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IconLogic and the eLearning Brothers have joined forces to bring you the very best in training and eLearning assets.

Beginning today, when you complete any of the following IconLogic classes you will receive a free one-year paid subscription to the eLearning Brothers eLearning Templates (a $499 value).

• Adobe Captivate Beginner
• Adobe Captivate Advanced
• Articulate Storyline Beginner
• Articulate Storyline Advanced

Free Sample Packs

Complete any of IconLogic's 3-hour eLearning mini courses and you'll receive a free sample pack of eLearning assets from the eLearning Brothers.

Live, online, and 100% interactive! 3-hours of content… and just $79!

Whether you are in the market for a new job, just starting your career, or are a well-established professional, LinkedIn is one of the most important tools for establishing your online presence. Good practices from the start help you to “brand” yourself & determine what kind of message you want to offer about yourself to the world.

During this class, you will learn to use the most powerful features of LinkedIn to get your profile noticed. You will discover best practices for creating an online presence, learn about privacy and other settings, get tips on networking and protecting your online reputation, and more.

The class will use a series of worksheets (provided) for exercises in gathering keywords, writing your summary, and listing your skills and strengths. We’ll do some fun group exercises to get everyone thinking of how to improve their own profile.

Who Should Attend?

• High school and college students
• Persons who are seeking employment
• Job seekers who are re-entering the workforce
• Seasoned professionals who need to learn the right way to establish online presence

More information.

Where: Adobe Headquarters, McLean VA.
When: November 12, 7 p.m. – 9 p.m., Eastern
Cost: Free!

Online via Adobe Connect: http://experts.adobeconnect.com/mdva/

Tonight's Agenda…

From Flying Bullets to Instructional Animations with Diane Elkins

Flying bullets were the height of fashion … in 1997. And yet still they persist in some corporate learning, both in the classroom and online. So why is this much-maligned presentation technique still popular?

Come to this free event and join Diane Elkins, Artisan E-Learning, as she presents a case study of how an American Red Cross Disaster Services course moved from slides and slides of bullets to useful, engaging instructional animations. You’ll look at before-and-after slides that illustrate the transformation from text bullets to instructional animations. But more importantly, you’ll learn about some of the specific design techniques used in that transformation—techniques you can use yourself, even if you aren’t a graphic artist. Come see this DemoFest 2012 award-winning course!

In this session, you will learn:

• What the research says about using text, graphics, and animations

• How to analyze text-based content and determine the best visual approach

• When and how to apply instructional animations

• Common design pitfalls to avoid

Plus…

Networking & food! Come join us!

***

Diane Elkins leads Artisan E-Learning, a custom eLearning development company specializing in the use of rapid-development tools. Diane has been in the eLearning industry since 2001, speaks regularly at national conferences about eLearning, and is co-author of the popular E-Learning Uncovered book series.

Please park in the Adobe McLean parking garage. We will be on the fifth floor in room 500. Adobe will validate your parking there.

That heat you felt as you walked past that room was our own  Jennie Ruby catching everyone ablaze with her enthusiastic session at the Online Learning Conference yesterday.

It was a jammed-pack room and Jennie didn't disappoint as she instructed attendees on the best practices for creating and presenting voiceover audio for eLearning.

Last night the Adobe eLearning User Group: DC, Maryland, and Virginia met at the Adobe offices in McLean, VA (and online for those folks that couldn't join in person).

During the meeting, the group was treated to an awesome presentation on creating eLearning Voiceover Scripts by Jennie Ruby. And while the Connect session gave us fits (it kept crashing poor Jennie's computer every time she tried to screen share), everyone who attended virtually was still able to hear Jennie's talk. (Special thanks to Lori Smith for serving as the go-between for the onsite audience and the virtual audience.)

If you attended (or listed to the audio portion of the presentation), you learned 10 valuable tips for create effective voiceover scripts including who's talking, who's listening, the value of consistent naming of screen objects, and effective use a style guides and script templates.

Of course, the pizza was awesome too (especially that vegan, gluten-free one… what was that one again AJ?).

Our next meeting is early November. Stay tuned to our Meetup page for more information on that. If you'd like to speak at one of our sessions, please let me know (we're always looking for sponsors as well).

by AJ George 

Have you ever copied and pasted something into a Word document (such as from a pdf) and ended up with line breaks in crazy places? Or maybe every single word shows up on a separate line? Going in and manually fixing all of those line breaks can be a real headache. If you find yourself in such a pickle, use this quick fix to eliminate those hard line breaks.

1. Highlight the pasted text from which you would like to remove line breaks.
2. In MS Word 2010, press [Ctrl] [H] to access the Replace tool.
3. In the Find what field type ^p.
4. In the Replace with field press the spacebar once on your keyboard.
5. Click the Replace All button.
6. When asked if you'd like to perform the Find and Replace task for the rest of the document, click No.

This same process can be applied to MS PowerPoint and Outlook 2010.

Note: Check for any words that were hyphenated and broken in the middle by a line break and remove the hyphens before using this trick. Failing to do so will leave you with a space and a hyphen in the middle of the word. 

***

by AJ George 

When I need to create screen captures on my Macintosh, I turn to Skitch. Skitch is simple to use, it's stable, and, heck, I even like the way the app looks. I love it. 

When I heard that a new version of Skitch was available, I immediately upgraded. I soon regretted my decision. After starting the new Skitch, I was now required to have an Evernote account to use Skitch. The simple functionality I once enjoyed was gone. I wanted my old Skitch back. However, to add insult to injury, going back to the old version wasn't possible. I did not have the old Skitch installer, and there was no way to revert back to a previous version of Skitch from within the app. 

Thankfully, I use Time Machine to back up my Macintosh every hour. (Time Machine is the built-in backup feature that works with the Mac and an external drive.) When my Mac got sick and died earlier this year, I was able to use my Time Machine to totally rebuild my old system onto the new Macintosh.

I could have wiped my Macintosh clean and used the Time Machine to put it back to the way it was before I installed the new Skitch. However, I have recently learned that my Time Machine can turn back time on just one application. Assuming you're using the Time Machine feature (and I urge you to take advantage of it), here's how to roll back a single application:

1. From your Mac's dock, open the Finder.
2. Select Applications.
3. Select the offending app from the Applications list.
4. With the offending app selected, right-click the time machine icon from the menu bar at the top right of your screen.
     
5. Select Enter Time Machine from the drop-down menu.
6. From the timeline at the right, select a time you'd like to restore to.
7. Click Restore.

Your app will revert back to the way it was before you updated it. In the instance of my screen-grabber, I am greatly relieved to have my much-loved older version of Skitch back in place.   

***

by AJ George 

Just like everyone else, at IconLogic we receive our fair share of spam emails and fraud attempts. Usually they're easy to snuff out. But training companies beware: scammers are getting more resourceful. Last week we received a paid order for one of our classes. The next morning we received the following email (presented as it was received, except for the account number):

This is to notify you to cancel Our attendance at the program due to some circumstances beyond my control. I recently lost my husband to complication during surgery, He was hit by bullet while we were robbed in our home in Illinois, and this have caused a devastating effect on my psychic as I'm seriously preparing for the funeral.Kindly issue a refund credit to my company corporate visa card account XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-4272, Exp: 05/14 and CVV:XXX on my authorization.

The email itself sounded fishy to me. The poor grammar and typos definitely sent up a red flag. And even without looking into this to see if was, in fact, a scam, I would have never refunded another card all willy-nilly. But I did look into it, and found that similar scams are cropping up amongst nonprofits and educational institutions. In those cases, similar emails to the one above are sent, but instead of cancelling a class order, the scammers request to be refunded the amount of a large donation that was made in error or to cancel a conference registration. The trick with all of the above, however, is that they'd like to be refunded to a different account than was used for the original transaction. 

There were also a couple other tell-tale signs of fraud in this case. We tried to call the number provided with the class registration, but were told that we had the wrong number. The email address (although I won't list it here), was similar to those that are included with spam posts on blogs. Additionally, despite the email stating the "customer" lived in Illinois, the billing and shipping addresses were listed as California.

Have you received similar fraud attempts? Share your stories below and pass this article along to prevent these scammers' most recent creative attempts from being successful.