Developing products that works for different languages

Recently I had the opportunity to watch the movie Babies, and I think is a great example for instructional designers of how - with one single product - you can address audiences that may not speak the same language ...

The recipe for that of course includes use universal things that everyone can relate & make the product very very visual :0)

Here is a trailer of the movie:



Source:http://focusfeatures.com/film/babies

Tool to create customized comics

Through Brian Remer from The Firefly Group (http://www.thefirefly.org/),I discovered this convenient tool to create my own comics.

It has many applications, for instance ...

• the comics (final product) can be used as a part of my instructional materials, or

• the creation of the comic (process) can be used as an activity to use to make learners reinforce what they learned, creating a comic about that.

The tool presents you with the empty frames and you can choose the characters (from a selection) and then choose balloons for thoughts or talk, you can add your own text and make some modifications to the characters such us size/scale, add objects, flip the direction the character is looking at, and choose expressions ...

Check it out at: http://www.makebeliefscomix.com/Comix/

Visually Interesting Statistics

As an instructional designer I am always looking for good examples of how to captivate an audience and convey a message effectively.

Here is one of my favorites examples, a TED Conference presentation by Hans Rosling:



By the way the topic of the session is very interesting too.


Source:
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html

Simplicity is not always easy to achieve

I am a PC AND Mac user ... I have one computer of each ... but I must admit that sometimes when designing training materials that should be simple ... it requires a lot of thought to do not over engineer it !

I enjoyed this video that has a grain of truth ! ;0)