Our prize for the Environment Photo Competition was a place on any 2-day course here at Silicon Beach – however as our winner Charles is based in the USA – he wasn’t easily able to attend.
If you’re interested in entering our current ‘Lifestyle’ Photography competition - with a chance of winning 2 stunning aluminium mounted prints of your choice – HURRY! it ends on 2 September!
Charles didn’t want his prize to go to waste, and was keen that a local not-for-profit organisation benefited. So – having done a little research online - he very generously donated his prize to Brighton Museum and Art Gallery.
The Museum was thrilled to receive the free place and have chosen to send a delegate to attend our Social Media course in August.
Paula Wrightson, the Museum’s Learning Officer, said:
“I was delighted when Brighton Museum was donated the prize. The first thing I did was have a look at Charles Tu’s winning photograph, which is a fabulous piece of work and I immediately thought how kind of him to think of donating his prize to us.
The offer of a place on this course could not come at a better time. We all think we could use social media better to promote Brighton & Hove Museums but feel we are not quite all on the ball yet or using new media as effectively as we could.
My interest is in promoting museum events like gallery tours and our more unusual experiences like our ghost-related programme at Preston Manor … we probably do far more in museums than people realise.
Ghost event attendees are usually slightly younger than the typical visitor and more likely to be users of social media.
I am keen to promote Preston Manor via social media to get a buzz going about this extraordinary buildingand its ghost story. We are lucky to have a real-life Victorian ghost story at the Manor – and right now I am in the middle of planning a fantastic new season of ghost events starting over Halloween.
I have spoken with a colleague who attended a course at Silicon Beach Training and she spoke very highly of the course and the trainer.”
We’re really pleased that Charles was able to find a worthy home for his prize – and we’re really excited to see the results of Paula’s Social Media campaign to promote Preston Manor after she attends the training in August.
Here at Silicon Beach Training we’re immensely proud of the quality of training that we provide – and we love teaching other people how to deliver great training sessions too, via our Train the Trainer course.
Knowing your subject matter is only part of being able to deliver great training. Understanding how adults learn, engaging with them effectively, and planning your training session properly are all essential to ensuring that attendees understand and retain what you teach them.
In this video, filmed on one of our Train the Trainer courses – our trainer Mary guides delegates through the stages of planning and designing an effective training session.
We’ve summarised the video below with some great tips on how to plan your own session.
These are edited highlights of this section of our workshop. We cover a lot more besides on out 2-day train the trainer course here in Brighton, Sussex – so why not come along and hone your training technique?
Train the Trainer: Planning a 10 Minute Training Session – Top Tips
When you plan a training session, its not just about what subjects you’re going to cover when. A well planned training session will provide the following elements for each stage:
Content
Questioning Techniques
Activities
During our Train the Trainer course each delegate is asked to deliver and refine their own short training session. This is broadly broken down as follows:
IOSH Accredited Managing Safely Training Course Now Available
Health and Safety Training Courses
According to the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH) every year on average:
220 people are killed
30,000 people injured
33 million working days are lost to injuries or ill health
25,000 people leave the workplace permanently because of harm suffered at work
The combined cost to British businesses for all of the above is somewhere in the region of £20 billion
Many of these costly work related injuries and absences can be avoided if managers receive proper Health and Safety Training.
We are pleased to announce that Silicon Beach Training is now offering accredited IOSH Managing Safely training here in Brighton, Sussex.
Attending an accredited health and safety course can not only reduce your organisation’s insurance premium costs, but can also enhance your business reputation, and increase productivity and profitability considerably.
Our 4-day Managing Safely course is priced at just £695 + vat, which includes assessment and certification.
CSS3 and HTML5 are changing the way we use the web, and how programmers and web designers build sites. Web browsers are quickly becoming compatible with HTML5 and CSS3′s new tags and features, which are opening up a whole new world of possibilities.
One of those possibilities is the use of Responsive Web Design. In a world where mobile web browsing is ubiquitous, Responsive Web Design techniques allow designers to use flexible grids and page layouts in sites that will respond to user behaviour and adjust automatically to the user’s browser capabilities and screen resolution of their device (meaning you don’t have to make a different version of your site for every mobile phone and tablet out there). We’ll be writing more about Responsive Web Design here soon (so watch this space!)
In response to the increase in demand for these skills we’re now running regular HTML5 Training and CSS3 Training courses here in Brighton – the two 1-day workshops are scheduled together and can be booked together as a package. We’re also running regular JavaScript TrainingandjQuery Trainingcourses.
To give you an idea of some of the exciting new things you can do with CSS3 – here’s our favourite 5 new features in CSS3, along with links to relevant CSS3 Examples.
Top 5 New Features in CSS3
1) Border-radius
The new border-radius feature in CSS3 comes as a great relief for anyone who has had to create rounded corners with corner images and extra DIVs: all you need is a few lines of CSS. It’s not yet supported by IE7 and IE8, but you can use a CurvyCorners Script (http://curvycorners.net) for these browsers.
The sun’s out, Brighton Festival is on, and as I stroll past the amazing independent shops in the streets surrounding Silicon Beach Training, mulling over which the manyfantastic North Laine cafes to buy my lunch from, it’s hard to imagine a better city to work in.
This is a fact not lost on the good people at Google, who have named Gardner Street on their shortlist for the “Best Shopping Street” in the UK Award. According to the Argus, the shortlist was drawn up by “a panel of experts from the world of travel, lifestyle and popular culture, including TV presenter Dawn Porter and X Factor Stylist Grace Woodward”.
And we can certainly vouch for their good judgement, as all of us in the office spend much of our hard earned cash in these very shops! Delegates attending ourTraining Coursesoften tell us they choose Silicon Beach Training because of the fantastic location and buzz around the area – it’s great to get away somewhere fresh for a few days training away from the office. By the way, new public courses include Google Analytics Courses, Agile Project Management and CSS3 Training – among hundreds of others!
Voting closes on 22nd May, with the winner to be announced in June. We’ve already voted for Gardner Street in the poll, and any self-respecting Brightoner should do the same!
WATCH THIS SPACE for our List of Favourite Shops in the North Laine – which is currently being enthusiastically compiled by the office team!
Silicon Beach Training now offers the increasingly popular range of Agile Project Management training courses – but what is Agile Project Management, and why is it such a big deal all of a sudden?
In March 2011 the government unveiled it’s new ICT Strategy which identified a number of problems (or challenges using their words!) with the method in which IT projects and programmes were managed and delivered, causing them to fail. The first of these challenges being:
“projects tend to be too big, leading to greater risk and complexity, and limiting the range of suppliers who can compete”
For example, if a project to implement a large IT system is deemed to take 5 years to complete, it is very likely that, in those five years circumstances (e.g. technology, customer and business requirements, even governments!) will have changed, rendering the final solution based on the original specification unfit for purpose.
A number of strategies were identified to address these challenges, one of which is “by the application of lean and agile methodologies that will reduce waste, be more responsive to changing requirements and reduce the risk of project failure”.
Agile methodologies have been used in software development for some years, but are now being applied in project management as they offer a flexible process that can change according to customer or organisational needs.
How does Agile Project Management differ from traditional project management methodologies?
Traditionally a project manager may direct the project team using a ‘command and control’ style, actively directing their team towards the work that must be completed. Agile project management uses a different technique. At the beginning of an Agile project a high level plan will be created by the project manager, which is based around basic requirements and a high level vision of the solution. From there on the final project is created iteratively and incrementally, with each increment building on the previous increments. Agile Project management also differs in the way that team members create the plans for each increment, rather than the project manager themselves.
CSS3 and HTML5 are exciting and powerful new tools for web designers which are changing the way we use the web today. As the mobile web becomes more prominent, and more browsers become compatible with the new features and tags, HTML5 and CSS3 are increasingly becoming an indispensable part of any web designers toolkit.
Back in January 2010 we wrote about why HTML5 is so important on this blog, and since then our HTML5 training course has been growing in popularity month by month. We found that delegates attending the course had just as many questions about CSS3, so we’re pleased to announce the launch of our new CSS3 Training Course here in at our training centre in Brighton, Sussex.
The new 1-day CSS3 Course is a sister programme to our 1-day HTML 5 Course
We recommend that these courses are taken together, and we offer a fantastic combined rate of £495 + vat for BOTH courses – that’s a saving of £115 + vat!
Our CSS3 and HTML5 courses are aimed at web designers and developers with existing knowledge of HTML4 and CSS2, so if you’re completely new to web design we’d strongly recommend attending our 2-day HTML training and 1-day CSS training courses first.
The new courses are proving very popular, so if you’re interested in attending, or need any more information call us on 01273 622272 or e-mail colin@siliconbeachtraining.co.uk
There are many different ways to draw maps - including photographic techniques and of course old fashioned hand drawing. However if have some Adobe Illustrator skills, using its vector drawing tools is a great option, as it means your maps will be fully scalable – you could blow it up to A0 size without losing any quality. Within Illustrator there are many different methods to gain a similar result. This tutorial introduces beginners to many useful techniques in a goal-focused way.
FANTASTIC Illustrator Time saving tips found – HERE
An Illustrator map will provide artwork which is razor sharp, scalable, supporting industry standard colours such as Pantone for print and HTML for web.
Illustrator Tutorial: Drawing a Scalable Map in Illustrator CS5
Output Formats
The final format you should export your document in is .EPS for print or GIF for the web. To insert the map into PowerPoint, you might export the map as a JPG at high to maximum quality.
Here is an example of our finished map
As you can see it does not pretend to have any cartographic or scale accuracy but it is very clear to read and can be simplified to clearly show the way to an office or point of interest, etc.
Tracing over a scan
If one wanted to preserve the accuracy of a previously drawn map, one would need to open a photographic version of another map (a screen grab or a scan), define the layer as a template layer, create a new layer for the new artwork and draw over the scan, keeping the curvature of the roads perfectly accurate. This will be the subject of a further lesson.
N.B. Scanning a map requires permission from the copyright holder.
There are many different ways to draw maps - including photographic techniques and of course old fashioned hand drawing. However if have some Adobe Illustrator skills, using its vector drawing tools is a great option, as it means your maps will be fully scalable – you could blow it up to A0 size without losing any quality. Within Illustrator there are many different methods to gain a similar result. This tutorial introduces beginners to many useful techniques in a goal-focused way.
