Wow, what a great group we had on the Accidental Technology Trainer webinar today! Thanks everyone for your great participation. I wished we had all day to keep sharing. At the end of the webinar I invited the participants to help me come up with a Top 10 list of training tips–generated from topics from the webinar and their own experiences. Well, they came up with 47 tips! If you missed the webinar, you can access the archived version (and the other past learning webinars) at: http://webjunction.org/do/Navigation?category=15543. On Friday, I’ll post the questions asked during the webinar, AND my answers. Do you have any additional tips to share or training questions you’d like answered? Just leave a comment on this post 
Thanks! Stephanie Gerding, author of The Accidental Technology Trainer
Top 10 Training Tips from Today:
- Respect your participants
- Use activities
- Provide info in short bites
- Letting them DO more
- Train the Trainers
- Provide candy
- Reminder that the beginning and the end are the most important — make more beginnings and endings
- Give them an experience
- Patience is important
- Team teach when possible
- Keeping their attention, by making it fun
- Remember smokers…they may need to break more often…
- Don’t overdo the content
- Learning is not consumption but creation
- I like someone’s suggestion of partnering people of different skill levels
- Providing time for them to work independently
- Have structured and independent work on computer class
- Action plans
- Snowball fight exercise…great fun idea
- Let your participants do more — you just give backup at a certain point
- Begin and end strong and memorable
- Hands on is key
- Give them something to create so they leave with an example
- Mixing up the activities – lecture + activities
- Use humor to help keep the atmosphere relaxed.
- Variety, variety, variety!
- Polls
- Be flexible
- Make the classes smaller rather than larger.
- Laughter is a great motivator
- Find out participants expectations at the outset
- Get feedback!
- Immediately useful take-aways, professional or personal
- Let participants know they can request breaks
- Peer tutor
- Give time for independent learning and reflection
- Drawing
- Have them paraphrase what you have said.
- Positive Reinforcement
- Whoever is doing the talking is doing the learning.
- Allow time for practice
- Info they can take with them
- Allow plenty of time
- If available, guest speakers break the monotony
- Don’t try to cover too much material
- Certificates at the end for participants
- Tell them what you’ll teach, teach, tell them what you taught