Help: Tips for Trainings

Whether you are leading a staff development training session, or bringing a class of college or graduate students online, these tips may be helpful for you in introducing Tapped In.

Before the Training Session

People should be aware that they are logging into a professional environment and act in a polite and professional manner. Encourage your group to log in for the first time before the training session. If you can get your group to log in once (on their own) before your training, the whole environment will be less foreign to them. Volunteers are available in the Tapped In reception area to greet and help everyone who logs in during the week. A good webpage to share with people is the Tapped In Interface Introduction as it shows Tapped In features and how to navigate. Before the training make sure you and your group knows the answer to the question, why are you using this online environment? Is it to save your group from having to drive to meetings? Is it to allow them to get together between meetings? People need to understand why you are using an online venue. Don't make the mistake of introducing your group to the environment before you understand it well, and have a vision for using it. Be sensitive to your group's comfort level with technology. If a group is not comfortable with technology, it will take more time to introduce the concept of working and collaborating online. You should also expect less retention from the training session. We have many help guides online for questions about features and navigation in Tapped In. Feel free to use any/all of them in your trainings.

Face-to-Face Training Tips

Make sure you understand the technology and feel comfortable presenting it

If you've never done a training session on the Internet before, you may want to manage the session closely. It's hard to keep people's attention when the Internet is up in front of them. Make sure people know whether they are supposed to be listening to you or watching the computer. If you are comfortable with training people to use the Internet, you may want to have intervals in the session where people listen to you talk, then explore on their own, then come back and discuss as a group.

People learn at different rates. It helps to know the expertise of your group to know how to gauge the pace of your training and you may want to assess their levels before the training session. If you have a very heterogeneous group, you may want to consider multiple training sessions, e.g., first training the people who will learn quickly and then recruiting from them to help you at the next training you have for people less familiar with technology.

Encourage ownership in the process from the beginning. In a training, you may want to log people in as guests, show them some of the relevant features, and then have them apply for membership on the website. Make sure they understand the whole process: logging in, getting membership, and why they are doing this. People can get membership by going to http://tappedin.org and clicking on the membership link.

If you are doing the training late in the day and it's appropriate feed your group! It helps keep their energy up and their attention. They will appreciate it too.

Obtain regular feedback from trainees. Find out what is working and not working for them.

Emphasize activities. Organizations we have worked with have said, "People were productive and learned the most when the training involved activities such as a scavenger hunt." (Learning by doing.)

It can be difficult to balance teaching people how to do things and demonstrating the power of online interactions.

Make sure that your group realizes that learning how to use the different features of the environment will serve to help them find resources and interact online, don't get so caught up in the "how to" that you forget the "why."

If you have a small and technologically sophisticated group, plan a discussion to take place during the training session. Perhaps discuss an article that your group has read, or meet with an expert online. It is sometimes difficult to demonstrate the power that online interactions can have when the whole group is in the same room for the training sessions. Inviting an expert from somewhere else is a great way to demonstrate the connectivity online interactions can provide.

Have regular team meetings online as soon as you can after the training--otherwise people forget what they learned. It's important to have your follow-up planned before you introduce people to the environment. Before they leave a training session make sure that you have the next meeting scheduled, or tell them the next steps they need to take.

Tell people to write scheduled online meetings on their personal calendar. It is very easy to forget about an online meeting.

Technology & Other Tips

Make sure the computers in the lab work before the demo. It's always a good idea to check the computers you'll be using in the training. One professor did not do this and though things worked fine in her office, the lab was set up differently and she spent a great deal of the training time getting the technology to work.

The Tapped In server can handle many simultaneous connections, but a group undergoing training together in the same room might experience slow connections if they overload their local network or the remote Tapped In server. If this happens, try to stagger activity. For example, avoid having a roomful of people log in at exactly the same time; instead, have up to five people log in at a time and stagger logins by a minute or so.

If you have problems connecting or getting chat to work, or have other support-related questions, see our frequently-asked support questions and answers.

If you hold your training session online in a room, transcripts of your training session will be automatically mailed to each participant who is a member of Tapped In. If individuals go to others rooms or exchange Private Messages during the training, only those individuals will receive the transcripts for those separate discussions.

Tapped In staff can help facilitate discussion. If you would like a Tapped In staff member or HelpDesk leader to assist you with your group's visit to Tapped In, please let us know at least a week in advance.