Hello all!

Ok, I lied last month when I wrote that Spring was just around the corner. Actually, I just passed a lie along from a certain groundhog* that shall remain nameless. As it is still cold and windy outside, why not take some time to learn some new skills? Here's what lynda.com has to offer.

Technical Skills

iBooks Author for Teachers: Fundamentals

Start repurposing your existing classroom materials into iBooks Author projects. In this course, Mike Rankin shows how to leverage the templates and intuitive toolset in iBooks Author to create custom course material. Also, check out the other iBooks lessons while you are there.

Creating Infographics with Illustrator

Infographics are hot! They provide a unique way to visualize your data and trace the story behind it. Join author Mordy Golding in this course as he introduces you to designing charts, graphs, and other infographics in Adobe Illustrator. Mordy reveals five key components to a great information design, and shows how to determine which of the types of graphs available in Illustrator is right for your data.

JavaScript and JSON

JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) has replaced XML as the core way of sharing data, especially when it comes to JavaScript, since it's so much faster, sleeker, and easier to parse. In this course, dive into working with JSON tools, designing JSON objects, and using different ways to handling JSON data. Author Ray Villalobos also shows how to use AJAX and jQuery to parse your data and feeds, and shows JavaScript and JSON in action in a real-world practical application.

Career Skills

Screenwriting Fundamentals

Join independent film director and screenwriter Mark Tapio Kines as he walks you through the process of getting your screenplay idea out of your head and onto the printed page.

Monthly Productivity Pointers

In this series on productivity, author Jess Stratton takes you through the latest tools that will help you run your business and life more efficiently. Each installment covers a particular feature or technique in a different online tool, such as Google Apps, Skype, YouTube, Mint.com, Etsy, and more. Check back every Monday for tips on topics from recording and publishing video chats to managing your finances online.

Enjoy, and stay warm!

 

 

* No groundhogs named Phil or otherwise were harmed in the production of this monthly update. Yet.

Hello all!

Spring is just around the corner, but it's still cold outside - the perfect excuse to stay inside, warm, and brush up your skills! Microsoft Office 2013 is now available (Windows users only), so if you want or need to upgrade to the new version, Lynda has a suite of tutorials for you!

Technical Skills

Office 2013 New Features

Take a look at suite-wide enhancements like cloud integration, Touch Mode, PDF editing, and Ribbon customization, as well as individual app improvements added to Office 2013.

Word 2013 Essential Training

Teaches you the basics of working with documents in Word 2013, from creating and editing to formatting text.

Excel 2013 Essential Training

Teaches you the basics of using Excel 2013 to enter and organize data, use functions, and build charts and PivotTables.

PowerPoint 2013 Essential Training

Teaches the basics of creating, editing, and sharing presentations with PowerPoint 2013.

 

Career Skills

Delegating Tasks to Your Team

Explores how delegating helps your team build experience while meeting business goals and introduces a four-phase model to delegate tasks and projects large and small.

Managing Small Projects

Develop the skill set needed to successfully manage smaller projects.

Enjoy!

Lynda.com recently added a new Playlist feature. It is an extension of their current Queue feature. A queue is a list of lessons you created. Previously, you had only one queue. With the addition of playlists, you may now have multiple queues, and move lessons between them. You can arrange the lessons in a playlist as desired. You may have up to 10 playlists.

For more information, please refer to this article on playlists. It included step-by-step instructions, and of course - a video!

Hello everyone!

It's fall, and as cold weather settles in, you may have some time to brush up on your skill sets. Here's some offerings from lynda.com in which you may be interested.

Technical Skills

InDesign Secrets

In this series, David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepción, co-hosts of the web's top resource for InDesign tips and tricks, InDesignSecrets.com, share some hidden and sometimes surprising workflow tips that will make working in InDesign more efficient and more fun. The course covers built-in timesaving features such as Quick Apply and auto-expanding text, but also little-known tricks, such as using the eyedropper to copy and paste character and paragraph text attributes and making accurate selections by selecting through or even into objects.

New techniques will be added to the collection every other week, so check back early and often. Find more tips and tricks at indesignsecrets.com.



Google Drive Essential Training

Google Drive incorporates the document creation features of Google Docs with a cloud computing solution that keeps your content updated and synchronized across the web, your computer, and your mobile device. In this course, author Susan Metz teaches the essentials for creating, formatting, sharing, and editing Google documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and forms. The course also introduces the new Google Drive homepage, the Google Drive sync folder, and file management on the online web drive.



Career Skills

Boosting Your Job Search Skills

Lynda.com's new Acing Your Interview joins the following courses designed to help you advance your career: Achieving Your Goals, Managing Your Career, Job Search Strategies, and Negotiation Fundamentals. Send them a note from our contact us page and let us know if our courses help you get a job or promotion!



Miscellaneous

Inspiring Documentary: Jerry & Maggie

Our new documentary Jerry & Maggie: This is not photography features husband-and-wife artists who push the boundaries of photography. Jerry Uelsmann experiments in a darkroom; Maggie Taylor composes on a computer screen. Step inside their Florida compound for a peek at their complementary work, contrasting processes, and inspiration-seeking expeditions through an alligator-dwelling swamp.

Hello everyone!

This month, Lynda.com hosts a variety of new courses and development opportunities. Here's some highlights.

Technical Skills

Highlighting row differences in Excel
http://blog.lynda.com/2012/08/20/highlighting-row-differences-in-excel/

Recognizing when your numbers don't add up is key to successful operations management, which is why organizations of all types and sizes use the Excel spreadsheet program to manage their operations and inventory. A real-world example of this might be conducting a monthly inventory analysis that compares the number of products in your system with the units counted in your warehouse. In Excel 2007 and 2010, you can quickly check for differences between these two inventory numbers. Find out how in this article!



Cloud Computing First Look
http://www.lynda.com/Business-Collaboration-tutorials/Cloud-Computing-First-Look/105390-2.html?org=psu.edu

In this course, author David Rivers explains the essentials of cloud computing and answers the basic question: What is the cloud? The course then explores the benefits and drawbacks of cloud computing, including a candid look at balancing the sharing and privacy issues with the productivity gains of working in the cloud.


Career Skills

Free lynda.com webinar

Personalized learning: A roadmap to on-your-own learning

September 21, 2012
Choose your time


Register for time-slot one: 10:00 a.m. EDT / 9:00 a.m. CDT / 8:00 a.m. MDT / 7:00 a.m. PDT
http://pages.lynda.com/webinar-registration-personalized-learning-september-2012-east.html


Register for time-slot two: 2:00 p.m. EDT / 1:00 p.m. CDT / 12:00 p.m. MDT / 11:00 a.m. PDT
http://pages.lynda.com/webinar-registration-personalized-learning-september-2012-west.html
 
Today's learners face real challenges. They want a student-centered education that gives them skills, helps them solve problems, and lets them benefit personally. Personalized learning fosters confidence. It improves motivation. It encourages productivity. See how lynda.com teaches learners to evaluate where they are now and where they want to go--and provides the tools they need to get there.
 

Don't hesitate to dive into the new and varied offerings at Lynda.com!
 

You can now directly link to a lesson in the Lynda.com library and access all the videos in the lesson. Please note it is not yet possible to link directly to a specific movie within a lesson. To create a direct link to a lesson:

1. Copy the URL to the lesson. For example: http://www.lynda.com/Dreamweaver-CS5-training/Interaction-Design-Fundamentals/82822-2.html
2. Add ?org=psu.edu to the end of the URL: http://www.lynda.com/Dreamweaver-CS5-training/Interaction-Design-Fundamentals/82822-2.html?org=psu.edu
3. Give this URL to your students.

If your students have not already signed in via http://lynda.psu.edu, or by logging into ANGEL, etc., they must first log in via Web Access and will then be taken to the lesson.

If your students have previously authenticated via their Access ID and password to any Penn State system, they will see a screen similar to the following:


This screen does not require any action from them and will disappear after several seconds.

Note: When initially accessing a lesson with this new method, you may encounter the following screen:

If this happens, please:

1. Select Penn State from the drop down menu.
2. Click the Remember my selection permanently radio button.
3. Click the Next button.

In the last three decades, education has moved beyond the four walls of the classroom to the infinite possibilities of the Internet. Training resources using rich media are everywhere: YouTube, Vimeo, Open Education Resources, lecture capture inside LMS, and third-party rich media libraries. Online video is a powerful tool for engaging learners. Discover how a great online video addresses the "why" of each lesson, presents the big picture of the subject matter, and supports it with granular details and steps. Join our free webinar to find out how these factors affect our learning: • transcripts and closed-captioning • playback controls • anywhere/anytime access • simplicity and choice • personalization and customization • repetition and failure in a private setting Webinar Details: Thursday, August 16, 2012 Free Choose your time: 10 to 11 a.m. EDT/ 7 to 8 a.m. PDT  OR 2 to 3 p.m. EDT/ 11 a.m. to noon PDT     Speaker: Laurie Burruss   Laurie is a professor of interaction design and director of the Digital Media Center at Pasadena City College. She has been a speaker at Macworld, Adobe MAX, SIGGRAPH, and the New Media Consortium Summer Conference. Her passion for digital storytelling has led Laurie to serve as an education consultant at lynda.com , where she supports academic initiatives. lynda.com is an online learning company that helps your team learn software, creative, and business skills to achieve personal and professional goals. Users get unlimited access to a vast library of high-quality, expert-taught video tutorials. Have questions? Email lynda.com webinars at webinars@lynda.com.

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Hello everyone!

This month, Lynda.com offers some great tutorials on Photoshop, video fundamentals, managing your career, and an iOS mobile app update.

Here's some highlights.

Technical Skills

Photoshop for Web Design

Join Justin Seeley as he reveals how designers can create vibrant web graphics, wireframes, and complete web site mockups in Adobe Photoshop. The course covers creating a custom web workspace for maximum efficiency; drawing, coloring, and optimizing web graphics; creating vector shapes and text that scale seamlessly; mastering transparency; building navigation bars and buttons; and speeding up these tasks with the Photoshop automation tools.

Fundamentals of Video: Cameras and Shooting

You need more than ideas and tools to make a great video. You need know-how. Filmmaker Anthony Q. Artis lays the foundation for creating moving images, covering subjects from the anatomy of a camera and lighting techniques to visual storytelling and audio essentials. Whether you're making a personal video, a first documentary, or a promotional video for your organization, this all-level course aims to help you shoot with consistent results.

Career Skills

The Power of PreViz at BMW Group DesignworksUSA

PreViz, or previsualization, harnesses the power of visual preplanning in envisioning and designing products and workflows before prototyping begins. In industries as diverse as special effects, photography, and business modeling, leaders are using previsualization as a design-thinking tool to plan, build, and responsibly execute projects.

In this course, author and designer Dane Howard asks DesignworksUSA, a global design firm for the BMW Group, to share their insight and expertise in previsualizing successful design concepts. DesignworksUSA showcases previsualization in the context of automobile design and creation, including framing the creative conversation before the project starts, using previsualization to better manage development resources, and capturing the energy and essence of an automotive program.

Managing Your Career

What do you enjoy doing, and how are you uniquely qualified to build a rewarding career out of your interests, skills, and experience? In this course, author Valerie Sutton guides you through the process of proactively managing your career by identifying your options, needs, and interests.

Mobile Update!

lynda.com has launched a completely redesigned app for iPhone and iPad. Available to individual subscribers as well as business, academic, and government clients, this new app makes it even easier to access the lynda.com video library wherever they go.

These key features allow members to:

• pick up where they left off--no matter where they log in
• quickly discover relevant content with improved navigation
• auto-play an entire course with the tap of one button
• save and prioritize courses in a personalized queue
• stream courses from the iPhone or iPad to Apple TV over AirPlay

Download the app at the app store today!

There's lot's more available this month. Never hesitate to explore the new and varied offerings at Lynda.com!

This Month at Lynda.com

June 2012

Hello everyone!

This month, Lynda.com offers new video shooting techniques, Google Calendar training, and more. Lynda.com also offers a variety of career-building lessons. Here are some highlights.

Technical Skills

Video Journalism Shooting Techniques

Join video producer, instructor, and former TV news reporter/videographer Jeff Sengstack as he presents practical tips on shooting video with shots and angles that support the story and make it more visually interesting. This course explains how to craft the story and plan your production and includes several still photography techniques that work well with video. The course also shows how to achieve shots such as sequences, matched action, reveal, trucking, and point of view, and reminds videographers to keep considering what the video editor will need to keep the story moving forward.

Google Calendar Essential Training

In this course, Google Apps trainer Susan Cline demonstrates how to use this web-based calendar to manage both your personal and professional schedules. The course shows how to invite attendees and assign resources for any event with the scheduling tool, and how to monitor attendee responses. Tutorials on setting up tasks and troubleshooting errors are also included.

Building Facebook Applications with HTML and JavaScript

Facebook application development is one of the most lucrative and fast-paced niches of the programming world. This course introduces developers and designers who are already familiar with HTML and JavaScript to Facebook app development. Author Ray Villalobos reviews the different types of Facebook apps and tours the Facebook Developer site, reviewing the requirements to be an apps developer. At the end of the course, Ray shows how to create a complete app, from building the initial containers and pages to adding social plug-ins and game controls.

Create an iPad Web App

Discover how to create an app-like experience for the Apple iPad with HTML, CSS, and jQuery. In this course, Chris Converse shows how to prepare web pages that can become web apps on the iPad. Discover how to create custom icons, startup screens, and create an immersive user experience--all with web standard technologies. Bypass Objective-C and the App Store altogether and create a unique experience that can be revised as quickly as you update your web site.

Edge First Look Preview 6

This course takes a first look at Edge, a new tool from Adobe for creating interactive animations, which utilizes the latest web standards including HTML5, JavaScript, and jQuery. This course covers how to create and build interactivity into motion content in an easy-to-use, timeline-based interface. Author Ray Villalobos also explains the possibilities Edge offers web designers and developers, including drawing and animating with Edge, working with the timeline, exploring symbols, and creating interactivity with timeline triggers and scripts.

Career Skills

The Invaluable Series

Dave Crenshaw's Invaluable series reveals how to build a career improvement plan by increasing personal productivity, pursuing different avenues for self-education, and setting up a documented standard of performance. This fifth and final installment of the series, Invaluable: Becoming a Leading Authority, teaches you to identify areas where you can become an authority, leader, and decision maker. Even if you don't think you're in the public eye, being recognized as an authority can dramatically improve your value within your company and the community beyond. This course demonstrates a clear, step-by-step process to becoming a system expert within a business and then shows you how to evaluate and increase your value through activities such as building a library, assembling an online network, and gaining personal publicity.

Creative Inspirations - Multimedia Journalism

This installment in the lynda.com Creative Inspirations documentary series features Richard "Koci" Hernandez, a national Emmy® award-winning video and multimedia producer who is at the forefront of the next generation of journalism. Retracing his steps, Koci shares how he began his obsession with photography and his love of visual storytelling with a trip to the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite. Thirty years and three newspapers later, he finds himself teaching multimedia storytelling at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Koci is known for inventing techniques on the fly, often teaching himself new software just moments before completing a project and incorporating fresh ideas with stunning results. Koci readily learns as much from his students and blog readers as he teaches them, and openly shares with us his constant journey of discovery.

There's lots more like this at Lynda.com, so get exploring!

As always, lynda.com has released a slew of news offerings. Here's some highlights:

Hard Skills Training

GMail Essential Training

Authored By: Susan Cline
Released On: 3/3/2011
In this course, Google Apps trainer Susan Cline demonstrates how to streamline your inbox using the Gmail email management tools. The course shows how to perform basic email tasks, like writing and responding to messages, but also shows how to create filters to manage the flow of messages and demonstrates the Gmail powerful search function. The course also describes how to customize the inbox, use the built-in audio and video chat features, and organize names and email addresses using the Contact Manager.

http://www.lynda.com/Gmail-training/Essential-Training/77961-2.html

View Source

Authored By: Ray Villalobos
Released On: 2/3/2012
The View Source weekly series offers 10-minute projects on intermediate and advanced web design topics, covering technologies such as HTML, PHP, jQuery, and CSS, as well as content management solutions like WordPress and integration with Twitter, YouTube, and more. Each movie in the course is self-contained and shows how to accomplish an interesting effect and/or technique. Example projects include creating datepickers and custom photo galleries, and mapping and geotagging with Google Maps. Exercise files are included with the course.

http://www.lynda.com/Web-Interactive-Projects-tutorials/View-Source/93388-2.html

Windows 8 Preview

Microsoft has released its consumer preview of Windows 8--and we've got free training to help you learn it. Windows 8 Consumer Preview First Look introduces the software's first radical redesign in over a decade, including a new start screen. The course also provides instructions on installing the preview, and running it in tandem with your existing Windows application.

http://www.lynda.com/Windows-tutorials/Windows-Consumer-Preview-First-Look/100467-2.html

Soft Skills

Creative Inspirations

This ongoing series captures the thoughts of leading creative visionaries, focusing on art, photography, and design. Well worth checking out!

http://www.lynda.com/Documentaries-training-tutorials/99-0.html#Creative+Inspirations

Invaluable: Becoming a Leading Authority

Dave Crenshaw's Invaluable series reveals how to build a career improvement plan by increasing personal productivity, pursuing different avenues for self-education, and setting up a documented standard of performance. This fifth and final installment of the series, Invaluable: Becoming a Leading Authority, teaches you to identify areas where you can become an authority, leader, and decision maker. Even if you don't think you're in the public eye, being recognized as an authority can dramatically improve your value within your company and the community beyond. This course demonstrates a clear, step-by-step process to becoming a system expert within a business and then shows you how to evaluate and increase your value through activities such as building a library, assembling an online network, and gaining personal publicity.

http://www.lynda.com/Business-Business-Skills-tutorials/Invaluable-Becoming-Leading-Authority/88535-2.html

Enjoy!