I’ve been using Lynda.com this week. I’m very keen to learn Adobe Illustrator CS4. Particularly, I’m interested in using Illustrator to create one of my photo uploads for our Week 2 Flickr assignment. Lynda.com is terrific. I feel like I’m learning just as much watching these tutorials as I would if I were actually sitting in an Illustrator class (and for a lot less money)! In this vein, I decided to explore Web 2.0 Tools in search of a similar software tutorials that are free. Low and behold, I found Woopid. Woopid contains professionally created tutorials for a host of hardware, software, gadgets, and operating system questions. While you will not find a tutorial for a complicated software package like Adobe Illustrator, you will find many, many other tutorials for both the PC and the Mac. In fact, Woopid’s Mac library is quite impressive.
The site is very easy to use. From the homepage (www.woopid.com), you can enter a search query to automatically have all related tutorials populate or, if you don’t know exactly for what you are looking, you can go to the library tab and look for tutorials by subject.
As I mentioned, Woopid is completely free. No account is needed to search for or watch tutorials. However, if you do create an account, which takes less than a minute to do, you can save favorite tutorials into your own “favorites” tab and you can send invites to friends to watch certain tutorials. Other cool features include a “bundles” tab where grouped tutorials are kept for complex tasks and a “request tutorial” tab where you can tell Woopid what you would like to see and if they get enough requests for it, they will create and post a tutorial on that topic.
To finish my research of Woopid, I decided to peruse their Mac tutorials. Since I am relatively new to the Mac, there are still some tricks I have yet to learn. One very simple Mac application I find challenging is, of all things, Spaces. I get confused navigating all over the place. But after watching the Woopid video, I am now a Spaces expert! Thanks, Woopid, for being both great and free.
Laura... this is a great resource. I need to go on top of the mountain tops and tell all our friends about this resource.
ReplyDeleteThank you for finding it. I am going to check it out now.
I was also wondering if you could use this at work? Since you work for a company that tends to be tech adverse could you recommend this site to the help and have them send out a mass email to inform employees about the site or maybe post a link on the intranet. Just a thought...
I ran across Woopid while researching Web 2.0 tools but didn't spend much time on the site. I guess that is why I initially wasn't impressed. Being a die hard Lynda.com user, I just didn't see how the two compared. Lynda is packed with tutorials and inspirational documentaries and Woopid has only a few tutorials.
ReplyDelete...and then Laura, I ran into your blog entry on Woopid and decided to give it another try. I have to agree with you and Q that Woopid is a wonderful resource. I think I let my Digital Native pride and Lynda.com elitism get in the way.
I feel this would be a beneficial resource to pass along among teachers and it's a safe site so it could be a great learning tool for students as well.
Great find, Laura! I am glad you found something that works for YOU!
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