February 5, 2009
Dear Everyone:
Last year I began teaching “SharePoint Foundations”
at work. SharePoint is
Microsoft’s “collaboration platform.”
It allows people who work together to keep their documents in a
central location where everyone can find what they need (theoretically),
edit and publish documents and do lots of other cool stuff.
“Foundations” means this is the really basic
functionality of SharePoint, intended for new End Users who just need to
know how to move around and find the things they need (theoretically.)
These are the baby steps.
Next Tuesday, I’m scheduled to teach about a
half-dozen of my co-workers how to give this same training.
So I’ve been going through all the material (along with another
co-worker who is also giving the same training as I am.
We trade off every other Tuesday.)
The people who set up all this training seem to
think that a “folksy” tone is in order.
They had entire scripts written up with things like:
Say:
“Rosie, Tom and Mike are on a team.
Rosie has written a document and would like input from the rest
of her team. What will Rosie
do? What would you do?”
Click mouse.
(This causes some arrows to appear on the
PowerPoint slide
traveling from the pictures of “Rosie” and “Tom” and “Mike”.)
Say: “Rosie
emails her document to Tom and Mike.
And what do Tom and Mike do?”
Click mouse.
(More arrows appear between “Rosie” “Tom” and “Mike”.)
Say:
“They email back and forth.”
Click mouse.
(Additional things appear representing multiple copies of the
same document.)
Say:
“Then Tom leaves the team.”
Click mouse.
(Tom’s picture fades out and is replaced by a question mark.)
Say:
“What happens to Tom’s documents?
Some students were downright insulted by this tone.
They indicated that they felt like we were talking down to them.
There was also an example of a “shopping list” that didn’t look
like any shopping list I’ve ever used.
My fellow trainer pointed out that a lot of men don’t use
shopping lists and might not relate to this example.
My feeling was that for a lot of men, if they did have a shopping
list, it would contain one word:
“Beer.”
So I stripped out all of that “folksy” stuff (Say:
“So what does that mean to folks like you and me?
Well, let’s look at permissions.”) and placed it all in a
Word
document with notations for each slide (there’s between 50 and 60 slides
in all.) And I added
warnings (This is an animated slide.) and some helpful hints about when
to mention “Appropriate Use Statements” and when to let the students
take a break.
My fellow trainer and I decided to regard all the
training materials as “living documents” meaning they are going to
change over time as things change, so don’t wait until they are
“perfect” before sharing them with the rest of the “team”.
I emailed links to all of them this afternoon.
We’ll probably set up some kind of a “checkpoint”
meeting every week so people can report on what’s working for them and
what they might want changed.
And, of course, there are the questions that come up during a
training session that the instructor can’t necessarily answer on the
spot.
Example:
“Is there a template for the ADAIRO list that we can use?”
I have no idea. I’m
not even really sure what “ADAIRO” means.
(The D stands for Decisions, and the AI stands for Action Items.
So it’s (something), Decisions, Action Items, (something,
something) might be Report Out, not really sure.)
Needless to say, all these materials are stored in
our own SharePoint Site. And
as questions come up, we’re adding them to a list, including the answers
when we find them. Next
steps, after “training” the trainers next Tuesday (and Friday for the
two in “Hobby”), is for each new instructor to sit in on an actual class
to see it all in action.
Then the new instructor gets to present a class with a more “seasoned”
trainer in the room to help out of they get stuck.
After that we’ll be scheduling a whole lot of
classes. Fun time ahead.
We did get a few sprinkles this week, but the
East
Bay is now officially rationing water; so everyone please continue to
pray for rain and lots of snow in the mountains.
Love, as always,
Pete
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