- “Learn Better” – Ulrich Boser
- “Confessions of a Public Speaker” – Scott Berkun
Instructional Design and eLearning Portfolio Ideas
- Google Maps Platform projects:
- Choosing your APIs
- Securing your API keys
- Setting up a VM for development using Google Cloud Free Tier (public version)
- Smaller Google Cloud portfolio projects:
- How to use Google Cloud Text-to-Speech to generate eLearning voiceovers (use this as the subject of the TM “Research” speech? nah)
- Toastmasters Pathways projects for Job Seekers – “Make Connections Through Networking (3)”; “Prepare for an Interview (3)”; “Building a Social Media Presence (4)”
- Marketing Yourself on LinkedIn
- Leadership in Toastmasters – “the MF ManiFesto (develop in online guest speeches at clubs on the way to DTM)”; “why we gotta keep getting more members?”; “The SMART Distinguished Club Program – it’s development for you”; “20 or Plus 5” (keynote-length speech for PM5)
- eLearning for Toastmasters Club Coaches / Club Mentors / Club Sponsors
- eLearning for Toastmasters club meeting roles – Toastmaster, General Evaluator, Evaluator, Grammarian, Timer
- Adaptive testing project – ???
- Losing Weight – “‘Diet’ means ‘way of life'”; “Your Hybrid Powerplant (old TM speech)”; “What does ‘fat-burning zone’ mean on exercise bikes?”; “What is Max Heart Rate, exactly?”; “calculating Basal Metabolic Rate (history of BMR calculations)”; “is metabolic advantage a thing?”; “Muscle burns HOW MANY calories?”; “can you exercise yourself thin?”;
- Visual Guide to Git
Links for Instructional Designers
- Why Instructional Designers Need to Use LinkedIn to Build Their Network
- Cathy Moore’s Action Mapping blog
- Twine – open-source HTML editor to design interactive stories (i.e., branching scenarios per Cathy Moore) (has timed interactions – could use to hint spelling for language learning?)
- Devlin Peck blog:
- Is Instructional Design Right For You? (1 hour talk, and wanders somewhat)
- How to Become an Instructional Designer in 2021
- Creating an Instructional Design Portfolio
- Examples: Devlin Peck portfolio
- Cath Ellis portfolio
- Troy Ashman
- Joe Stubenrauch
- Laura Strombergsson (Devlin’s video review of portfolio) (attended Devlin’s Portfolio Bootcamp)
- Amanda Nguyen
- Aleksandra Drobik (attended Devlin’s Portfolio Bootcamp)
- Kassie Calvo (attended Devlin’s Portfolio Bootcamp)
- Links from one Facebook Become an IDOL post:
Parallax Scroll with CSS
My first portfolio project will be FreeCodeCamp’s “Tribute page”, the first project in their beginner Responsive Web Design track.
It’s a fairly simple web page, and it would be pretty easy to create a minimal solution that fulfills all the requirements. But if I’m going to add it to my portfolio, I want something at least a little better than the minimum, so I’ve been thinking about ways to improve the look of the page.
Parallax scrolling is where two or more elements on a web page move at different speeds when the page is scrolled (vertically or horizontally). It’s a little gimmicky, I suppose, but I think it will work for this project.
The Google Web Developers December 2016 Updates (blog) had an article titled Performant Parallaxing that explained how to implement parallax scrolling using CSS that works cross-browser.
It looks like it should be pretty simple to add to my first portfolio project. And since I currently work for Google and plan to use Google Maps Platform examples in my later portfolio works, using their parallax scrolling solution for a non-Google portfolio project seems appropriate. However, the article was written in 2016, so it may require changes to work with current browsers.
Web Development and UX Portfolio project ideas
- Google Places Autocomplete – select a city, then search within that city’s bounding rectangle (requires updating the AutocompleteOptions dynamically)
- Shopping list (PHP backend? Google Cloud? Heroku? Netlify?)
- Exercise tracker (PHP / Heroku / GCloud / Netlify backend?)
- Mixed-mode transportation search – combine Google Maps Platform and CapMetro APIs to find the closest bus route when the start or finish is outside CapMetro’s service area.
- Build a proxy server for Google Maps web service APIs, like Raymond Camden’s article on using Pipedream to build a proxy server for APIs. This CSS-Tricks article talks about other ways to build proxies with serverless functions (such as, perhaps, Google Cloud Functions)
- Interactive Club Finder for Toastmasters (using Google Dynamic Maps)
GOOGLE DIALOGFLOW
Well, boy is my face red. I identified the wrong Google product to use to create chatbots. (also, I’m writing this while getting in a few minutes of exercise on my FitDesk stationary bike).
In my previous post, I identified the Hangouts Chat API as the Google product to build chatbots. Oops. I think that’s the product to use to add a chatbot into Hangouts Chat.
No, the correct product to build chatbots is Google Dialogflow. Dialogflow is where one would build the interactions that could be used in another environment, such as Hangouts.
Build a chatbot for language learning?
I’ve been interested in learning languages for most of my life. One thing I struggle with is making the jump from class, book, or app to conversation.
Today I had a thought – what if we used chatbots as a stepping stone between the book/app knowledge and real-world conversations?
I work for Google, so my first thought was to see if Google has a Chatbot API. Turns out, there’s a Hangouts Chatbot API that can be used for free. Score!
But it’s not the only free chatbot API out there – here’s a list of 10 chatbot APIs (including Google’s)
Now the question is – which ones make it easy (or even possible) to build chatbots in another language?
Are HTML Image Maps still a thing?
Well, they were still a thing as of 2013, apparently. There were even jQuery Responsive Web Design or WordPress plugins to resize the image map coordinates for different image sizes.
The Raphael library is an alternative and is still available on Github as of June 12, 2021.
PowerShell and the Google Cloud Vision API
I was browsing the document for Google’s Cloud Vision API, and I noticed that the “Detect text in files (PDF/TIFF)” (OCR) sample can be used with curl or PowerShell !!!
Skills for corporate Instructional Designers
I’m thinking about changing careers to Instructional Design / Development. As part of my thought process, I wondered what the currently preferred software package is, so I asked a question in the Instructional Design group on Facebook.
One response included a set of skills that corporate IDs should know – I wanted to save that set here:
- consulting
- storyboarding
- adult learning theory
- analysis methods
- engagement
- evaluation methods
- graphic design
- LMS knowledge
I’m sure I’ll find more in the future.