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Team Canvas – Get your team on the same page

This is a guest post by Alex Ivanov. Alex and his team developed a simple-to-use and very visual framework called Team Canvas for teambuilding and team alignment that is available freely to anyone under Creative Commons licence. We are grateful to Alex for having shared this great tool with the facilitators’ community, and also glad to announce that you can find Team Canvas resources on SessionLab both in the library and as a Featured Session - so you can seamlessly integrate it in your next session plan if you decide to do so. On average, only 46 out of 100 workgroups within organizations end up creating value for companies, and…

Real-time collaboration, printing options and more

In today’s update we are bringing you an important feature that makes SessionLab a truly collaborative process design tool. Plus now you can customise your printouts. Here are the detailed descriptions of the new goodies: Real-time collaboration and editor rights: When you invite a collaborator for your workshop or training plan now you can work together at the same time on your plan. To do that you can give the new editor role to your collaborators which will allow them to edit all the plan details. The viewer role still remains for cases when you want to give only view and commenting rights to collaborators. Furthermore, you can see the…

More than 100 exercises in our new library

We are thrilled to introduce the SessionLab library of facilitation techniques. You can already find more than 100 handpicked exercises collected from free public sources that you can search and filter by suggested number of participants, length of exercise and topics. Once you have found the exercise that fits, you can easily add it to your session plans. Do you have an exercise that you would like to share with the community of trainers? Feel free to add your favourite exercises to the library. Our vision is to build the best public repository of training or workshop content knowledge and your contribution is more than welcome! But that’s not all.…

5 most useful free online sources for training activities

Good icebreakers, exercises, and energisers are essential for an engaging and effective training. It takes careful consideration to choose the right activities for your training, the ones that will fit perfectly with your learning objectives, group size, the profile of participants, and the time available. UPDATE We have added 4 more links that you, our readers recommended, so be sure to check them out at the end of the article. You may already have your favourite exercises for different training topics, but as you deliver more and more training, you do not want to use the same ones over and over again. Refreshing your exercises is good for experimenting with…

Trainers and coaches in the Netherlands: Share your digital tools and technologies used in training

Inspired by a recent blog post on lack of digital tools to support trainers and in our effort to promote sharing of practices and tips between trainers, we are organizing a first trainers’ meet up in the Netherlands. You can find below the description of the event and register on facebook or meetup.com. How can technology get you into the flow when preparing and delivering your training? How can you save time when managing your training? Technology brings plenty of opportunities for different professions, but what about the training field? Come, see and share your experience on how digital technologies can help trainers in their work. We would like to present some…

Can online courses substitute classroom training in the corporate world?

You can sit in your cosy living room and learn JavaScript on Codeacademy or take Intro to Physics course on Udacity. You choose the topic, the time and the place – what’s there not to like? Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are great! They are great in the same way as books are great - fantastic collections of information that you can obtain whenever it’s suitable for you. However, they have been criticized a lot because of the low completion rate, which is around 10% on average. It might seem very low, though in many cases an online course is taken just to check out the new possibilities of online learning, without…

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Why trainers don’t share?

While working on SessionLab we’ve had the chance to interview many experienced soft skills trainers and educators from around the world. We were discussing individual working habits and the training industry in general to better understand trainers’ needs and desires. We received honest but sometimes puzzling replies to our questions. When we touched the topic of sharing materials, almost all interviewees told us they are reluctant to share training materials with each other. Someone even admitted: “I don’t even share my training materials with my co-trainers”. Some others said: "Maybe I would share my materials, but I don’t think others would” A board member of an international NGO told us…

Trainer styles – don’t judge a book by it’s cover

Have you ever judged a trainer’s performance by how do her slides or flipcharts look like? Are there nice pictures included, or triggering messages written on them? Such visuals are only providing a superficial perspective of a training, they are only the ‘tip of the iceberg’: the slides and flips are there only to complete the learning objectives, to help passing on the main message. The real learning happens by doing exercises or by providing a new, triggering perspective about the given training topic, whilst also providing the space for reflection. In our practice as trainers we have met with two distinct styles of running a training: either a trainer…

Training preparation – the start of a training workflow

The key to a good training is preparation. General rule of thumb says, when preparing a standard training you should spend around 3 hours of preparation for 1 hour of training. And this just covers the average case, while if you are new to a given training topic or the topic is rather complex, the time spent can increase drastically. But what is considered preparation? The preparation can include communicating to your clients and/or participants, drafting the training outline, arranging the logistics, creating/updating the training materials, etc. If we take the mentioned formula, for a one day training workshop a good preparation would take 2-3 days. Can all these elements…

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