27 Mar 2018

Bumpy beginnings, keep on! How ? Here some practical advices.

I got a letter from a worried toastmaster. She is in one of the clubs I visited.

1. The Icebreaker comes I so slow, I had to click 5 times. 

I usually answer, it depends on the bandwidth but it has to arrive all the way from US!

2. Arrived to the page were it does congratulate me as finished, but I did not even given the speech, my Icebreaker! 

About that I wrote a whole post already: the congratulation page means nothing. It is at the end of each project and one can arrive there just by going page to page or jumping at the page before and advancing one. IT IS CONFUSING.

I even signaled it to the highest decision levels about Pathways to no avail.
Till you do not answer ALL the Auto Assessment After questions and save, the project is NOT finished to Base Camp. Even if you did already give your speech after completing all the tasks. (That one happened to me a year ago) Let me show again.
Till we do not see, in ANY PROJECT this comparison between BEFORE and AFTER Assessments, no project is closed. As soon as it is there pops up for us: the project is considered closed by the Base Camp.

3. Where do I find an Evaluation form I can send to my Evaluator? I would like to put my name and title and I can not. 

That is when the Senior Learning Specialist from TMI closed our discussion, half year ago. When I told her that Adobe Acrobat does not let us fill out forms free any more. Each of us had to find new solutions, depending on our system.

First, let me tell you that at the end of each project, (just after the "self assessment after" page) there is a page YOUR Evaluation. It is there that we can find not only the Evaluation form for that project, but also the Project, ready to Print. It opens the Project and from there we can also save it to our computer). I opened here the menu under the page that lets us jump always from one part of project to the other.


One has to download the Evaluation, save it, then we can open it and write on it. In case you have any problem with Acrobat from Adobe, I also use XODO app, and Preview, both free on my Mac or iPad. 

As I said Saturday, I am now "Pathways Proficient" (4 path finished and many bumps on the road that did teach me trics of the trade) but a year ago, I was Pathways Naïve. And yes, one more item I discovered only after a few month of frustrations!

4 The base camp does not remember where I was, she wrote me. 

It took me three month for my son to come and visit, and show me two things. 
a) To open up the window I use totally. Then I did not have to pull the project rectangle and could see easy all the arrows to navigate.
b) More important, how to configure my browser so if I open a link it does create a new TAB so when I close it, I find myself where I started! Suddenly I had my "bookmark": the last tab I used. In plus, Base Camp does remember where we were in a project last time we opened it!.

This "small" adjustments to my browser changed my life in pathways and also showed me that many small things depend on ME and not on the Base Camp!

2 comments:

JT said...

Really helpful Julie
Sorry I did not check the blog before starting my journey
Jenny

Canadian Dodd Family said...

At least the Blogger pop-up opens to the width of this box. I know tell all to expand the pop-up to full screen. (Thanks Julie for spending 15 minutes with me at the beginning to show me online in a Zoom session)

Congratulations, for being in Pathways for a year.

I am also advising every Toastmaster to take the Ice Breaker project on the Pathways menu. You do not have to wait until Pathways rolls out in your Region. It takes 50% of the mystery out of Pathways.