“It’s easy stuff — easy to work with.”
- First-time Articulate user following hands-on workshop

On Monday my colleague Don and I traveled to West Point, NY — home of the United States Military Academy — to attend the FBI National Academy Associates Training Conference, where we were invited to participate by Training Committee Chairman Bill Kiley of the International Association for Property and Evidence. Attendees included primarily chiefs of police from across the Northeast U.S. and Canada, as well as active and retired employees of the FBI and CIA. It was a really great day and always a fun experience to introduce new users to our tools.

Like the conference I attended in Toronto last year, this one gave attendees the chance to build sample training courses on the fly with Articulate Presenter — without any formal training and with only our helpful teenage mentors — Kaleigh, Ryan, and Danny — who volunteered for the day to be by their side and assist with using the software (since young people are natural experts with technology, of course).

The groups got to use the new version of Articulate Presenter (currently being beta tested by a few hundred customers) and were particularly impressed by some of the new features we’ll be rolling out soon.

The day was a rewarding experience not only for these future Articulate customers and teen mentors, but for me and Don, too — since watching people use our software helps us understand how they think and how they interact with the tools. Mostly, the day reinforced how easy Articulate products are to use, as you’ll hear in these videos:

When we announced that we were going to do a raffle for licenses of Articulate Rapid E-Learning Studio — based on the best ideas for how law enforcement agencies might leverage Articulate Presenter — just about every hand in the room went up. Here’s a sampling of the list attendees came up with (winners, as selected by the teen mentors, in bold):

• Criminal public awareness
• Campus safety communications
• Awards & recruiting for officers
• Evidence storage training
• High-risk procedural training
• Scam public awareness info
• Law updates
• Wanted people
• Recruitment
• Publicizing evacuation routes
• Crime patterns analysis
• Amber alerts
• Training bulletins

We ended the day by asking Bill to say a few words about Articulate (note that Captain Smiley, never one to be left out, joins Bill in this video):

Big thanks to Bill for the kind words and for giving us the opportunity to participate in the conference! And thanks to Kaleigh, Danny, and Ryan for helping attendees build sample Articulate courses.

[ video testimonial ]