Monday Nov 14, 2011
By: Robert Hodges
Part 3: Support your school district’s Office 2010 migration with Office 2010 Training in KeyStone OnDemand
In Part 1, I spoke a little about Office 2010 Training as a key element for a successful Office 2010 Migration. Part 2 focused on helpdesk and support integration to provide support for those common day-to-day problems, even including custom “how to” training for the unique challenges you face in your district or school. Today, I wanted to wrap up with some overall best practices for your Office 2010 migration support.
Best practices for Office 2010 migration support:
1. To maintain productivity and avoid overloading your support teams, it is critical to include an effective Office 2010 Training program (like KeyStone OnDemand) in your rollout. Not only will you increase productivity with Office 2010’s powerful tools, but you will see a drastic reduction in end-user support. An effective training program must provide real-time results to educators, allowing them to get the answers they need when they need them. In addition, it should provide comprehensive coverage, tracking all progress and results for continuing education and professional development.
2. Communication is a big part of change management. It’s a good idea to develop a rollout plan that includes emails and/or other communication to help educators see the value in why you are migrating. Explain the benefits of moving to Office 2010, talk about the time-saving new features, and show them how easy it is to learn to use the new features available to them. Ironically, educators can be one of the toughest crowds when it comes to training... make sure you show them the value of both the new software (e.g. Office 2010) and the training from the beginning to mitigate this challenge. KeyStone OnDemand includes a workflow feature for automated follow up so you can set up a communication plan and schedule it all at once. In addition, KeyStone provides a number of services, including kick-off webinars, to assist you with adoption.
3. One size does not fit everyone. The ability to address the ongoing day-to-day challenges unique to your environment will both reduce your overall support burden and increase adoption of the training, allowing your teams more time to focus on critical support and giving educators more time to spend with students. With KeyStone OnDemand, you can easily capture and share articles and videos. Whether a a quick “how to...” or a complete custom course for professional development, you can create custom content and share it district-wide. Build your own knowledge base and share best practices.
Best of luck with your Office 2010 migration. Whether you are in full swing or planning a future roll out, give us a call anytime with questions and we’ll be happy to help.
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Monday Nov 07, 2011
Are you clicking and clicking and clicking? Time, time and more time.
Here at the office, there are many shortcuts that we use on a daily basis, but these are the top ten most used Office 2010 keyboard shortcuts we apply. You may already be using them, but if you’re not, you need to. You don’t realize how time consuming it is to constantly right click and find your solution or navigate the ribbon to copy your text until you take a small amount of time to memorize and apply shortcuts like these for Office 2010.
PC Mac
1. Copy Control + C Command + C
2. Paste Control + V Command + V
3. Undo Control + Z Command + Z
4. Redo Control + Y Command + Y
5. Bold Control + B Command + B
6. Italicize Control + I Command + I
7. Save Control + S Command + S
8. Find Control + F Command + F
9. Print Control + P Command + P
10. Select All Control + A Command + A
These Office 2010 shortcuts are sure to help you if you have not been using them. These are particularly easy to use and apply because they all start with the same key and have one letter.
While this is a great start, understanding more features in Office 2010 and the various ways to use the tools encourages speedy work and effective use of time. This is why we are so passionate about educating users in Office 2010. There are so many features and tools in Office 2010 that can go unnoticed until someone shows you how to use them.
Our Office 2010 Training provides full text and video for each topic, including printable KeyNotes and instant-on video, all available in real-time search. Click here to learn more.
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Monday Oct 31, 2011
By Deanna Reynolds
Here at KeyStone, we have relationships with the best trainers in the business. These people operate at
a high level of energy with a true passion for both the software and sharing their knowledge with you
(or, really, anyone who will listen).
So, we asked them:
Q. What are your absolute favorite, jaw-dropping, applause-rendering, show-
stopping tricks that bring the house every time you share them in your
classroom?
We were not disappointed with the answers and we don’t think you’ll be either.
Our first tip is from Nona, a trainer residing in Virginia, USA. Nona writes:
“The standard "Select All" key doesn't work the way you think it does. Experienced Windows users know
that Ctrl-A is the shortcut key that selects everything in a window or document; the A in Ctrl-A stands
for All. Ctrl-A works this way in every application you can find—except Excel. When you press Ctrl-A in
a worksheet with data in it, you select the current region (that is, all connected cells), not the whole
worksheet. But wait—if you immediately press Ctrl-A a second time, you select the entire worksheet—
unless the worksheet contains a table, in which case your second press of Ctrl-A will select the current
region and the summary rows (typically the headers) of the current table. And if your second Ctrl-A
selects the current table and its summary rows, then you'll need to press Ctrl-A a third time to select the
entire worksheet.”
Our next tip comes from Nicole, a trainer residing in Germany. Nicole writes:
“In PowerPoint 2010 you can now get rid of the background or better “cut out a picture “ as you are
used to doing in Photoshop or Corel Draw. But what is great that you don´t need to click around the face
anymore to cut the background out…you simply need to just draw a line into the area you no longer
need. I really love this new feature in 2010.”
Nicole also likes to show her students how to quickly pin documents they use on a regular basis to the
File tab, on their Recent Documents list. She offers that by just right-clicking any document shown in
the list, you can choose “Pin to list” to always keep the selected document at the top of the Recent
Documents list regardless of the last time it was accessed.
Our final tip is from Alva, a trainer residing in California, USA. Alva shares:
“I absolutely enjoy creating formulas in [Excel’s] Name Manager. [That way] students can use the name
provided for the formula to further manipulate their data in Excel.
Alva’s right on target with this tip. Excel 2010 now allows you to name tables, ranges, cells, and formulas
for future reference. This works fabulously on larger spreadsheets as a name seems far easier to
remember than a complex list of cell addresses and/or ranges.
I wish I could fit all of our trainer’s tips into this article. They are so full of great advice. We would love to hear your tips as well; send us a message.
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Monday Oct 31, 2011
Implementing the course outline in the CourseBuilder
In a previous post, we discussed where to begin when authoring a course: create a course purpose, course objectives, an outline and an introduction.
Now, we will discuss how, once you follow the above steps, you can use the outline you created to build the course.
In KeyStone OnDemand, you have the ability to create an outline in the CourseBuilder before you officially add the content. The image below shows you an example of a new course outline in the CourseBuilder. You can use the written outline you created to form this outline. Keep in mind that this outline can be edited and the names can be changed at any time. So while this outline will help with organizing your content, it does not have to be the final form.
The CourseBuilder allows you to add a name and place for an article, quiz or video without actually adding the item itself. It is our suggestion you do so, then you know exactly where you will be placing all your content. Once you have created the outline, you can search for content you have already created to place in the course. If you create content after you create the course, you can assign the content to that course while you are creating it.
As you can see, building a course in KeyStone OnDemand is simple, especially if you take a few minutes to prepare a course outline.
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Friday Oct 28, 2011
Here are five simple suggestions for you when you start building your course:
1. Present with personality. If the instructor is not interested in the course, how can you expect your learners to be interested?
2. Answer all common questions. Especially if you are forming a course on software training, you need to think of all possible questions when going through a step. Answer those questions, to keep the attention of your learners. Your learners will be looking at the course, thinking of questions as you are teaching, so answer them without having them asked.
3. If you are teaching a course with a powerpoint presentation, don’t just read off the slides. Provide your users with additional information. Why should they listen to you if you are just going to say exactly what the slide says? In some cases, this may work, but in most instances, you can re-word what is on the slide or provide an example for better understanding.
4. Share the basics but throw in some detail. While the basics are important for the beginner, keep the learner engaged by throwing in one detail or example of what they will be able to achieve upon completion of the course. Show them this course is worth paying attention to.
5. Understand your audience. Sometimes courses include too much detail or go too fast for online learners. It can be easy to assume your learners understand you when you cannot physically see their reactions. Be sure to understand your main audience. If, however, the course is targeted towards advanced users, then go for the detailed and high-level tutorial. If your learners are new to the subject matter, be sure to guide them to understanding. Just because you know the information and learned it easily, it does not necessarily mean the information will be as easy for your learners to digest.
These may seem basic, but sometimes going back to the basics is just what you need. At KeyStone OnDemand, we are always looking to help our customers who are creating custom courses for their organization using our platform.
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