I'm fresh off three days at the LEARNTEC conference in Germany and the sessions were great but the real reason I come to events like these is for the conversation that starts as small talk and somehow turns into the most useful thing you heard all week. It's finally meeting someone in person that you've only known through a screen and realizing they're even better than you expected. That never gets old and I'm grateful that I'm able to have those experiences.

Thanks for reading!

Supported by iSpring

Vague feedback. Missed deadlines. Stakeholders who disappear until launch day. Heidi Kirby is tackling it all in her Working with SMEs session on May 28. Free. One hour. Genuinely useful.

​Register for now →​

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The Claude Tools Already Living in Your Account

Last week was about Claude Design; put storyboard in, get course out. A fundamentally different way to build.

This week, same tool. Different layer. Not what Claude can build for you, but what Claude already knows about you. Or would, if you'd set it up.

Most people are probably only using about 30% of what's already in their account. The good news is that tapping into the other 70% doesn't require an upgrade, a new subscription, or a single install. All it takes is a little knowledge and abot five well-spent minutes.
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Also supported by Neovation

I’m a big believer in using AI to move faster without giving up the steering wheel. This webinar shows how to turn a real L&D design brief into draft-ready storyboards, scenarios, and job aids—with AI as your co-designer, not your replacement.

​Register for the AI Workflows webinar →​

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Worth your attention
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Claude Projects: Stop Re-Explaining Yourself

Every new Claude conversation starts from zero. Your learning philosophy — gone. Your typical learner profile — start over. The instructional model your team uses — retype it.

Projects fix this in one easy step. Call it your Course Development Studio. Load in your ID framework, brand voice doc, learner personas, and a few examples of output you actually liked. Claude carries all of it into every conversation inside that project, automatically, every time.

Think of the difference between a collaborator who knows your work and a contractor who needs a full onboarding every Monday. That's the gap Projects closes.

Free for everyone. Up to five projects on a free account.

​Get started with Claude Projects →​

Claude Styles: Teach Claude Your Voice

You've read AI-generated course content that sounds like AI-generated course content. So has your audience.

Styles is a newer feature that fixes this, and most people have never touched it. Upload samples of your best work. Real writing, the stuff that actually sounds like your team. Claude builds a custom style profile from that, then matches your sentence length, tone, and formality every time you use it.

For L&D teams writing in-house content that needs to sound consistent across contributors, this isn't a nice-to-have. It's the difference between content that sounds like your organization and content that sounds like everyone else's AI.

​How to set up Claude Styles →​

Claude Skills: Your Instructional Design Model, Baked In

A prompt is a sticky note. A Skill is a standard operating procedure.

Skills are instruction sets — plain Markdown, no coding — that Claude loads automatically when you need them. You write it once. Claude knows it from then on. No re-explaining, no re-prompting, no hoping it remembers.

Build an assessment writer that always structures questions across cognitive levels the way your team does. Or a lesson plan generator that follows your instructional model without you spelling it out every session. The newest feature in this edition is the one most worth exploring first. And it is available for free on all plans.

​Create your first Skill with Claude's help →​

Also Worth Knowing: Anthropic's Prompt Generator

Anthropic has a free tool that writes your prompts for you. Most people don't know it exists because it lives at console.anthropic.com — the developer console — and the interface signals "not for you" the moment you land there. Ignore that signal.

The tool is simple. Describe what you want Claude to do. It generates a structured prompt using Anthropic's own best practices: role, context, constraints, output format, all built in. Type something like "I need a prompt that turns a dense compliance policy into scenario-based questions with feedback" and what comes back will easily beat anything you'd draft from scratch. Go copy-paste that in and be prepared to be amazed by what it gives you back!

Free to access. Create an account at console.anthropic.com and head to the Workbench.

​Anthropic's Prompt Generator →​

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The Bottom Line

These aren't hidden features. They're not waiting for some future update. They're in your account right now, unused. The version of Claude most people are running isn't the real Claude. It's Claude with the memory wiped, the voice stripped, and the workflow left to chance.

How often do you get powerful upgrades that are so easy and free?

🎵 Today I'm listening to Natalie Cole

📍Where I'll be next

• ​ATD International Conference, May 17-20 (Los Angeles, CA)
• ​Canadian eLearning Conference, May 29 (Niagara Falls, ON)
• ​Why Great Training Gets Ignored & How to Fix It, June 24 (Online)
• ​ATD Core4, Sept 29-Oct 1(Indianapolis, IN)

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