Much of my energy at work has been invested in starting to offer (free) workshops to users at both of the locations I work at and online. The workshops are modeled after ones that were offered at a previous college library I worked at. There were logistical things to deal with like booking equipment and rooms. With the assistance of knowledgeable staff these things turned out to be the easiest to do. It is also beneficial that the libraries I work at have their own computers labs, that we schedule, which were available for the workshops. Some other things I had to work on were setting up a registration form, creating a page available through the library website for people to go to for information/ registration, and advertising the event.
Google Forms
For the registration form I was able to use Google Forms to setup a registration page and using addons like FormLimiter and Email Notifications I was able to add needed features. FormLimiter allows you to create a notification that will be provided to anyone trying to sign up after the a maximum number of responses is reached that the event is full and to contact me. The email notifications addon allows you to create a custom email message registrants will receive upon submitting the form. I used this to create a registration confirmation with the event details, my contact information, and a display of the information they submitted in case there were some errors. These addons were able to be included while creating the Google Form and this video helped me to properly create the email rule.
I created a different registration form for each workshop and set registration limits that matched the number of computers in each room. Feel free to check out the online registration form but please do not sign up unless you really want to attend. This is my first experience using Google Forms and it was exactly what I needed. It was easier to setup than I anticipated and the embed code provide after clicking Send was just what I needed for the LibGuide based page on the library website. I will be using this for all my workshops in the future.
Workshop
The workshop itself was about an hour long and covered how to setup a presentation in Prezi and Google Slides. Below, I have a Prezi that covers the new tutorial students will experience when they first sign up for Prezi. Overall, the students that have taken the workshop so far, were more interested in Google Slides over Prezi because it can be downloaded for offline use. Both web apps allow users to share the project with others and work on it collaboratively. In the future I think I will more heavily advertise the Google Slides part since it has generated more interest.
