm-up tasks, no checking the weather while another...
Global Learning Partners is poised to launch into cyberspace with our first online course. I know, I know, we’re a bit behind the curve when it comes to online learning but we’ve got our reasons. Because we’re so focused on learning through dialogue, we’ve been...
PowerPoint. We love it. We hate it. We abandoned it to flirt with Prezi. Then we came back. It's like that relationship we know is not good for us, but we keep it on speed dial. So, we won't give you the long list of how not to use PowerPoint. You've been there and...
Webinars offer a great alternative to holding face-to-face workshops as they save the costs and carbon associated with travel. However, they can easily become a sleep-inducing monologue in which a disembodied voice drones over a hypnotic barrage of never-ending...
It can be challenging to collect meaningful data from participants while facilitating dialogue. There we stand at the flip chart with markers in hand, racing to get their insights up on the wall while the dialogue flows past us. The conversation starts to go off track...
One of my great passions in life is using adult education theory to create learning-centered training – working out how learners can best learn so they then go on to flourish. A significant addition to this in recent years is digital education, to which there are...
I could sense around me that I was losing my learners. It was during an early experience of me training them to use software to help with language learning. But these learners had very different levels of experience of using software and while I was helping some who...
One participant came to speak to me about how the training session had been for her. At this early stage as a trainer, I had thought it had been good, but I listened. I had engaged participants with the content and had facilitated good discussion, either in small...
There were many challenges throughout my course. Electricity was intermittent. English, the language of communication, had varying levels of understanding among participants. But the biggest challenge was the cultural shift to a dialogue approach to learning; a big...
Silence. Total silence. It was after one of the highlights for me of the Digital Education Masters program through The University of Edinburgh. Two world experts in their field had been discussing their topic together in a Skype class, with the rest of us listening in...