My Top Seven Skillshare Classes

Have you ever just wanted to learn a specific skill like how to make you doodles into works of art, how to cook meatballs or how to design your own habits? Then look no further than Skillshare.

Skillshare is a platform that like it says in the names allows teachers for all over the world to share their skills from.This week I will be talking about the top seven skillshare classes that will get you learning a wide range of skills that can help you daily.

1. The first class that I absolutely love Digital Illustration: Doodles to Design. This class teaches you how to take your doodles and make them into cool works of art. The instructor is Jon Burgerman an award winning illustrator based out of New York. I highly recommend this class because of the way it brings out your inner child through creating doodles and then teaches you how to make them into works of art.

After You are done creating your works of art. The second class from Skillshare that you should take is Get Stuff Done Like a Boss- Design Your Workflow and Double Your Productivity in 21 Days. This class is all about learning how to be more productive through developing cornerstone habits. The instructor is Tiago Forte and he is really good at breaking down the ways you can things done through developing habits and introducing different tools in order to be more productive. I highly recommend this course.

After you have gotten things done the next step you might be a little hungry so the next skillshare class that I recommend is Show Us Your Balls: Meatball Making with the Meatball Shop. This  class is all about creating your own meatball inspired dish. The instructor is super chef Daniel Holzman and he goes through the entire process of creating your own sauce and the meatballs of course. He gives many valuable tips on how to get creative with meatballs. I highly recommend this course for anyone looking to spice up their meals.

After you have filled your belly with those delicious meatballs you have just made, you might be in the mood to play some video games. Because of this, I recommend Make Games From Scratch: Getting Started With Unity this class teaches you how to create your own video game using the Unity platform. And the best part is, that it involves zero coding. The instructor is Brandon Wu, and he goes through the entire process of making a building your own virtual world. So If you have ever wanted to make your own video game this class is definitely for you.

Last but not and this is my favorite Skillshare that I have ever taken and its called Hey, Cool Shirt: Designing Effective T-Shirt Graphics this class is taught Chris Delorenzo of the awesome clothing company Johnny Cupcakes. I love this class because it takes you through the entire process of designing your own bad ass t-shirt. I highly recommend this class because not only does it help with design but it shows you technical things related to t shirt designs and also how to effectively brand something. I highly recommend taking this class. So, what’s you  favorite skillshare classes?

Yours in Awesome Learning,

Janeille

The Best MOOC’s To Take That Will Prepare You For College

Preparing for college is tough, there is the making friends and if you are living on campus, living with people you don’t know, not to mention the coursework, it can be downright overwhelming I know I felt that way.

Now what if I told you that there are some seriously great MOOC’s that will help you be better prepared for college academically. These classes will you help you to learn how to learn so that you have enough time to party while getting great grades. I think that college is a lot easier if you know how to play the game so that is why I want share with you five MOOC’s that will help you to crush college.

The first class I want to tell you about is the UC San Diego class called Learning How to Learn: Powerful Mental tools to help you master tough subjects. This class is taught by Dr. Barbard Oakley a professor of Engineering and Industrial Engineering . It is also taught by Dr. Terrence Sejnowski, the Fracis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute. I like this class because it teaches you about universal learning techniques from subjects like math ,art, music and other fields. This class gives you insight into how your brain learns and by using the techniques taught it will help you to figure out how you best learn and help you to use this information as a tool to study effectively( in between your hangovers of course)

The next class I want to tell you about to Personal Family and Financial Planning. I can tell you from experience as a broke college student that knowing how to manage your money it a key skill not only in college but in life. That’s why the next course I love is also from coursera and its all about managing your money. This class is taught by Michael Gutter PHD. from the University of Florida. It teaches you about cash, credit, wealth, and risk management as well as the environmental effects on personal and family financial management. After taking this class you will know how to budget to have enough money to pay for nights on the town as well as tuition payments.

Nihao, the next class I think is crucial for college is Chinese for beginners. This Nihao (Hello in mandarin), while in the US ,Chinese is not the main language spoken I believe language skills are very important to learn in college  (I’m biased towards Chinese) due to the rapid globalization of our world. It can’t hurt to know another language and its makes you way more marketable for jobs after college if you are fluent in a language other than English. So get a head start before college by taking a foreign language.

Hungry anyone, This  class by Stanford University , Child Nutrition and Cooking talks about how to prepare healthy meals for children. I believe it is also very helpful for college students while (I would hope) that as a college student you have no children, this class not only teaches you about nutrition but also how to cook healthy meals and even teaches you how to stock a kitchen do you have the staples available so you never go hungry. This is enormously helpful because it helps you to eat out less (saving crazy money) and is the gift that keeps on giving for a lifetime.

So, to recap language skills, personal finance planning, learning Chinese and knowing how to cook  are the life skills that the MOOC’s featured teach you and what I think you would need to know to make it throughout college and life. What do you think are the best MOOC’s to take that will help prepare for college?

Yours in Awesome Learning,

Janeille

You Dawg It’s Past Your Bedtime: Design Your Own Habit

The next step on my learning journey involves Skill share, an online platform that allows anyone to take classes on various topics  including business, design and even cooking . Recently, I took a class on Skillshare called , Design Your Own habits: Behaviour Design. It is taught by Tiago Forte, he a productivity coach that helps people to develop habits that allow them to be more productive and overall more effective in getting things done in life.

I must say that this class was really helpful because it helped me to look at the current habits that I have in my life and what habits I would want to develop later in order to improve my overall effectiveness in work and more broadly in life. If you have a look below you can see what I worked on throughout the class.

As you can see above, the habit I developed was to go to bed by 10 PM every night. This was easier said than done. As someone that likes to stay up late I found this challenging. However, I found that going through the Design Your Own Habit exercises ,I found that if I focused on my trigger with was listening to my alarm it became easier and also by looking at my small wins and closers this helped to make it easier to stick to my habit a lot because I didn’t feel like a failure if I didn’t 100% do my habit sometimes. I am on day five of it, but I have not faltered yet (fingers crossed).

All in all I think this class is worth the effort and the teacher Tiago is really invested in students. He even took the time to evaluate my habit sheet and give me tips on how to make my habit more specific. For an online class this level engagement of students is really something. He even has giveaways every month to students that post something new based on his criteria.

Check out the class here: http://www.skillshare.com/classes/entrepreneurship/Design-Your-Habits-A-Hands-On-Introduction-to-Behavior-Design/978368389?via=similar-classes

So what habit would you want to develop that you think would have a huge impact on your life?

Yours in Awesome Learning,

Janeille