This week’s guest poster is Hallie Wieland, one of our charming and knowledgeable sales people. She’s here to talk about Promotional Webinars, a service for helping clients to promote training in their organizations.

We are excited to inform you of our online learning Promotional Webinars! Once a month, we hold a webinar to give you helpful tips and solutions for promoting CustomGuide’s interactive online learning within your work place.

CustomGuide has done an excellent job of building a Promotional Toolkit right in our CLMS. As a CustomGuide client we hope you take full advantage of the many tools available right at your finger tips. Here are a few I like and suggest using:

Promotional Posters: We provide editable banners in Word .doc format that you can customize for each course. Simply edit and add your contact information to post at your company.

Quick Reference Cards: We allow you to brand your CLMS account with your logo, which will also appear on the Quick References. These are a great resource to send out to your staff or students

E-mail: We recently added the ability to send e-mails right from within your CLMS account. This is a great way to promote a custom course you’ve created, reinforce a course that needs to be completed by a certain date, or give a weekly tip or lesson to your users.

At the end of the day, I think you will agree with me that eLearning is only successful and beneficial if it is used. We hope you’ll come join us for one of our webinars and learn some useful solutions that have worked for other organizations and that can work for you too!

Our guest poster for this week is Dan High, sales rep extraordinaire, and resident Outlook guru.

I have to admit it; I hated Microsoft Office 2007 when it first came out and I still don’t care for it. All the commands that I was able to access without a thought in early versions of Office, such as AutoSum or the Format Painter, now require hunting through collections of buttons. File related commands, like Open or Save As, are no longer categorized under the meaningful File menu; they are hidden underneath an ambiguous circle called the Office Button. Perhaps it could make using Office easier to the novice, but for me it was like getting a new GLURPY keyboard in lieu of my familiar QWERTY one because the industry felt the non-typists would find it easier.

So, it may come as a surprise that, despite its few modifications, I am really enjoying Office 2010. Why, you might ask?

For starters, the Office Button is gone, replaced by an updated version of the old File menu. Secondly, you can now customize the Ribbon you can set it to look the way you want it to. Once you have customized the toolbar to keep your favorite commands all together, you can really start to appreciate the other enhancements Office has made since the popular Office 2003.

Some of the best improvements in Office 2010 appear in Outlook. One of my favorite features is the Clean Up Conversation feature. As you know, your inbox can often fill up with redundant emails from a single conversation thread:

“Are you going to the supply store at noon?”

“Yup.”

“Can you pick up some paper?”

“Sure!”

“Thanks!”

“No problem!”

The Clean Up button automatically deletes five of these six redundant messages (along with all other redundant ones in your folder), leaving only the most current one. You’ll be surprised by how many messages are sent to your delete bin.

Another useful new tool in Outlook 2010 is the Quick Step feature. Quick Steps help you respond to requests that require the same response. For example, on a regular basis, I often receive requests for more time to review an eLearning demo account. So, with the single click of a Quick Step button that I’ve set up, I can reply to the user that they’ll be given additional time in their account; send a message to our account manager to extend their account another two weeks; mark the message as complete; and move it out of my inbox.

One other great new tool found in Outlook 2010 and other Office 2010 applications is the Insert Screenshot feature. Clients often ask me for the location of a particular button or feature in CustomGuide’s online learning. Now, with the readily available Insert Screenshot feature, I can send them an image of what they are looking for. I’ve also found this feature useful when I need tech support, so I can show the exact error message I’m getting with a program.

Overall, I’d say the improvements in Office 2010 were greatly needed ones, and have fixed most of my complaints with the previous version. Now; if they could only come out with a Recall Message feature that actually works, instead of just drawing attention to the message you wanted to remove in the first place…

Our guest poster this week is Lisa Stelzner, one of our sales people at CustomGuide. Thanks for a great post, Lisa!

I recently saw the much anticipated and hyped movie “Waiting for Superman.” Wow. When I left the theater, I was filled with a mixture of emotion; disbelief, anger, sadness and disgust. If that is really the way the education system works in America…it is very troubling. For those of you who have not seen the movie I highly recommend it, especially if you have a son, daughter, grandchild, niece or nephew in school.

A major point of the movie that stuck out to me was the standards we hold students to. It appears that teachers have different standards for kids in their own classroom. Some of the children are kept to high standards, some to medium and others to low…yet they all pass and move onto the next grade. Is it fair to be sending them the message that they aren’t as good, and thus don’t need to achieve the same level?

Personally, I think that is one of the worst messages you can send a child. How can you expect someone to achieve if you don’t hold them to high enough standards or even the same standards as his/her classmate? I was fortunate to go to a school where everyone was held to the same standards. This was challenging for me because I had dyslexia and some other learning difficulties, but the teachers didn’t let me slack or get away with doing less than the others. Despite the challenges and extra hard work, I realized that I was just as capable as everyone else in my class. My confidence was boosted, and now I’m a successful adult with a great career!

Now you may be asking yourself: where does CustomGuide, online computer training, fit into this? Simple: we have the same standards for everyone. By keeping everyone to the same standards, we expect excellence from all, which helps in boosting everyone’s self-confidence. No matter what age, culture, economic background or job…the standards are the same for all, from CEOs to entry-level administrators. We believe that everyone should have the same level of competency in our training, regardless of how they contribute to their organization. Because who knows? One day, that entry-level administrator might become the CEO!

So, if you keep all the same standards and expect excellent results from all…you may be surprised by what people can achieve!

Our guest poster this week is Matt Petricka, one of our sales people at CustomGuide. He also does a great job hosting our daily webinars (click here to sign up for one today!). Thanks for a great post, Matt!

When asked what we really do here at CustomGuide, the best way to sum it up is that we help people learn – and we help people learn better than anyone else! Awareness of an individual’s learning style has always been the basis of our product foundation, and this attention is quite noticeable when you start diving in and comparing one training solution to another.

For instance let’s look at the different approaches to learning CustomGuide adopts:

Kinesthetic — Someone with a strong preference for doing. The big RED arrow that helps you along in our training was adopted for the sole purpose of helping Kinesthetic learners (thank God – I’m one of them!) The positive impact of this learning style is well worth the additional time it takes our developers to complete the rigorous assignment, so next time you see the helpful arrow pointing you along you’ll be able to identify the Kinesthetic learning style that has helped so many of us!

Auditory — Sometimes hearing things over and over actually does sink in and work. Just think about your parents asking you to make your bed — it probably took some time and repeating, but eventually it becomes a habit. This is an example of why repeated narration is so important to auditory learners. Our lessons get played over and over until it sinks in. Luckily, the lessons aren’t that long, and there are “next” and “previous” buttons that allow you to navigate through the sections of a lesson. And the voice really isn’t that annoying either!

Visual — For the most part, applications are pretty static, which means that there really isn’t a lot of change happening on the screen. It’s common nature that people get used to familiar surroundings and won’t dive into something new because of the fear of messing something up. Tasks that might be easier performed with a shortcut key stroke are often times done “technically” the long way because it’s what people know and feel comfortable with. This boils down to the visual approach; when you see a screen that looks familiar or a problem you may have dealt with previously, you navigate to familiar areas of the screen to perform the task/solve the problem or search for help. Visually seeing things done the correct way in the initial exposure has a tremendous impact on the learner. CustomGuide’s online learning was developed to work just like the application so that clients could immediately apply newfound skills to the actual application.

So put CustomGuide to the test today and let us know how we stack up with these learning styles!