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Friday Finds
Fresh ideas, practical tools, and marketing-inspired thinking for people who design learning.
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I’ve got the itch to plan an outdoor adventure for October. I just haven’t decided where or how ambitious I want to be. The current shortlist includes one of the Nordic countries, Slovenia, Montenegro, or Albania, or something closer to home, like a long-distance hiking trail. A hut-to-hut or inn-to-inn route sounds especially good: big days outside, followed by a hot meal, a real bed, and no need to carry my entire life on my back.
I’m fine with chilly weather, a little rain, and some climbing. If you’ve taken a trip like this—or know a route that’s especially great in October—I’d love to hear your recommendations.
Thanks for reading!
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🎵 Today I'm listening to Young MC
(Where are my 80's people at?) |
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Supported by iSpring
Got something useful to share with other L&D pros? iSpring is looking for speakers for upcoming L&D events, and it’s a great chance to get your ideas out of the slide deck and in front of learning peers, decision-makers, and industry leaders. If you’ve been meaning to build more visibility around your work, this is a smart place to start.
Become an iSpring speaker →
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Closing Gaps in Your Workflow
Some tools help you create the thing.
Other tools help you move it from one place to another without breaking it, flattening it, or otherwise going mad in the process.
That second group doesn’t get enough love.
This week’s Tools Edition is all about the awkward handoffs: video to learning, documents to AI, and AI output to almost anywhere else.
Three small tools. Three common headaches. Three simple solutions.
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Also supported by Neovation
Every ID project starts with the source-material dump: decks, PDFs, SOPs, old courses, mystery spreadsheets, and a few “important” files nobody can explain. In AI-Assisted Content Intake and Gap Analysis, you’ll see how AI can turn that mess into a clean catalog, surface what matters, and flag gaps before they become design problems.
August 19 at 1 pm ET / 12 pm CT / 10 am PT.
Save your seat →
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Interakly: Turn watching into thinking
Video can explain almost anything. It can also lull people into a pleasant state of cognitive hibernation.
Interakly lets you add questions, polls, feedback, information cards, calls to action, and branching choices directly to a video. Paste in a YouTube link and start building. No account required.
Instead of waiting until the end for a quiz, you can pause at exactly the moment a decision matters.
Imagine a video about a difficult performance conversation. Just before the manager responds, stop and ask:
What should the manager say next?
Let the learner choose. Then show what happens.
That small shift turns watching into thinking.
What I like about it:
- Viewers don’t need accounts.
- Branching supports realistic decisions.
- You can track responses and trouble spots.
- It’s currently free during early access.
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MarkItDown: Give AI a cleaner file
Your PowerPoint deck was designed for human eyes. When you give it to AI, the model also gets repeated headers, footers, formatting artifacts, broken reading order, and other token-consuming debris.
That clutter isn’t just messy. It can waste tokens. You may be paying the model to chew through information that contributes nothing to the answer, and hitting your usage limits much sooner than you need to.
MarkItDown converts PowerPoint decks, PDFs, Word files, spreadsheets, images, and other formats into clean, structured Markdown. It preserves useful elements such as headings, lists, tables, links, and text while stripping away most of the needless baggage.
What I like about it:
- It can reduce wasted AI tokens.
- It preserves meaningful document structure.
- It’s free.
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CopyNPaste: Make your formatting behave
AI writes a polished response with headings, links, and tidy bullet points. Then you paste it into another app and get hashtags, stray asterisks, broken bullets, and messy leftovers.
CopyNPaste converts Markdown into formatting built for its destination. Paste in your content, choose where it’s going, copy the result, and move on with your life.
It works with Google Docs, Notion, Slack, Teams, WhatsApp, and email, among others.
What I like about it:
- No account required.
- It supports several common platforms.
- It’s free.
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Also supported by aNewSpring
Summer is a good time to pull your learning content off the shelf and ask the uncomfortable question: Is this still building the skills people actually need? Courses can look polished, approved, and complete while the work keeps changing underneath them. That’s why I like aNewSpring’s free Learning Scan. In 7 minutes, it helps you spot where your training is losing impact and what to fix first.
Run the 7-minute Learning Scan →
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The Bottom Line
The flashiest tool isn’t always the most useful.
Sometimes the real hero is a tiny utility that removes an irritating step you've been repeating all week:
- Interakly turns passive video into active practice.
- MarkItDown turns messy files into cleaner AI input.
- CopyNPaste turns AI output into usable communication.
None of these are huge headliners. They just fix the parts of your workflow that break down.
What other workflow irritations do you wish you could solve with a handy tool like these? |
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P.S. Know someone who would find this helpful?
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(Already subscribed? You can grab my book, buy me a coffee, or book me to speak at your company.)
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