Indiana University: IT Training Tips Blog

Join us at lynda.com day in Bloomington (Feb. 29th) or IUPUI (Mar. 1) and learn how to maximize your lynda eLearning experience! Take advantage of the opportunity to:

• Attend a workshop that will teach you how you can integrate lynda.com content into your academic course delivery
• Learn how you can get the most out of your personal lynda learning experience
• Speak with lynda.com’s usability experts about your favorite features and areas you think can be improved
• Learn about key features and best practices for using lynda’s online training library

Lynda.com representatives will be available to speak with at the following times and locations:

• Wednesday, Feb. 29, Noon – 5pm in the Wells Library lobby (IU Bloomington)
• Thursday, Mar. 1, 9am – Noon in the Campus Center lobby (IUPUI)

As part of these events, IU faculty and IT Training staff will present a special session titled Integrate lynda.com Content into your Academic Course. You will learn why you might want to integrate lynda.com content into your academic course and get ideas for a number of different ways you can do it. Additionally, lynda representative Jen Jortner will be presenting Tips and Tricks for Using lynda.com online and in-person at IUPUI. Take this session to learn how you can get the most out of your lynda.com learning experience.

Registration for both sessions is free. You can read descriptions, dates and times of these sessions and register online!

Questions? Contact us!

Check out our lynda.com offerings here.

Easier ways to search

Lynda.com has not only changed its appearance, but has added enhancements to its search features.

The new interface allows you to search lynda’s library of training videos by choosing the subject, the software, or the author of the topic you are looking for:

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Based on the most recent statistics, the lynda.com training offerings appear to be rather popular with the IU community. And they have made another change recently that is likely to only make it easier for those who use an iOS-based device (iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad) to get to their fine work…

The lynda.com app [free!] available in the iTunes Store now works with the IU login method.

Using it is very easy:
1. Install the free lynda.com app on your iOS device.
2. Open the free lynda.com app, and push the “login” button.
3. In the login screen, flick toward the bottom, so you see the “web portal access” button, and push it.
4. In the URL field, enter the URL for the IU lynda.com training portal:
https://shib.lynda.com/Shibboleth.sso/InCommon?providerId=urn:mace:incommon:iu.edu&target=https://shib.lynda.com/InCommon
and be certain the “Remember this URL” switch is ON, then push the blue Go button.

You’ll be prompted for your CAS Authentication information (your IU username and passphrase), and once you type that in properly, you’ll be whisked away into the lynda.com training library!

IT Training & Education is pleased to announce that our agreement with Lynda.com to provide their video training library and exercise files to IU students, faculty and staff has been extended. We’ll have a full announcement later on, but we wanted to assure our users that they could continue to access the Lynda.com content past the original end date, which was June 30th.

So enjoy the content, and we’ll have more information soon.

You can access the content here:

http://ittraining.iu.edu/lynda

After all the great feedback we received from the IU community, the decision was made to extend the Lynda.com pilot to June 30th of 2010.  That means that the IU community gets an extra 6 months of free Lynda.com access.

So please keep using the service and let us know how it works for you!

Check out http://ittraining.iu.edu/lynda for more information and to log in.

You may already know that Photoshop blend modes can immeasurably enhance your creativity and playfulness. You may be familiar with the artful aspects of blend modes; however, most Photoshop users don’t know they are corrective, too. Understanding how they work is a key to using them to your best advantage.

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You may have attended the IT Training & Education STEPS workshop, “Adobe Illustrator CS4: The Basics,” and would like to learn more. Make lynda.com your personal trainer! If you would like a little review of Illustrator followed by more advanced concepts, see Mordy Golding’s Illustrator CS4 Essential Training.

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In an earlier blog post, Veronica discusses the lynda.com training that is available for Office for the Macintosh. I was happy to see that she was sharing this information, because participants who attend the IT Training & Education PowerPoint workshops almost always have questions about PowerPoint for Mac versus PowerPoint for Windows. Is the interface exactly the same in the two applications? Do they use the same filename extensions? Can I open up and edit a Mac presentation with the Windows version? Etc., etc…

Since IU students, staff, and faculty can now access lynda.com for free, it is a great time to learn more about PowerPoint for the Mac. In David Rivers’ tutorial called PowerPoint 2008 for Mac Essential Training, you can find out everything there is to know about the Mac version of this application, including how to:

• create, edit, and share professional slideshows and presentations
• efficiently navigate presentations
• apply custom themes
• place and edit text, images, and multimedia files
• publish a self-running or manual slideshow

Mac users can watch all of the modules included in this comprehensive tutorial, or they can just watch the sections they are most interested in. If you have already attended our STEPS PowerPoint workshops, you may just want to view the section called Understanding the Interface.

If you haven’t yet taken any of the STEPS workshops in this series, consider attending one of the following:

1. PowerPoint: The Basics
2. PowerPoint: Enhancing & Packaging a Presentation
3. PowerPoint: Customizing a Presentation
4. PowerPoint: Project Lab 

This is the last official blog article in the lynda.com series, but you can bet that there will be more information about this fantastic learning resource in upcoming posts.

As you know, Adobe Flash is a robust platform for creating web and desktop applications as well as simple animations. IT Training & Education currently offers three workshops focused on Flash:

• Flash CS4: The Basics — Basic instruction on the interface, drawing, and Flash concepts.
• Flash CS4: Interactivity Basics — Introduction of ActionScript 3.0 to create interactivity using buttons in a Flash movie.
• Flash CS4: ActionScript Programming Basics — Basic concepts in ActionScript 3.0 such as the use of control structures, collision detection and animation.

While these workshops give you a great foundation in Adobe Flash, there are many, many topics that aren’t covered in-depth. Lynda.com can be used to fill in and augment the topics in these workshops. From now until December 20th, IU community members get FREE access to lynda.com. As of this writing, lynda.com offers 10 courses in Flash CS4 and 7 courses in ActionScript 3.0. Remember that the Flash platform isn’t limited to the Adobe Flash software. In addition to the Flash specific courses, lynda.com offers 4 courses on Adobe Air and 10 courses in Flex. That’s 31 courses about or relating to the Flash platform. To simplify things, this article will focus only on the courses related to the Flash application as well as ActionScript 3.0.

Continue after the jump!
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At IT Training & Education, we have a workshop called Acrobat 9: Forms, which teaches you the basics of creating Acrobat forms, along with how to distribute them, and collect data, along with several ways to store that data once collected.  It covers all the major aspects of creating forms in Acrobat 9 Pro.

However, there is a lesser known program called LiveCycle Designer, which is installed with Acrobat Pro, which can also create forms.  These forms can be created from a template, or a spreadsheet, and it can even start with a blank document. It can also create forms that can be connected to a database, and can create more complex calculated fields using FormCalc or JavaScript (JavaScript can also be used in Acrobat 9).  LiveCycle Designer is a much more complex program, and unfortunately we don’t have time in Acrobat 9: Forms to cover it.

Now that IU students, faculty and staff can access lynda.com, you can now learn how to use this program, and create forms in a different way which might work better for your situation.  One of the main benefits of LiveCycle Designer is that it can give you a better starting point, since LiveCycle forms do not need a pre-existing file to work from, unlike Acrobat 9 Pro.
In Acrobat 9 Pro: Creating Forms from lynda.com (make sure you’re logged in through IT Training & Education’s lynda.com portal to access the workshop), Brian Wood covers the creation of Forms in both Acrobat Pro and LiveCycle Designer.

However, if you’ve already taken Acrobat 9: Forms from IT Training & Education, you can skip sections 1, 2 and 3 of the lynda.com video series, giving you a head start on getting through the rest of the videos, and saving approximately the same amount of time you would have spent in the IT Training & Education workshop.  Understanding form creation can probably save you time learning LiveCycle Designer as well.
Suggested IT Training & Education Prerequisites:

• Acrobat 9: Forms – Optional prerequisite. Covers the first 3 sections of Acrobat 9 Pro: Creating Forms on lynda.com, including Form creation and distribution.