Quick Prep for Classes: A Case Study
On January 31 I presented a webinar for the “Texas Connect” project of the East Texas Genealogical Society. It covered Texas state research and African American research, using The Family History Guide. I prepared the content using the Quick Prep approach in the Trainers menu (https://www.thefhguide.com/train-quick-prep.html):
-
Select interesting articles and videos from TFHG to show and discuss.
-
Log in to the Online Tracker and mark the stars for each of these items.
-
Create a brief summary sheet of talking points for the items.
In just a few hours of preparation I put together two successful training modules covering nearly an hour, without having to build a slide deck. Comments from the attendees were very positive, and they were excited to follow with the topics on The Family History Guide.
I posted the talking points document here, for reference:
The label for each item is the Goal, Choice, and Step … so 1A-4 would be Goal 1 in the Texas page, Choice A, Step 4.
Additional Thoughts
- The articles and videos I selected were my own preferences for the training. Your selections for any given training class are up to you; or, your organization may decide it wants to focus on certain things.
- A substantial benefit of doing the Quick Prep is that you can see a tremendous amount of new information about your topics in a short period of time. The content you review, whether included in the training or not, tends to stick with you.
- The talking points can be printed out, or viewed on a second monitor.
- If you already have slides or outside information you want to share, you can mix those in between the screen demos of The Family History Guide. Showing screen shots of The Family History Guide is usually not the best approach, because a) the viewers won’t typically see how you arrived at the screens, and b) the context of surrounding and adjacent material is lost.
We hope you enjoy preparing and delivering family history classes with the Quick Prep approach!
