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Here's a copy of the workbook we will use in our workshop. I'll provide a printed copy for our workshop.

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Mini tutorials on how to engage learners online.

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Join the web's most supportive community of creators and get high-quality tools for hosting, sharing, and streaming videos in gorgeous HD with no ads.

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A Jeopardy template you can customize for your own content.

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Donald Kirkpatrick (March 15, 1924 - May 9, 2014) was Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin in the United States and a past president of the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD). He is best known for creating a highly influential 'four level' model for training course evaluation, which served as the subject of his Ph.D. dissertation in 1954. Kirkpatrick's ideas were published to a broader audience in 1959 in a series of articles in the US Training and Development Journal, but they are better known from a book he published in 1994 entitled Evaluating Training Programs. Other books that he has written on training evaluation include Transferring Learning to Behavior and Implementing the Four Levels.

Kirkpatrick's four levels are designed as a sequence of ways to evaluate training programs. Many practitioners believe that as you proceed through each of the levels, the evaluation becomes more difficult and requires more time. Clomedia.com Editor suggests "it is best to look at the levels as a categorization scheme (i.e., their original purpose) in order to guide your staff in what levels to apply to the evaluation task". In practice, then, it is common for trainers to get stuck in Levels 1 and 2 and never proceed to Levels 3 and 4, where the most useful data exist. Today, Kirkpatrick-certified facilitators stress "starting with the end in mind," essentially beginning with Level 4 and moving backward in order to better establish the desired outcome before ever planning the training program. When done strategically, reaching these levels does not have to be any more expensive or time consuming, but will still help to ensure on-the-job performance of learned behaviors and skills.

The four levels of Kirkpatrick's evaluation model are as follows:

1. Reaction - The degree to which participants find the training favorable, engaging and relevant to their jobs

2. Learning - The degree to which participants acquire the intended knowledge, skills, attitude, confidence and commitment based on their participation in the training

3. Behavior - The degree to which participants apply what they learned during training when they are back on the job

4. Results - The degree to which targeted outcomes occur as a result of the training and the support and accountability package

Several authors have suggested an addition of a fifth level of evaluation. JJ Phillips has argued for the addition of a Return on Investment (ROI) level, which is essentially about comparing the fourth level of the standard model to the overall costs of training. Roger Kaufman has argued that ROI is essentially a Level 4 type of evaluation because it is still internal to the organization and that a fifth level of evaluation should focus on the impact of the organization on external clients and society.

Kirkpatrick, D.L., & Kirkpatrick, J.D. (1994). Evaluating Training Programs, Berrett-Koehler Publishers

Kirkpatrick, D.L., & Kirkpatrick, J.D. (2005). Transferring Learning to Behavior, Berrett-Koehler Publishers

Kirkpatrick, D.L., & Kirkpatrick, J.D. (2007). Implementing the Four Levels, Berrett-Koehler Publishers

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Donald Kirkpatrick (March 15, 1924 - May 9, 2014) was Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin in the United States and a past president of the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD). He is best known for creating a highly influential 'four level' model for training course evaluation, which served as the subject of his Ph.D.

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A free crossword puzzle generator.

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Journal of Clinical and Diagnostic Research

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PowerPoint has made some big improvements. Here's my favourite improvement.

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Active learning increases student performance

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Active learning increases student performance

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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

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Another interesting use of PowerPoint/Google Slides.

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Here's an article on using Bloom's Taxonomy to design discussion questions.

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This article illustrates how much effort and brain coordination is required in listening to and processing language. Implications for PowerPoint.

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The brain is key to our existence, but there's a long way to go before neuroscience can truly capture its staggering capacity. For now, though, our Brain Control series explores what we do know about the brain's command of six central functions: language, mood, memory, vision, personality and motor skills - and what happens when things go wrong.
When you read something, you first need to detect the words and then to interpret them by determining context and meaning. This complex process involves many brain regions.

Detecting text usually involves the optic nerve and other nerve bundles delivering signals from the eyes to the visual cortex at the back of the brain. If you are reading in Braille, you use the sensory cortex towards the top of the brain. If you listen to someone else reading, then you use the auditory cortex not far from your ears.

A system of regions towards the back and middle of your brain help you interpret the text. These include the angular gyrus in the parietal lobe, Wernicke's area (comprising mainly the top rear portion of the temporal lobe), insular cortex, basal ganglia and cerebellum.

The Conversation, CC BY-ND

These regions work together as a network to process words and word sequences to determine context and meaning. This enables our receptive language abilities, which means the ability to understand language. Complementary to this is expressive language, which is the ability to produce language.

To speak sensibly, you must think of words to convey an idea or message, formulate them into a sentence according to grammatical rules and then use your lungs, vocal cords and mouth to create sounds. Regions in your frontal, temporal and parietal lobes formulate what you want to say and the motor cortex, in your frontal lobe, enables you to speak the words.

Most of this language-related brain activity is likely occurring in the left side of your brain. But some people use an even mix of both sides and, rarely, some have right dominance for language. There is an evolutionary view that specialisation of certain functions to one side or the other may be an advantage, as many animals, especially vertebrates, exhibit brain function with prominence on one side.

Why the left side is favoured for language isn't known. But we do know that injury or conditions such as epilepsy, if it affects the left side of the brain early in a child's development, can increase the chances language will develop on the right side. The chance of the person being left-handed is also increased. This makes sense, because the left side of the body is controlled by the motor cortex on the right side of the brain.

paul pod/Flickr, CC BY

Selective problems

In 1861, French neurologist Pierre Paul Broca described a patient unable to speak who had no motor impairments to account for the inability. A postmortem examination showed a lesion in a large area towards the lower middle of his left frontal lobe particularly important in language formulation. This is now known as Broca's area.

The clinical symptom of being unable to speak despite having the motor skills is known as expressive aphasia, or Broca's aphasia.

In 1867, Carl Wernicke observed an opposite phenomenon. A patient was able to speak but not understand language. This is known as receptive aphasia, or Wernicke's aphasia. The damaged region, as you might correctly guess, is the Wernicke's area mentioned above.

Scientists have also observed injured patients with other selective problems, such as an inability to understand most words except nouns; or words with unusual spelling, such as those with silent consonants, like reign.

These difficulties are thought to arise from damage to selective areas or connections between regions in the brain's language network. However, precise localisation can often be difficult given the complexity of individuals' symptoms and the uncontrolled nature of their brain injury.

We also know the brain's language regions work together as a co-ordinated network, with some parts involved in multiple functions and a level of redundancy in some processing pathways. So it's not simply a matter of one brain region doing one thing in isolation.

Wikimedia Commons

How do we know all this?

Before advanced medical imaging, most of our knowledge came from observing unfortunate patients with injuries to particular brain parts. One could relate the approximate region of damage to their specific symptoms. Broca's and Wernicke's observations are well-known examples.

Other knowledge was inferred from brain-stimulation studies. Weak electrical stimulation of the brain while a patient is awake is sometimes performed in patients undergoing surgery to remove a lesion such as a tumour. The stimulation causes that part of the brain to stop working for a few seconds, which can enable the surgeon to identify areas of critically important function to avoid damaging during surgery.

In the mid-20th century, this helped neurosurgeons discover more about the localisation of language function in the brain. It was clearly demonstrated that while most people have language originating on the left side of their brain, some could have language originating on the right.

Towards the later part of the 20th century, if a surgeon needed to find out which side of your brain was responsible for language - so he didn't do any damage - he would put to sleep one side of your brain with an anaesthetic. The doctor would then ask you a series of questions, determining your language side from your ability or inability to answer them. This invasive test (which is less often used today due to the availability of functional brain imaging) is known as the Wada test, named after Juhn Wada, who first described it just after the second world war.

Brain imaging

Today, we can get a much better view of brain function by using imaging techniques, especially magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a safe procedure that uses magnetic fields to take pictures of your brain.

from shutterstock.com

Using MRI to measure brain function is called functional MRI (fMRI), which detects signals from magnetic properties of blood in vessels supplying oxygen to brain cells. The fMRI signal changes depending on whether the blood is carrying oxygen, which means it slightly reduces the magnetic field, or has delivered up its oxygen, which slightly increases the magnetic field.

A few seconds after brain neurons become active in a brain region, there is an increase in freshly oxygenated blood flow to that brain part, much more than required to satisfy the oxygen demand of the neurons. This is what we see when we say a brain region is activated during certain functions.

Brain-imaging methods have revealed that much more of our brain is involved in language processing than previously thought. We now know that numerous regions in every major lobe (frontal, parietal, occipital and temporal lobes; and the cerebellum, an area at the bottom of the brain) are involved in our ability to produce and comprehend language.

Functional MRI is also becoming a useful clinical tool. In some centres it has replaced the Wada test to determine where language is in the brain.

Scientists are also using fMRI to build up a finer picture of how the brain processes language by designing experiments that compare which areas are active during various tasks. For instance, researchers have observed differences in brain language regions of dyslexic children compared to those without dyslexia.

Researchers compared fMRI images of groups of children with and without dyslexia while they performed language-related tasks. They found that dyslexic children had, on average, less activity in Broca's area mainly on the left during this task. They also had less activity in or near Wernicke's area on the left and right, and a portion of the front of the temporal lobe on the right.

Could this type of brain imaging provide a diagnostic signature of dyslexia? This is a work-in-progress, but we hope further study will one day lead to a robust, objective and early brain-imaging test for dyslexia and other disorders.
Want to know how the brain controls your mood? Read today's accompanying piece here.

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What brain regions control our language? And how do we know this?

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The brain is key to our existence, but there's a long way to go before neuroscience can truly capture its staggering capacity. For now, though, our Brain Control series explores what we do know about the brain's command of six central functions: language, mood, memory, vision, personality and motor skills - and what happens when things go wrong.

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This Padlet has a host of tools/tutorials/resources about tech ideas, energizers, etc.

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Quiz_Emera Facilitation Skills Workshop Pre-Test

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What Trainers Need To Do Before, During & After Checklist

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What Trainers Need To Do Before, During & After Checklist