The Best Free Training

Topic: Biographical info and interviews with Joe Biden, John McCain, and Barack Obama
Format: online and downloadable videos
Reviewer/email: Mike G – greers_pm@yahoo.co

Learn more about the major presidential candidates with these free resources from LearnOutLoud:

• Get to Know Joe Biden — 1 hour, 7 minutes
• Charlie Rose – An Hour with John McCain — 1 hour
• The Audacity of Hope – Interview with Barack Obama — 1 hour, 6 minutes

Interesting political history bonus:

• 1960 Democratic National Convention Acceptance Address by John F. Kennedy

And if political decision-making is on your mind, you may also be interested in these previous posts:

• Project Vote Smart – Learn About Your Candidates
• McCain & Obama: Should We Prohibit Them from Learning & Growing?
• Electing a US President in Plain English

Topic: How to create and edit multimedia (integrated text, graphics, video, animation, and sound)
Format: Website with many video tutorials and links to additional resources
Reviewer/email: Mike G – greers_pm@yahoo.com

This course is a clear and simple introduction to multimedia production techniques, including how to create multimedia for the web using photos and videos. Video tutorials provide clear, step-by-step instructions for accomplishing common multimedia productions tasks using Adobe Photoshop Elements & Adobe Premiere Elements (two of the most popular, low-cost multimedia applications). Even if you don’t intend to use these Adobe programs, you’ll find this collection of tutorials will provide you with a good, solid overview of the tasks involved in multimedia production.

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Topic: How to make and use charts, graphs, and other visual tools to help organize new concepts and learn more effectively
Format: Website with text lessons, graphics, practice items, suggested readings, links, and reference list [free registration required]
Reviewer/email: Mike G – greers_pm@yahoo.com

Ever notice how it’s easier to learn complex information if you make yourself a little chart of the key ideas? That’s the idea behind this valuable, one-hour free course: To help you make and use home-made graphics as organizers to support your learning — or to help you help your students or kids use graphics organizers so they can learn complicated topics more effectively.

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Topic: Introduction to the study of aging and its implications for families, society, and health care
Format: Website with PDF files of slides from lectures, suggested readings, links, and reference list
Reviewer/email: Mike G – greers_pm@yahoo.com

Given the huge and aging baby-boomer population, health-care institutions and society in general face some trying times. As voters, as children with aging parents, as older citizens in need of quality health care, we all need to know more about the issues involved so we can help determine the fate of these institutions. This free course from Johns Hopkins: “Introduces the study of aging, its implications for individuals, families, and society, and the background for health policy related to older persons.”

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Topic: Abraham Maslow’s research on the self-actualizing individual
Format: 25-minute MP3 download
Reviewer/email: Mike G – greers_pm@yahoo.com

Almost everyone is familiar with Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Maslow gave us the term “self actualization” and did substantial research on “self actualizing individuals.” According to Wikepedia: “Maslow studied, what he called, exemplary people such as Albert Einstein, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people…” His mission, according to Brian Johnson (author and narrator of this free audio) was to “to ‘understand great people, the best specimens mankind’ he could find while inspiring people to become a self-actualized individual.” In this free MP3 audio download, Brian reviews Maslow’s 19 characteristics of self-actualizing people and challenges us all to adopt some of these to be all we can be.

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Topic: How to get organized, study and master almost any subject
Format: Website with many links to online resources, guides, tip sheets, etc.
Reviewer/email: Mike G – greers_pm@yahoo.com

Howtostudy.org is an amazing online collection of resources and tools to help you develop good strategies for studying almost any academic subject. The target audience for this course is college students… especially new college students who need help getting organized themselves and approaching particular courses to succeed. However, no matter how old (or young?) you are, you are likely to find some great tips to help you succeed in studying any subject. Parents of younger kids might find it useful to review some of the subject-based strategies outlined here and translate them to help their kids succeed! This site is loaded with good stuff!

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Topic: The US switchover from analogue TV broadcasts to digital TV broadcasts and how it will affect you
Format: Slide tutorial with graphics, pop-ups, and links to additional resources
Reviewer/email: Mike G – greers_pm@yahoo.com

These days we’ve all been seeing words like this scrolling across the bottom of our TV screens: “On February 17, 2009, this station will stop broadcasting analog signals and switch entirely to 100% digital transmission. You may need to take action to assure you continue receiving our programs.” So what’s this really mean to you? Will you need a new TV set or other new equipment? (Not necessarily!) And how do the new HD TVs figure into all this? This clean, simple tutorial from Sony makes all the technical issues easy to understand, so you can figure out what you may need to do.

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