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.
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.
If you’re a regular visitor to this blog, you’ll know that we’ve been championing the use of Social Media in business marketing for a LONG time! We were among the first in the UK to offer a Social Media Training course, and we’ve written extensively about how important Social Media is in the modern marketplace right here!
Social Media is important for 2 reasons -well, it’s actually important for LOADS of reasons, but my two for today are:
It provides a platform for businesses to speak directly to your customers
It’s really good for SEO
Most people agree on number 1. Many people are still quite sceptical about number 2, and argue that ‘traditional SEO’ – i.e. link building, on page optimisation etc… still have more effect than Social Media.
However – it’s hard to ignore the fact that the major search engines are investing a lot of time and money in Social, and that their algorithms appear to be placing more emphasis on Social Media in their SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages)
However a lot of people won’t believe that Social Media has an effect on SEO without seeing clear proof. It was therefore refreshing to see at the recent BrightonSEO conference, a presentation by Paul Chaloner of Fresh Egg which summarised some tests he had done using Twitter providing exactly that. He showed that using Twitter alone, without any other promotion, can push your pages up the rankings (and even on to the front page). Paul called this TweetSERPing. A video and summary of the presentation are below…
Using Twitter for SEO – #BrightonSEO Video
What is TweetSERPing?
Very simply – TweetSERPing is using Twitter to improve web ranking (and is a term I believe invented for this presentation – lets see if it catches on!) Paul’s presentation described two tests that he ran on separate blog posts, where he used TweetSERPing exclusively to improve ranking. Check out the video… a summary is below.
Paul started by asserting that EVERYTHING is a social network. Whenever we interact with anyone, whether that be online, in the pub, at the office, wherever – we are ‘social networking’. Social Media marketing, whilst using modern technology, is just an extension of things that have been going on for years (people recommending things to each other!).
The navigation bar is an important consideration for your website, both in terms of design and usability. Visitors use it constantly to get to the different parts of your site, so if it is poorly designed or difficult to use your visitors may not enjoy using your site and be reluctant to return.
UPDATE: Since we wrote this post, LOADS more tutorials have hit the web! Check out our NEW 10 BEST jQuery Navigation Bar Tutorials post in our Free Resource section.
However a really well designed dynamic menu that’s easy to use can make your site stand out from the crowd. One of the most popular ways of creating animated navigation bars used to be Flash - however with the popularity of iPhones and iPads now (which don’t support Flash) no-one in their right mind would make their main navigation elements in Flash as it would render their site unusable on any device running iOS!
Read more about designing for mobile devices in our post about Responsive Web Designand the technologies it uses.
So – is this the end for animated navigation bars? Well – NO!
Enter jQuery and CSS! You can now create animated jQuery navigation bars that will display just fine on iOS. In some cases the full animated functionality might not work on mobile devices, but its still better than Flash which won’t display at all!
In this post we’ve collected together a range of tutorials that show how to create animated jQuery navigation bars (with our thoughts on each one!)
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.
