Monday, April 5, 2010

Ask Lynda

This week I spent a lot of time working on my personal learning project for my social media class. The personal learning project was designed to provide students with the opportunity to tailor an assignment to their own learning needs and course related interests. During the brainstorming process, I was given the opportunity to work with CHIQ and create a digital media kit for the website.

As I began researching how to make a digital media kit, I discovered that it required me to know how to navigate Adobe InDesign (CS4). Prior to this project I had never used a CS4 (Creative Suite) before. The situation became immediately overwhelming. I had never taken on the responsibility of working with an actual company to make a real product. I was terrified that I would fail. Luckily for me Chiq spokesperson, Christina Hall, was very willing to help me learn. She gave me the web address to a site where I could learn all the CS4 programs and much, much, more. This site is  www.lynda.com.

Lynda.com provides training videos on a variety of software from Access to Garageband to InDesign. You can search for what your looking for by subject, vendor, software or author. Users have access to over 42,000 video tutorials with anytime access. Lynda is not a free service, but it is completely worth it if you want to learn a program from top to bottom fast. Lynda provides updates on the latest software and videos.


Not only does Lynda provide thousands of useful tutorials, but the tutorials are easy to navigate and follow. Take InDesign for example. The InDesign "essential training" videos are broken down into sections:


These section are broken down into several videos. Lynda provides how long each video is and how big each file is. It also lets you know which videos you have already viewed just in case you leave the site and come back later to continue your lessons.


Along with each video you can access a description (overview), exercise files, so that you can follow along with each video, and a transcription.

I will not only use Lynda's help for this project and product but for future projects and products. Learning this material could help me in my future career. Learning all the CS4 software could give me an advantage in the work place.

No comments:

Post a Comment