My neurodivergent brain can thrive under pressure and my ability to multi-task would win gold medals. But like everyone, I have my limits. When the feelings of overwhelm start to creep in. When I question if I can really juggle everything being thrown my way. When I doubt my ability as a parent, when my boys have only done their home reading twice in a week, because there has simply not been enough time in the day to do it all.

It's times like these I forget to metaphorically breathe.

JavaScript can be hard! I’m still a novice myself, so as a freebie to all you fellow JavaScript novices enjoy the template I used in this video walkthrough. This includes the html code for you to use as a basis and tweak to your needs.

There can be multiple reasons why someone will want to leave permanent employment, and for some of us the decision will have been made for us, for example due to redundancy or lay-offs.

If you find yourself in a position where you are at a crossroads with where you go next, consider the following questions.

My biggest advice for contracting? Build those relationships! It really does pay off to make yourself known. When you’re placed into an organisation show them what you’ve got! Talk to people in the team, introduce yourself and exceed expectations. Those relationships can be vital in seeing you being asked back for future contracts.

So you’ve made the decision to come away from permanent work, but where do you go next? Do you take the leap into self-employment and try and make it on your own? Or do you go down the route of agency work and become a contractor?

There’s no one size fits all answer for this question. It will be dependent on what you are looking for from a job, your circumstances and your goals etc.

As a person who does both freelance and contracting, I ‘ve experienced the positives and negatives of both ways of working.

What a ride this year has been so far and jeez is self-employment one heck of an emotional rollercoaster. I go from feeling so excited and happy about my work, to anxiety that it may all be taken away, to existential dread at what I would do if I had to go back to permanent work, to blissful delusion once the next invoice goes in. It’s a lot.

In today’s blog post we’re discussing feedback. Feedback from your clients or stakeholders is crucial in gauging whether the learning your are developing is meeting their needs and expectations. It helps guide the development and design phases, and more often than not you will have multiple feedback stages within a project.

But…

Whilst feedback is necessary, it can be easy to slip into review cycle after review cycle if you’re not careful. What do I mean by this? Think jumping on the feedback carousel and going round and round and round until the client eventually decides it’s time to get off.

If I see anymore LinkedIn gurus luring transitioning teachers in with promises that they already have all the skills they will need to make six figures, I’m going to go insane. Because inherently, children and adults learn differently. Also, if there’s some secret to ID’s making six figures please share, because I’m definitely not in on it and I’ve been doing this for 8 years!

It’s freebie time again! Today we have a simple flashcard interaction for you to make your own. Change the text, images, slide design, use this as you wish!

I held my breath as she picked up the garment, studied it, frowned and then began to rip it apart. No not figuratively. Literally.

She told me the stitching was lousy (or words to the effect) and said I needed to do it again.

Nowadays I can look back on this moment and laugh, because ultimately she was right. The stitching was lousy and it probably did need redoing. But at the time it felt like I’d been punched in the gut. This lecturer in question didn’t offer any advice or support to help me improve my technique, heck she didn’t even ask me if I wanted her input. She just walked away.

Little enhancements can really elevate an eLearning and if like me, you use custom navigation, the design of your buttons is important, not only aesthetically but for accessibility and functionality too.

So I've pulled together 7 really simple button designs each with different animations and effects, for you to copy and drop into your next Storyline eLearning.

Quite often, stakeholders will want the project done yesterday and will be thinking about their own targets to hit and boxes to check.

Balancing creating learning in a short timescale, versus producing something that is still engaging and encourages learning retention, can be tricky and there almost always will be compromise on some level.

Once you get your head around it, the Adobe software can be pretty easy to use, but if you don’t know what you’re doing it can be intimidating and spending £60 a month on a subscription, just to spend most of your time glued to Youtube trying to find the tool you need, is not ideal!

But did you know there are many free, or cheaper alternatives to the Adobe suite that can offer you the chance to practice, without feeling like you need to ‘get your money’s worth?’

The authoring tool Articulate Storyline is sometimes described as being ‘PowerPoint on steroids,’ and whilst that’s a topic for another day, Storyline is close to being a PowerPoint replica in its basic functionality and façade. However, Storyline is missing one of my favourite PowerPoint features…

…The morph transition.

Don’t worry this isn’t going to be another post on the pros and cons of ChatGPT. Amid the obsession with ChatGPT, many people are forgetting that AI powered systems and platforms have actually been a part of digital learning for some time.

In an eLearning, it can be really easy to slip into doing ‘too much.’ As developers we always want to try and make our eLearning courses as interactive, engaging and visually pleasing as possible, but sometimes simple really is better.

Not all gamification needs to be blindingly obvious, in some instances the learner could be scoring points without even realising it.