Weekly Review - Sept 15-19 - Apple, TED-Ed, LitmosAuthor, TwitterChats

Apple, Apple, Joy, Joy... continues

The big news this week is still the new Apple product announcements.  I wrote a followup blog post about the impressive focus Apple puts on it's events and perhaps we should put the same amount of effort into our training events. While event-based learning is still belittled by some, I am firm believer in the important of training events...even classroom style events.

Did you download the new iOS8? Did you pre-order an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus? I'm in for a 6 Plus, and as nervous as I am excited about it. Will I hate the size? Will battery life stink? Will it fit in my pocket? What kind of accessories should I get to go along with it? Keyboard with stand?

Do You Like TED-Ed?

I also found another great video on TED-Ed and felt the need to ask if we should be using TED-Ed as a model for corporate training.  It's a simple tool, with customization features that give anyone the ability to create a lesson based on these very impressive videos. If you haven't checked it out, you should.

LitmosAuthor FTW!

And if you didn't know about the LitmosAuthor tool, the Product Manager wrote a great post about the impressive cost savings being seen with it's use.  You can check that post out here. I know a developer that's been a fan for a long time, and I didn't find out he was until I started working for Litmos. There are a lot of authoring tools to choose from, but LitmosAuthor has a couple aces you can't beat with other tools.  Check it out.

New CallidusCloud Acquisition

This week brought some fun news for the CallidusCloud team.  For those of you that may not know, CallidusCloud is the parent company of Litmos. Anyways... they acquired Clicktools this week.  You can read the press release here.

More Twitter Chat Fun

Another Fireside #lrnchat LIVE is in the can. Thanks to Will Constantine for joining me so I didn't have to do it alone. It's an hour long and so you probably don't want to just sit and watch.  At this point it's still an experiment.  I'm changing things weekly and just learning as I go.  At some point I think I'll edit these down to just the good parts and save you all from the long moments of silence.  It is, after all, based on a twitter chat. And so at times we're just following the Q&A stream.



Today begins another Twitter chat for L&D professionals called #Guildchat. And so that really gets me thinking about these Hangouts on Air. I'm really enjoying them and it's a great way to enhance a twitter chat.  So instead of coming up with a new name for each one, I think I will start doing this for all the twitter chats I attend and just brand the experience HangChats. What do you think?

Hope you all had a great week! Enjoy your weekend!