VALUE OF TIME

Have you been to the bank?
Imagine there is a bank that credits your account each morning with 86,400 units. It carries over no balance from day to day. Every evening it deletes whatever part of the balance you failed to utilize during the day. What would you do? Draw out every cent, of course !!!!
Each of us has such a bank. Its name is TIME.
Every morning, it credits you with 86,400 seconds.
Every night it writes off, as lost, whatever of this you have failed to invest to good purpose.
It carries over no balance. It allows no overdraft.
Each day it opens a new account for you.
Each night it burns the remains of the day.
If you fail to use the day’s deposits, the loss is yours.
There is no going back.
There is no drawing against the “tomorrow”.
You must live in the “present” on today’s deposits.
Invest it so as to get from it the utmost in health, happiness, and success!
The clock is running.
Make the most of today.
To realize the value of ONE YEAR, ask a student who failed a grade.
To realize the value of ONE MONTH, ask a mother who gave birth to a pre-mature baby.
To realize the value of ONE WEEK, ask the editor of a weekly newspaper.
To realize the value of ONE HOUR, ask the lovers who are waiting to meet.
To realize the value of ONE MINUTE, ask a person who missed the train.
To realize the value of ONE SECOND, ask a person who just avoided an accident.
To realize the value of ONE MILLISECOND, ask the person who won a silver medal in the Olympics.
Treasure every moment that you have! And treasure it more because you shared it with someone special, special enough to spend your time.
And remember that time waits for no one.
Yesterday is HISTORY
Tomorrow is MYSTERY
Today is a GIFT
That’s why it’s called the ‘present’ !!
(This is a reproduction of an article shared from Lav Nigam)

Tips for trainers

• Confident on what you are talking about.
• You may not know all of the things on the topic you are presenting. When there are audiences asking question you may not know immediately, do not hesitate to tell them you will get back to them later and write it down on your notes.
• Your gesture and movements may affect your confidence. Stand still most of the time. Move when you want to approach audience. Hand gesture is important – do not put your hand in your pocket. Move them naturally to suit your speech.
• Do not put down all the words you are presenting on your notes. Instead when preparing, drop down only keywords onto your notes.
• Practice a lot. Practice in front of your friends and family and ask for feedback. Getting feedback is important because most of the time you may not spot anything yourself for improvement.
• If no friends or family members can help you, try to record to audio and even video and review yourself.
• After each presentation, hand out feedback sheets for audience to fill out. Usually you will receive some encouragements or constructive feedback for you to improve on.
• If there are questions you may able to answer in later part of the presentation, do not feel bad to tell them so. Better yet you can drop down the questions on the whiteboard or paper so you will remember to attend it when the time comes.
• Depends on the topic, try to add in some interactions with audience – asking questions, doing some small exercises etc.
• Use simple key points in presentation slides. Use drawings and illustrations on whiteboard.

Looking for Trainers on Java / Dot Net / SAP / PLSQL / IPHONE / ANDRIOD

We are vendor’s for many MNC’s for corporate training programs in India. Looking for freelance trainers on various domains for Inductions & Regular Training’s.

SAP – ABAP, BASIS, BW, CRM, FI/CO

JAVA, J2EE

DOTNET, SHAREPOINT

SQL/PLSQL, ORACLE

IPHONE, ANDROID

Our clients across India, mainly Cochin, Trivandrum, Chennai, Bangalore, Mysore, Hyderabad and Mumbai, sometime to NCR, Pune and Kolkatta.

send your profile to – vahab.sa@gmail.com

feel free to contact on 9500581272

Keeping users engaged...

So you got past the brain's crap filter, but now how do you keep their attention? How do you keep them involved? Take a lesson from game developers...

The more time someone spends with your "message", the greater the chances that they'll understand, retain, and be able to recall that message. So whether you're trying to help someon learn or get users to become more involved with your [product/service/website/music/cause/whatever], keeping the user engaged is crucial. But how?

By looking to places where keeping users engaged is not a problem--places where people want to stay involved. And that means looking to hobbies, sports, games... places where people are passionately addicted! Wouldn't we all love to have users that felt as passionately about our stuff as people feel for their favorite activities? Look at the characteristics of people who are passionate about something:

* They want to learn as much as they can about it.

* They want to connect with other users (user groups, conferences, clubs, online forums, etc.)

* They're willing to spend money to get the latest and greatest.

and sometimes most importantly...

* They talk about it to others. They can't help being envagelists.

So, the solution is simple:

Just make sure your product or service is as engaging as, say, snowboarding. Problem solved.

So what happens if your product is something just a tad lesscompelling... something like soap? Hugh at Gaping Void got a similar question when we wrote about how your brand makes the customer a more powerful entity. In a comment, someone asked, "How can garbage bags increase my personal power, or how could you even pitch them in such a way? Power over not having the bags rip and spill stuff all over me? Am I missing something? I do see where this could apply in the technical arena, or with cars, or suits, or whatever. I'm not seeing that the Hughtrain has universal marketing power."

I thought Hugh nailed the answer (or at least pointed to where the answer lies) with this:

"I think it is possible to be evangelical about a garbage bag.
But you need imagination and a sense of adventure."

So yes, it's easy to get people excited and involved when the thing you make, write about, etc. is something people can become passionate about. But what about soap, or canned chile, or garbage bags? What if your product is a spreadsheet? Sure it's easy for the guys who write fun tools for 3D animation to have passionate users, but what about the rest of us?

I can't speak for what Hugh meant, but we believe the answer (the imagination and sense of adventure) lies in creating an environment aroundyour product or service that uses what game designers know to create opportunities for flow states(Beth has a lot of great things to say about flow in this post). And there's a formula for that. It's not easy to do, but the formula itself is simple.

It's about getting the challenge level right, and creating opportunities for people to want to get to The Next Level. It's about giving people the "I Rule!" experience. But first, you have to get yourself out of the way, since it doesn't matter if users think YOU kick ass. It only matters that they think THEY kick ass.

Give users a way to kick ass.

And giving them brighter whites in their laundry doesn't count as kicking ass. Giving them slightly stronger garbage bags doesn't count. Tastier chile isn't enough. Nice-smelling soap doesn't do it either.

The true feeling of kicking ass comes from challenge. If you get the challenge level right, people enter that state of flow where they lose track of time because they're so fully engaged and involved. They feel good about what they were able to do and learn. It's a kind of natural high, and it's been directly linked with happiness. More flow==more happiness. And game developers (and the researchers who study flow states) know exactly what creates the right challenge level (although it isn't one size fits all--what's challenging to some will be too difficult or too easy for others, although there are ways around that with dynamically adjusting challenge levels... but that's a different topic).

Challenge depends on your skills and perception of the task. If you perceive the challenge is too difficult, the flow state vanishes because you become frustrated and ultimately give up. If you perceive the challenge as too easy, the payoffs aren't worth it, and you lose interest. You can't feel like you kick ass (I Rule!) if the thing you're doing is dead simple or meaningless. Games or activities (skiing, rock climbing, running, etc.) that keep people engaged have a challenge level that matches the user's skills and knowledge and most importantly--keeps increasing.

The key is to have a cycle where the user can keep building their skills to reach higher and higher levels! In other words, the challenge keeps building, but so do the user's skills and knowledge. The spiral is a continuous cycle of motivation/seduction followed by a period of intense activity toward a goal followed by REACHING that goal which then gives you more skills and knowledge (superpowers, tools, whatever) that let you achieve still higher levels... and on it goes. Five hours later you're at Level Eight, or skiing bigger moguls, or helping save the world.

Which brings us back to... garbage bags. Nobody in the history of the world has become passionate and engaged and challenged and in flow as a result of their choice of garbage bags. What's the Next Level of garbage bags? Twist ties instead of those built-in handles? White instead of black? Would anyone want to become expert at learning how the damn things are manufactured?

So, those who're trying to do this with garbage bags DO have a big extra challenge of their own, and they have to take extra steps. But as Hugh said, it's possible:

If there's nothing inherently engaging about your product or service, you need to create something around your product or service that is.

In other words, you have to make the engaging challenge about something somehow related to your product, and then you have to provide users with both the challenge AND the tools to keep increasing their skills and knowledge around that challenge area. This related thing does NOT necessarily have to be deeply spiritually fulfilling. You don't have to make everything a Big Important Cause. You don't have to come up with some change-the-world benefit by, say, associating your product or service with a save-the-whatever campaign. Think about it... video games keep people engaged, involved, learning, passionate, and on and on, without ever suggesting that you're directly fulfilling a higher purpose other than feeling more personally powerful at something. Achieving a flow state is fulfilling on a personal level because it creates an "I Rule/I Kick Ass" experience.And that's a Good Thing, whether it's attached to an important cause or not.Happiness is beneficial all by itself.

(And one can argue that in a systems thinking way, the more experiences like that a person has, the happier they are and ultimately--the more likely they are to contribute in the world. To pursue more adventures and challenges and who knows where it could lead...but that's not necessarily our job.)

So what might that be? Let's take something easier first... like coffee and soap. Coffee is easy because you could approach it in many different ways, but here are a couple:

* Provide a means to make people the coffee equivalent of wine sommeliers. Give them the tools, education, and challenges. Hold contests. Award certificates. Make snobs.

or

* Help people understand and become involved with the issues around Fair Trade. Coldplay's Chris Martin reaches hundreds of thousands of fans at his concerts, and usually the camera zooms in for a close-up of his hands on the keyboard, where he's written "Fair" on one and "Trade" on the other. Those thousands of fans leave the concert, go home, and google on "fair trade". A coffee producer who shows some fair trade awareness is good, but that's not enough to create passionate users. But a coffee roaster who, say, provides interesting and challenging ways for people to learn and more importantly--become involved in issues around fair trade might have a better chance at keeping users engaged.

What if your product is soap? Maybe something like:

* Teach people to make their own soaps, using natural ingredients. Hold contests where people can submit the most wild-looking soaps, or that use the most exotic and unusual ingredients. Give people a way to keep learning more and increasing their skills, and provide interesting payoffs (a reason to get to the Next Level).

* Similar to getting people involved in issues around fair trade, you could use hemp as a platform for skill, knowledge, and increasing challenge.

OK, back to garbage bags. I've been delaying this one because I really don't know what to do there. If it were my job to know, though, I'd spend a lot of effort on it. But I'll throw out some probably lame ideas as a starting point:

* The easiest way would be to make sure your garbage bags really ARE made in some environmentally supportive and interesting way, and provide the tools for people to increase their knowledge and skills in some interesting and challenging way. When I say interesting and challenging, I mean that you can't just put up a bunch of good info to read. They might read it, but then what? That's not enough for passion.

But let's assume you just don't have that luxury. Your bags are what they are, and you have no control over how they're made. Then what?

* If you can't make it about the product itself, make it about the packaging. Make the packaging a collectible work of art. Hire Hugh to put his cartoons on the inside of the boxes. Give people a way to learn just what the hell these things mean (or better yet--let people speculate on their own interpretations). Make sure you keep varying the cartoons with new boxes, so people have to keep buying them to see what's next. Make them exclusives, so you won't get them anywhere else.

The Chocolove company makes great chocolate bars, but so do a ton of other companies. But their packaging is truly special. They even put poems inside, and sometimes the poem is continued... in another type of bar! So you must keep buying the additional bars for your sweetie or you've left her/him with an unfinished poem.

* Provide games on your site. Really good, fun, interactive, high-score publishing games. Put clues to the games inside the boxes. Even if there's nothing at all in the box, if you can keep people on your site longer, they'll at least feel something related to your product.

* Let users design the boxes or even the bags. Or be campy and let people design the most obnoxious colors. Let people submit and post digital videos about their most bizarre/creative use of a trash bag. Teach people digital editing skills.

* Make really cool designer trash bins. Hire the best graphic designers for your bags and boxes, and offer free industrial design appreciation classes on your web site. Invite people to submit design ideas.

[UPDATE: John Mitchell commented with what I think is a much better suggestion: ." ...For example, think about the coffee example... It would take a
bold garbage bag company to actually talk about something meaningful like
actually reducing the amount of garbage."]

Of course all of this costs extra money, but you were probably going to have to find something to do with that advertising budget anyway, as ads continue to asymptotically approach total uselessness.

So if you think of what used to be your ad budget as going to your "help users kick ass and have an 'I Rule!' experience" campaign, it's just shifting the dollars to something way more useful and interesting for everyone. DISCLAIMER: this is all assuming that you already have a great product. A product that's at least as good as most of your competitors in terms of features and meeting the user's basic need for the product (in this case, hold trash). The things in this post are about rising above the noise when there are potentially many competing products that all do roughly the same thing for the user, and do it perfectly well. In other words, this is about what to do when there just isn't anything truly, deeply remarkable about the product itself.

None of this is easy, and of course I'm way oversimplifying everything here. That's why we're doing a whole book on it, and a three-hour tutorial about it at the upcoming ETech conference. Game designers work extraordinarily hard at getting the challenge levels right to keep people passionate about the games, and there's both an art and science to it. But that doesn't mean there aren't a bunch of practical, useful lessons we can learn from them.

Combine that with the lessons from cognitive scientists, psychologists, learning theorists, and entertainment (that's a whole different area I'll talk about in separate blogs), and there is a formula that almost anyone can apply. We've implemented some of this in our books, and our suggestion to new authors is to be extremely careful about the challenge level in your book.

A lot of first-time authors err dramatically in one direction or the other, either by trying to make it too difficult (so that they'll be perceived as smart and credible) or by making it too easy (in a misguided attempt to build the learner's self-esteem by making sure they have plenty of successes). Remember that too easy is just as unengaging as too difficult, in some cases more so. And simply being successful at something isn't enough to give you the I Kick Ass feeling either... I could be quite successful at a book of puzzles designed for third-graders, but I sure wouldn't reach a flow state and feel powerful.

Getting past the brain's crap filter

Getting past the brain's crap filter.

Your brain didn't come with a manual. And that sucks. Before we started the Head Firstseries, my partner Bert and I spent years studying ways to get learning into someone's brain, and the more we learned about the brain, the scarier it got. Because in so many ways, Your Brain Is Not Your Friend. It thinks you're still living in a cave, and it's sole job is survival of *you* as a human, and survival of the species. And what IT thinks is important and what YOU think are... really different.

Learning a programming language, it turns out, isn't high on the brain's list of Things To Keep You Alive. You know this, of course, because you remember the feeling -- you're in college, finals are tomorrow, and you're cramming to within an inch of your life. But you find yourself reading the same page, maybe the same paragraph, over and over and over and over barely able to stay awake. The illegal dose of caffeine isn't working. But then the hot babe from the next dorm walks by and suddenly you're alert, coherent, energetic even. Your brain was doing a, "Hmmmmm... calculus or survival of the species... damn... tough choice!".

So we've been spending a lot of time thinking about how important it is to get past The Gatekeeper (the brain's crap filter). If the brain is trying to save your life by keeping out the OBVIOUSLY unimportant thing like tomorrow's final, then how do you *trick* the brain into thinking the boring, dry thing is as important as that tiger that ate your ancestors?

All the studies seem to show that the center of everything is your amygdala--the almond-shaped organ (actually one on each side of your brain) that responds to things that might pose a threat or help you in some crucial way (and it does some of this without your conscious awareness). If your amygdala were programmable, you'd tell it to PLEASE treat a grade less than C on tomorrow's exam as LIFE-THREATENING, and could you PLEASE pay attention and record this to long-term storage. But you can't. Or can you?

There *is* a way to program it, kind of. The inputs that tell your brain that something is important and worth recording are *feelings*. You pay attention, and record, that which you feel, because the brain is paying attention to the chemistry associated with emotions. When you see a tiger (in the wild, not a zoo), your brain recognizes the threat and chemicals surge. Your brain says, "This is REALLY important -- so remember EVERYTHING." If you've been in a car wreck, you might know the phenomenon where you remember *everything* including the background details like which song was playing. Because your brain did a complete snapshot of the whole damn scene, knowing that this was a Very Bad Thing, but not knowing which parts were important--so it said, "What the hell -- I'll just save it all."

(And I'll talk in a later blog about why your brain reacts differently to the tiger in the zoo than in the wild... it's another really cool thing the neurobiologists have learned).

So the question again is, "how do you get the brain to treat, say, learning Java as though it were potentially life-saving?" We use this in our books to try to help people learn more quickly and more deeply, and with a more lasting memory (because we write on difficult technical subjects, and some of our books are certification exam guides as well, where memory is crucial).

But then we started to reailze that it applies to marketing as well...that the principles we use to increase attention and memory for the purposes of learning are the same principles you need to do what marketing guru Seth Godin says is essential today to break through--Be Remarkable. If you want people to talk about your product or service, it better be something really worth talking about. And today--with conventional advertising on its last legs--it's harder than ever to break through and be heard. Your users (or potential users) are so overwhelmed with messages (99% crap) trying to compete for their attention, that their brains are working overtime trying to keep those messages OUT. Remember, the brain wants to conserve bandwidth for the really important things... snakes, spiders, the fact that fire is hot, that socially you need to do a little better so that you have a hope in hell of sleeping with... that sort of thing. Their brains are NOT scanning for an FAQ of how your product is technically superior or logically a better choice or... pretty much anything related to the features of whatever it is you're trying to sell.

So, that was the first thing we learned about the brain--how the crap filter really works and how to get past it. In later blogs, I'll go into a lot more detail about that. But we learned a lot more about how to get--and keep-someone's attention, some of which I taught at UCLA Extension in the mid 90's at the IBM New Media Lab (and used during my days as a game developer). We've been doing a lot of experimenting including during my time as a Java trainer/evangelist for Sun Microsystems, and later with the creation of the new series for O'Reilly. The books have all become overnight bestsellers in their category, and since we *know* we aren't very good writers, we're pretty sure it's because we spoke to the reader's BRAIN, not the reader himself. We believe that talking to your customer/client/user/prospect matters less than WHICH part of them you talk to.

Bert and I are working on a tutorial we're presenting at ETech on Creating Passionate Users based on a session we presented at the last two Foo Camps, and we've finally decided to work out the details in a blog. We'll use this space to work on our "Creating Passionate Users" tutorial (and we're also doing a book on this), as well as talk about new things in the Head First series and an interactive learning site we're working on. Our passion is the brain, but we'll talk about the core elements we believe you need to inspire customers/users including lessons learned from cognitive science, psychology, video/computer game design, entertainment (Hollywood), and yes, even advertising still has something to say (although advertising no longer works well, it still holds the key to some of the things that DO work... more later).

So... we don't know where this will go, but we'll do our best to give as much as we've been getting from the contributions of so many others on the web.

Posted by Kathy 

Tips for Trainers and Teachers

Just because you've used lots of software doesn't mean you can write code. Just because you've been in lots of buildings doesn't mean you can be an architect. And just because you've logged a million frequent flyer miles doesn't mean you can fly a plane.
But if that's all ridiculously obvious, why do some people believe that just because they've taken classes, they can teach? (Or just because they've read lots of books, they can write one?) The problem isn't thinking that they can do it, the problem is thinking they can do it without having to learn, study, or practice.

I'm amazed (and more than a little disheartened) how many people believe that simply by virtue of their being skilled and knowledgeable in something, they're implicitly qualified to communicate, mentor, teach, or train that thing. It devalues the art of teaching to think that because you've been a student, you can teach well. That because you've experienced learning, you can craft a learning experience.

But with that out of the way, nobody needs a PhD (or in most cases -- any degree at all) in education or learning theory to be a good teacher. Just as there are plenty of great software developers and programmers without a CompSci degree. People can be self-taught, and do a fabulous job, for a fraction of the cost of a formal education, but they have to be motivated and they have to appreciate why it's important. The irony is that most people with this attitude would themselves be insulted if the tables were turned--iftheir students didn't think they needed to learn anything from them... that just going on instinct and winging it would be enough.
So this is my starter list for new trainers and teachers (I won't debate any distinctions between "teaching" and "training"--we're talking about one who designs and/or delivers learning experiences, so I don't care what you call it, what your subject is, or even how old your learners are. The fundamentals of how humans learn are pretty constant, even if the application of those fundamentals can look quite different on the surface).

There are two different lists here--Eleven Things to Know, and Ten Tips for New Trainers. This is for newbies, so I'm sure I have nothing new to say for those of you who are already experienced teachers/trainers.

---

Eleven Things to Know

1) Know the difference between "listening" and "learning".

Listening is passive. It is the lowest, least-efficient, least-effective form of learning. That means lectures are the lowest, least-efficient, least-effective form of learning. Listening alone requires very little brain effort on the learner's part (and that goes for reading lecture-like texts as well), so listening to learn is often like watching someone lift weights in order to get in shape.

2) Know how the brain makes decisions about what to pay attention to, and what to remember.

And here we are back to emotions again. Emotions provide the metadatafor a memory. They're the tags that determine how important this memory is, whether it's worth saving, and the bit depth (metaphorically) of the memory. People remember what they feel far more than what they hear or see that's emotionally empty.

3) Know how to apply what you learned in #2. In other words, know how to get your learners to feel.

I'll look at this in the Ten Tips list.

4) Know the wide variety of learning styles, and how to incorporate as many as possible into your learning experience.

And no, we're not talking about sorting learners into separate categories like "He's a Visual Learner while Jim is an Auditory learner.", or "He learns best through examples." Every sighted person is a "visual learner", and everyonelearns through examples. And through step-by-step instructions. And through high-level "forest" views. And through low-level "tree" views. Everyone learns top-down and bottom-up. Everyone learns from pictures, explanations, and examples. This doesn't mean that certain people don't have certain brain-style preferences, but the more styles you load into anylearning experience, the better the learning is for everyone--regardless of their individual preferences.
(And while you're at it, know that most adults today do not truly know their own learning styles, or even how to learn. The word "metacognition" doesn't appear in most US educational institutions.)

5) Know the fundamentals of current learning theory!

6) Know why--and how--good advertising works.

It'll help you figure out #3. Be sure you recognize why this matters.

7) Know why--and how--good stories work.

Consider the learner to be on a kind of hero's journey. If Frodo is your student, and you're Gandalf... learn as much as you can about storytelling and entertainment. Learn what screenwriters and novelists learn. Know what "show don't tell" really means, and understand how to apply it to learning.

Humans spent thousands upon thousands of years developing/evolving the ability to learn through stories. Our brains are tuned for it. Our brains arenot tuned for sitting in a classroom listening passively to a lecture of facts, or reading pages of text facts. Somehow we manage to learn in spite of the poor learning delivery most of us get in traditional schools and training programs (and books).

8) Know a little something about "the Socratic method". Know why it's far more important that you ask the good questions rather than supply all the answers.

9) Know why people often learn more from seeing the wrongthing than they do from seeing the right thing. Know why the brain spends far less time processing things that meet expectations, than it does on things that don't.

10) Know why it's just as important to study and keep up yourteaching skills as it is to keep up your other professional skills. Yes there ARE professional organizations for trainers, with conferences, journals, and online discussions.

11) Know why using overhead slides to deliver a classroom learning experience can--sometimes (often)--be the worst thing you can do.

(Although yes, in many cases using slides for some select pieces of a course are important, beneficial, and crucial. What we're dissing is the practice where the entire class, start to finish, is driven around some kind of slides or presentation.)

12) Know how -- and why -- good games can keep people involved and engaged for hours. Learn how to develop activities that lead to a Flow State.

Ten Tips for New Trainers

1) Keep lecture to the absolute minimum.

There is nearly (but not always) something better than lecture, if learning is the goal. If your class involves a combination of lecture and labs, then if you're short on time--always cut the lecture, not the exercises! (Unfortunately, this is the opposite of what most trainers do.)

2) It is almost always far more important that your learners nailfewer subjects than be "exposed" to a wider range of subjects.

In most cases, it's far more important that your students leave able to DO something with their new knowledge and skills, than that they leave simply KNOWING more. Most classroom-based instruction can bedramatically improved by reducing the amount of content!. Give them the skills to be able to continue learning on their own, rather than trying to shove more content down their throats.

If your students leave feeling like they truly learned -- like they seriously kick ass because they can actually do something useful and interesting, they'll forgive you (and usually thank you) for not "covering all the material". The trainers that get cricism for not covering enough topics or "finishing the course topics" are the ones who didn't deliver a good experience with what they did cover.

3) For classroom trainers, the greatest challenge you have is managing multiple skill and knowledge levels in the same classroom! Be prepared to deal with it.

The worst thing you can do is simply pick a specific (and usually narrow) skill/knowledge level and teach to that, ignoring the unique needs of those who are slower or more advanced. And don't use the excuse that "if they don't have the prereqs, they shouldn't be here." Even among those who meet the formal prereq requirements, you can have drastically different levels.Especially if the teacher who delivered those prereq courses was in the "covering the material" mode. Sure, your students may have been "exposed" to the prereq material, but just because they heard it or read it does not mean they remember it now, or that they ever really "got it."

Techniques for dealing with multiple levels:

* Be sure you KNOW what you've got. Find out before the class, if you can, by speaking with the students or at least exchanging emails. If you don't have access to students prior to the class, then learn as much as you can during introductions!

* Acknowledge the different levels right up front. The more advanced students are far more likely to get pissed off when they think you don't evenrealize or appreciate their level. By acknowledging it, you recognize their abilities and set the stage for having them act as mentors to the others.

* Have multiple versions of exercises! Have a "base" level of lab activities that everyone must complete, but have additional interesting, challenging options so that your advanced people aren't growing bored or frustrated waiting for the slower people to finish their exercises.

* For slower people, include graduated hint sheets for exercises. (More on that in the next point.)

4) Work hard to get everyone to complete the lab exercises, but NEVER give out the solutions in advance!

This is closely related to #3, because the most likely reason trainers don't have all students finishing labs is because there are some slower learners (and I don't mean "dumber", but simply less knowledgeable or experienced in the topic than the other students, or they just have a learning style that requires more time).

Be sure every students has been successful at the exercises! And if you give them the solution in advance, you've robbed them of the chance to seriously kick ass by working through it even when things get difficult. On the other hand, you don't want students to become completely stuck and frustrated, so use something like the technique below:

Using graduated hints can work wonders. Prepare three or more levels of hint sheets for the exercises, with each level more explicit than the last. The first level can offer vague suggestions, the second can be a little more focused, and the third can be fairly explicit. Students should be allowed to use these at their discretion, so it's best if you don't force the students to go to you for each new level. Make them available, but make it clear that it's important they turn to them only after [insert number of minutes relevant to your exercise].

After teaching literally thousands of programming and other courses, I can say with certainty that the vast majority of your students will NOT simply go to the most explicit hints right off. But this is conditional... I'm assuming that the exercise is relevant and interesting and challenging without being ridiculously advanced or clearly takes more time to complete than you're able or willing to allow for the exercise. If your exercises suck, for whatever reason, then hint sheets won't fix it.

5) Do group exercises whenever possible, no matter what you've heard.

I've heard every excuse, "Adults don't like to do group exercises." or "Professional developers don't like to do group exercises." or "People don't like to do group exercises when they're paying big bucks to be here." or "People from outside the US don't like to do group exercises... ". They're all bulls***. There is a huge social component to learning, regardless of how much we try to eliminate it in the classroom. There's a way to do interactive group exercises that works surprisingly well, and is usually quite easy.

A simple formula for group exercises

* Use groups of no more than 3 to 5. Try to go above 2, but after 5 you'll end up with some people hanging back. With 3-4 people, everyone feels more obligated to participate and be involved.

* When you assign an exercise (like, say, a two-page diagram of an enterprise architecture that they must label and explain), have each person START by working individually for a couple of minutes, THEN get them into their groups (be sure that they know who their group is BEFORE they start any work on the exercise).

* Eavesdrop on the groups and comment or just make sure they're on the right track. Drop hints or give pointers if they're veering into an unproductive approach.

* After a certain number of minutes, give a heads-up warning "60 seconds justify..." so they can finish up.

* Be certain that someone in each group has the responsibility to record what the group comes up with. One person should be the designated spokesperson.

* After the exercise is done, keep the people in their groups and query each group about their answers, or any issues/thoughts they had while doing it.

Note: the first few times you do this in any new classroom, students might be quiet or skeptical about doing it, but after the first two or three, they'll have a hard time imagining how you could do it any other way.

6) Designing exercises

The best execises include an element of surprise and failure. The worst exercises are those where you spend 45 minutes explaining exactly how something works, and then have them duplicate everything you just said. Yes, that does provide practice, but it's weak. If you design an exercise that produces unexpected results... something that intuitively feels like it should work, but then does something different or wrong -- they'll remember that FAR more than they'll remember the, "yes, it did just what she said it would do" experience.

Note that paper and pencil exercises are GREAT. Even if your teaching programming or any other topic that involves doing. In our books, for example, we have simple "magnetic poetry" code exercises that don't involve everyone having to go to the computer. You can design even simple multiple-choice quizzes, although the more sophisticated the better. Be creative with creating workbook style exercises when you're teaching challenging subjects. In a programming class, for example, I'll have paper exercises (that they do both individually and in a group) that involve everything from, "fill in the rest of this class diagram with what you think should be there" to "fill in each empty method on this sheet with bullet points or pseudo code for what you think should happen there."

Depending on the classroom, you could even have an exercise that involves one group "teaching" something to another group. Assign group A to figure out the File API, for example, while group B has to research how and why the Serialization mechanism works the way it does in the lab you just did...

As hokey as they are, sometimes game-show style quizzes can still be fun. Especially when there's a set of topics that DO require boring, rote memorization. When they have to burn in certain key facts... you can liven it up and make it a little less painful.

The exercises in our Head First books (especially HF Java) are examples of paper execises we do in classrooms, that are separate from hands-on programming "lab" exercises.

The best form of longer lab exercises get learners in the flow state! This is where your game design studies can really come in handy. Remember, the flow state comes from activities that are both challenging but perceived as do-able. Get the challenge level right! Having multiple levels of hints means that a single exercise can work for a wider range of skill and knowledge levels without being too easy or too hard -- both of which will prevent the flow state.

Exercises should feel relevant! They should not feel like busy work orstrictly practice (although for some kinds of learning, extra practice is exactly what you need, but in most cases -- you're looking to increase understanding and memory rather than simply practice a physical skill).

If students don't get the point of the exercise, you're screwed. It's up to you to either have an exercise where the point is dead-obvious, or that you can make a case for. The exercise does NOT need to be "real world" in the sense of the actual, complex world you live in. It should, however, reflect a simplified virtual world with its own set of rules. In a learning experience, you're usually trying to help them learn/get/remember only a single concept at a time. Way too many lab exercises that attempt to be "real world" have so much cognitive overhead that the real point you're trying to reinforce is lost.

7) Leave your ego at the door. This is not about you.

Your learners do NOT care about how much you know, how smart you are, or what you've done. Aside from a baseline level of credibility, it's far more important that you care about how smart THEY are, what THEY know (and will know, thanks to this learning experience) and what THEY have done. I'm amazed (and horrified) by how many instructors don't ever seem to get to know anything about their students. You should know far more about them than they know about you.

At the beginning of class, you do NOT need to establish credibility. You nearly always have a certain amount of credibility in the bank, even if they've never heard of you. You can LOSE that credibility by doing things like lying (answering a question that you really aren't certain about, without admitting that you're not sure), or telling them you really DON'T know what you're doing. But you'll usually hurt the class if you spend time talking about how great YOU are.

The best way to let them know what you've done is in the context of a question someone asks, where you simply say, "Well here's how I solved that on an accounts database I was working on at...." But even better if you say something like, "Well here's how one of my clients/students/wo-workers solved it..."

8) Have a Quick Start and a Big Finish.

Get them doing something interesting -- even if it's just a group discussion -- very early. Don't bog them down with YOUR long introduction, the history of the topic, etc. The faster they're engaged, the better.

Don't let the class fizzle out at the end. Try to end on a high. It's like the movies... where they usually put the best song at the very end, during the closing credits... because this often determines the feeling you leave with. Ask yourself, "what were my students feeling when they justify?" Too often, the answer to that is, "overwhelmed, and stupid for not keeping up". And usually, the fault is in a course that tried to do too much. That tried to cover(whatever the hell that means) too much.

9) Try never to talk more than 10-15 minutes without doing something interactive. And saying, "Any questions?" does notcount as interaction!

Whether it's a group exercise, a lab, or at least an individual paper and pencil exercise of some sort... get them doing rather than listening. But be sure that the interaction isn't perceived as a waste of time, either.

10) Don't assume that just because you said it, they got it. And don't assume that just because you said it five minutes ago, they remember it now.

In other words, don't be afraid to be redundant. That doesn't meanrepeating the same material over and over... but it often takes between 3 to 5 repeated exposures to something before the brain will remember it, so take the extra time to reinforce earlier topics in the context of the new things you're talking about. Great teachers know how to slip in the redundancy in an almost stealth way... where the thing is looked at again but from a different angle. It's up to you to keep it interesting and lively.

11) If you're not passionate, don't expect any energy from your learners.

That doesn't mean being an annoying cheerleader. Be honest, be authentic, but be passionate. It's your job as a trainer to find ways to keep yourself motivated. A lot of teachers/trainers feel it isn't their job to motivate the students. But that's ridiculous. Even the most motivated person in the world still finds it hard to stay motivated on each and every topic... especially when it gets tough. Think about how many technical books you've sat down to read on topics you were extremely interested in, but then couldn't find a way to keep yourself reading. Motivation for the overall topic and motivation for the individual thing being learned are completely different. You're there to supply the motivation for the individual things you're trying to help them learn.

Your passion will keep them awake. Your passion will be infectious. It's up to you to figure out how to stay passionate, or quit teaching until you get it back.

And finally, don't think of yourself as a teacher or trainer... since that puts the focus on what YOU do. Remember:

It's not about what YOU do... it's about how your learners feel about what THEY can do as a result of the learning experience you created and helped to deliver.

Rather than think of yourself as a teacher or trainer, try getting used to thinking of yourself as "a person who creates learning experiences... a person who helps others learn." In other words, put a lot more emphasis on the learning and a lot less emphasis on the teaching.

Looking for Trainers on Java / Dot Net / SAP / PLSQL / IPHONE / ANDRIOD

We are vendor’s for many MNC’s for corporate training programs in India. Looking for freelance trainers on various domains for Inductions & Regular Training’s.

SAP – ABAP, BASIS, BW, CRM, FI/CO
JAVA, J2EE

DOTNET, SHAREPOINT

SQL/PLSQL, ORACLE

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Our clients across India, mainly Cochin, Trivandrum, Chennai, Bangalore, Mysore, Hyderabad and Mumbai, sometime to NCR, Pune and Kolkatta.

send your profile to – vahab.sa@gmail.com

feel free to contact on 9500581272

Tips for trainers

• Confident on what you are talking about.
• You may not know all of the things on the topic you are presenting. When there are audiences asking question you may not know immediately, do not hesitate to tell them you will get back to them later and write it down on your notes.
• Your gesture and movements may affect your confidence. Stand still most of the time. Move when you want to approach audience. Hand gesture is important – do not put your hand in your pocket. Move them naturally to suit your speech.
• Do not put down all the words you are presenting on your notes. Instead when preparing, drop down only keywords onto your notes.
• Practice a lot. Practice in front of your friends and family and ask for feedback. Getting feedback is important because most of the time you may not spot anything yourself for improvement.
• If no friends or family members can help you, try to record to audio and even video and review yourself.
• After each presentation, hand out feedback sheets for audience to fill out. Usually you will receive some encouragements or constructive feedback for you to improve on.
• If there are questions you may able to answer in later part of the presentation, do not feel bad to tell them so. Better yet you can drop down the questions on the whiteboard or paper so you will remember to attend it when the time comes.
• Depends on the topic, try to add in some interactions with audience – asking questions, doing some small exercises etc.
• Use simple key points in presentation slides. Use drawings and illustrations on whiteboard.

Tips to Become a Successful Corporate Trainer

Sharing experience by Microsoft Certified Trainer since 2004 and a Visual Studio Team System(VSTS) MVP since 2009. I have been conducting corporate trainings since 2001 and so far conducted more than 300 corporate trainings on technologies like .NET, ASP.NET, Networking, Microsoft Solution Framework and for the last few years on Visual Studio – Application Lifecycle Management. Geographically most of these trainings have been in India, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Malaysia too. I have conducted trainings from Small and Medium software development firms to Large system integrators. The best thing about these trainings that I take pride in is the rate of success of the trainings that I have conducted. Over 98% of the trainings that I have conducted are successful with excellent or above average feedbacks from participants. Today I am going to open my thoughts about why I think that I have been able to maintain such a high rate of success for so many years. I am making a few suggestions and sharing a few guidelines that you may think of implementing. I implement all of them, always.

1. Before any session, prepare yourself well to deliver the session - Think that the session is going to be the best on that subject in the world. Although you may get a chance to deliver a similar session elsewhere, the participants who are attending that session have only one chance to learn that technology, and that is the session that you are going to deliver. Do not waste their only chance. They are the customers who have given you a contract, so it is your responsibility to provide the satisfaction and delight to the participants. At the end of the training, they should feel comfortable about the technology that you trained them on. In a way you should sell the advantages of that technology to the participants and make them aware of its shortfalls.

2. Be aware of the cutting edge technology in your chosen subject - Although it may seem unnecessary to be aware of more than what is required to deliver a session, I believe that maintaining a lead in the awareness about the latest developments happening in the subject that you are delivering, earns a respect of the participants. Spend sufficient time to be aware of allied technologies, competing technologies and their terminologies. When I deliver a session on latest development in Visual Studio – ALM, I keep myself aware about IBM Jazz, Subversion, BugZilla etc. so that I can discuss about them with participants who may probably use them.

3. Know about the participants - Not all the participants and organizations are same. If you know about the participants that you are going to face in the session, then you can prepare yourself to address their issues and concerns. If you can take examples from their domain or past projects, it increases the enthusiasm amongst the participants. Be careful not to delve too deep as that could disturb the schedule. If you do not get any idea of participants or the organization that they work for and their domain, then make 25% more preparation than you usually expect.

4. Prepare for every session - After you deliver a subject a few times, certain amount of complacency sets in. You tend to take things for granted and go to the session without preparation. This can be a fatal mistake since every session is a different session and you should prepare for the same subject with a different set of participant perspectives.

5. Set expectation about the session, right in the beginning. Every participant has some expectation from the training that they are going to attend. It is not always possible to meet those expectations. What is possible is to mould those expectations at the beginning of the session so that they are in line with what you have in scope. With these modified expectations, now the acceptance of your session will be much better.

6. Be passionate about the session delivery and visibly show that passion - Participants appreciate when they see you passionate about the technology that is being trained and explained to them. You should not only be passionate about your chosen subject but also about explaining the nuances of that and also explicitly show that you are passionate. There is nothing wrong about a little stage acting and drama in the class, it makes the session lively and you get attention of most of the participants. At the same time be frank about ignorance about some topic if you have not prepared that topic. Most of the participants understand that you are also a human being and need not always know everything under the sun about a subject. If some participants enter into the argument about the way tools or technology behave then make them aware that you are only a trainer of that tool or technology. Neither have you designed or created that tool or technology nor are you trying to sell it to them. You need not defend that tool or technology at the cost of losing your poise.

7. Involve the participants - Corporate training is not like school or a tuition. It should be as participative as possible to make it interesting to the participants. Ask questions, tell stories and ask them to complete those, ask their opinion about a particular topic where they may seem to have some experience and if nothing else is possible, chat with them once in a while to keep them focused towards you. Pay attention to them. Most of the participants give non-verbal signals of satisfaction, dissatisfaction, boredom, excitement etc. Keep observing those signals and remain agile enough to modify your delivery based upon those observations.

8. Be predictable about what you speak most of the times - Maintain timeline of delivery. Explain some feature in part, give them time to think further about that feature by explaining some minor point and then tell participants what they expect. It is a human tendency that they accept words easily which they expect. If they can predict what you are about to say and then if you say those words they are satisfied with themselves and that reflects in their acceptance of you.

9. Be punctual about all activities - Whether it is arriving for session, giving a break, providing time for labs etc. Do not delay anything that you ‘can’ do on time. If a participant starts a detailed discussion on a particular topic that may take a long time, then move that discussion for off-line.

10. Undertake the assignment only when -

a. You are fully comfortable about the subject. Half cooked knowledge is not going to give satisfaction to participants.

b. You are fully fit. Do not jeopardize the entire assignment by taking it up when you are not fit enough to deliver the training. One of the reasons that you may not be fit is undertaking too many assignments in a short span. Avoid overexposing yourself to remain fit.

c. Know your environment well. If you are going to take hands-on labs but do not know the kind of hardware and software that is available in the labs, it is better to go early and familiarize yourself of that environment before the session starts.

d. You are mentally at peace with yourself, your family and the organization that you work for. If you find that difficult to achieve, learn to meditate.