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Train the Trainer Robert Faust

Final Thoughts

This has been an amazing journey and a wonderful experience. My initial thoughts were that the focus of the class would be developing the technical side of training with Adobe products. I was surprised by—and thoroughly enjoyed—the focus on creativity and adult education theory. Thank you!

I became much more confident in making screen recordings and understand the importance of advance planning. Poor planning just leads to longer recording and editing sessions. You have to plan...you might as well do it up front!

As with my other Adobe Education Exchange courses, I've learned as much or more from fellow participants. Their creativity and skill in projects and discussions stimulated even more ideas for me. I hope the course materials continue to be available in archive form. I'll revisit them in the future.

Finally, a big Thank You to Adobe for your commitment to education. Not only is it smart business, but you are creating a culture of innovation and creativity among teachers and students. They will carry this spirit forward. The future is bright!

Weeks 7 & 8

Final Training Plan and Video

This is my final submission of my training plan and instructional video. It has been quite an evolution conceptualizing this course. As I look back over the earlier assignments, I can see how my vision for the course changed. I've learned many new skills and dusted off some old ones. I found the focus on adult learning valuable since most of my experience has been with secondary students. I look forward to infusing more creativity into my classes and hopefully inspiring my colleagues to make better use of the tools available to them and their students.

Week 6

Demonstration Video

Check out the training plan for this session here.

I chose to develop a demonstration video for the first of three sessions of my Photoshop for Educators course. When presented live, I planned for the opening and direct instruction portion to take about 20 minutes. It was a real challenge squeezing the majority of the content into a 5 minute video. It's a bit over time, but I tightened it up as much as I could without removing another key concept. As I make more recordings, I've gotten better at not saying "ahh" or "umm" while recording. Now I'm finding I have some other pet words that I need to work on like "and" and "now."

I can see that it's probably better to plan on having more sessions, and doing less in each one rather than trying to crowd too many concepts into a session. Having the training plan was essential to getting the video recorded with a minimum of miscues. I did need to spend quite a bit of time editing out pauses and other superfluous content.

Week 5

Training Plan Pitch

I had decided some time ago that I would use Photoshop for my training plan. Over the years I have been asked for assistance with images for publications and websites. Quite often the image resolution was the problem. With a little instruction and understanding, teachers understand why that image that looks amazing on the screen doesn't look so amazing when it's printed out.

Basic tasks like cropping, straightening, and retouching images is also a deficient skill for many teachers. This training should make competent image editors of the participants.

Determining specific objectives, their sequence, and grouping them into appropriate sized instructional chunks was the challenge in the creation of the pitch. Knowing that this can be edited before final submission is comforting. End of the school year responsibilities and a number of days out of town for a conference put me behind. Looks like I'll be making full use of the additional time to finish things up this week.

Click the button below to check out my training plan pitch.

Week 4

Training Plan Template with InDesign

I've been working with InDesign longer than any other piece of Adobe software. In fact, when I started using it, it was called Aldus Pagemaker. An amazingly powerful piece of software that—like all Adobe products—is fairly easy to learn the basics, yet impossible to master completely.

I thought for sure that I would be able to do everything I needed in the 2-minute time frame...wrong! So I settled for setting up the master pages. I was a bit surprised in the lecture video that Lukas did not make use of master pages.

My training plan template is shared online here.

Week 3

Digital Badge with Illustrator

Although it's well past week three...end of school year craziness took its toll and I got a bit behind. I've got a fair amount of experience with Illustrator, so there wasn't a big learning curve on the construction of the badge. I decided I would create a badge on one artboard first, then record the process as I replicated it on the adjacent artboard. I think this is a good model...though it was time consuming. I struggled a bit as the software threw me a few curves as I was recording. For some reason Illustrator decided it wouldn't let me use the arrows in the properties panel to increase and decrease attributes. The window would close the instant I clicked on one, so I could only type in values.

The full recording of the second badge was over 39 minutes. Obviously I wouldn't be editing the entire video down to two minutes, so I chose to focus on the process of placing text on a circular path, which was something I struggled with numerous times when learning Illustrator. Squeezing just that one skill into a two minute video was a challenge. As I do more recordings I'm learning to limit my "umms"...definitely easier than editing them out later. I've decided my primary training project will deal with Photoshop basics, so this badge may be useful in that process.

Week 2

Online Training Promotional Piece

Above is the promotional piece I created for week 2. I've decided the course I'm going to develop will be to educate teachers on proper use and editing of images. I've had many cases over the years where a colleague is not happy when the full page image they've printed is pixellated or the opposite problem when an image takes too long to load online because its a 10 Mp image at 300 ppi.

Teachers work with images every day (or should). Whether it is for newsletters, websites, presentations, or printing posters—teachers should be competent at making the image quality match the requirements of the project. I wanted the promotional piece to show some of the things they would learn in addition to just getting the word out.

I've been using Photoshop for years. It is a continual challenge to keep up with its ever expanding capabilities. I kept the project simple, as the audience of teachers new to Photoshop would dictate.

I used Snagit for screen capture this time. Camtasia is designed with the understanding that your editing will be done in Camtasia Studio. This greatly complicated my first project. this one went much more smoothly. I also got an understanding of just how short 2 minutes is in and instructional video...time sure flies!

Week 1

Course Introduction Video

Putting this clip together was way more difficult for me than it needed to be. I'm not sure if it was the fictitious nature of the course, or just me overthinking it. I wrote down and recorded the narration first. I thought it fit the assignment pretty well. I should have spent some time thinking through the shots I would use and even prepared some simple storyboards. I'm not thrilled with the result. It was difficult to find relevant creative commons media to include. Particularly not happy with the creepy sleeping man, but there wasn't much available.

Finding and collecting clips and images for the 1-minute video really ate up some time. I used Snagit to capture the clips of the various Adobe CC apps that would be offered. I used some of the projects I've created for some coursed offered through Adobe EdEx in the creation of some sample clips. I'm comfortable using Premiere Pro for editing. the process of capturing screen video is straightforward enough. I can see that planning and practicing prior to recording will be an important part of future projects.

Orientation

Introduction Video

Credits:

Photography by...me.

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