How do I change the toner?

A recent tweet by Craig Taylor and a company called Wistia got me thinking about video for learning.  Video has been gathering pace over the last few years and more companies are introducing this as part of their learning strategy.

The Wistia blog has some very good ideas, and I think that for a company who deal with video every day, it’s both refreshing and honest of them to chart their journey with video as a marketing tool.

How do I change the toner?  – was the question that prompted the video below.  I thought that this would be a great opportunity to demonstrate how useful video could be in the business so within half an hour I’d created this video about how to change the toner in the printer.  I filmed it on iPhone and edited on iPad with the iMovie app. At the time we were using Jam as our social platform and I could upload the video from my pad.

So if you are just starting off with introducing video, try with something that is necessary but infrequent – or even something that you are always asked about.

Chances are that if more than two people ask you how to do something more people want to know how to do it but won’t ask.

Then when you are asked again – point them in the direction of the video which will get them used to using/searching for video.

What else would be ideal for a short video tutorial?

Have you found resistance to using video as a reference tool?

Another string to our bow

As a learning designer I seem to be asked to do more than just design online learning or other ‘learning’ interventions.

As part of a large project at the end of last year I was asked to create a video that would be shown to the business which would give a high level view of the new system that was to be introduced.  This provided me with a couple of problems – I’ve never worked in marketing/PR – so how can I make something as dry as a new system interesting and engaging?  The brief was – make it upbeat.

So I thought that it would be good to get an authentic voice from people who had already used the system, and maybe get them to answer some questions or concerns from the people who were getting it.

I also wanted to show the interface and how to navigate around it.  Here is the first part of the video (I took out the bit with the system!)

To any of you who have developed video as a demo/into to a concept etc. I’d love to hear your feedback, as I think I may be doing more of these this year, and would like to get better with each one!

I filmed this on a Canon D600 and edited in iMovie using Keynote for the text.

I do not own the copyright to the music  M83 – Midnight city.