eLearn Canada Blog

Luscious, Low-Fat, Lightning-Quick Meals - Online Course

admin — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:44:03 +0000

By Sam Moore

Department: Health and Wellness
Instructor: Donna Acosta

Have you ever wished you had a personal chef preparing luscious, low-fat meals for you? This online course is the next best thing! You’ll learn how to ferret out fat in recipes, and discover how to reduce fat without sacrificing flavor or texture. Explore how to use flavor profiling to expand your culinary horizons. Learn how to prepare casseroles, crock-pot dishes, vegan dishes, oven-fried foods, meat-based meals, and many other entrees that are both nutritious and delicious!

You’ll discover in this online course how to get in and out of the kitchen faster, including tips for grocery shopping, menu planning, food preparation, and quicker cooking. You’ll also learn a dietitian’s tricks of the trade for encouraging reluctant family members to eat more healthfully. You’ll have the chance to try out over 50 exciting and easy lowered-fat recipes for tasty entrees, side dishes, desserts, and garnishes, with each recipe demonstrating a topic that’s covered in the lessons. For more information about this course, please click here.

Photoshop Elements 8 for the Digital Photographer - Online Course

admin — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:59:06 +0000

By Sam Moore

Department: Computer Applications
Instructor: Beverly Schulz

Bring out the best in your digital photos and images with Adobe Photoshop Elements 8. An award-winning package designed for photo enthusiasts, Adobe’s Photoshop Elements provides the tools for making quick fixes as well as detailed improvements. This online course is designed both for those with no previous image editing experience and those upgrading to Elements 8 from an earlier version of the program.

With this online course, you’ll experience editing images on your computer, correcting flaws, enhancing the final product, creating simple art projects, preparing images for e-mail and the Web, and more. You’ll achieve high-quality results with your images without having to learn complex professional techniques. And you’ll see how Photoshop Elements 8 gives you room to grow while making it easy to achieve amazing results even in the early stages of your learning.

So get ready to unlock the mysteries of Photoshop Elements 8. The hands-on, easy-to-follow exercises in this course will leave you with a great feeling of accomplishment! For more information about this course, please click here.

10 foods you should eat every day

admin — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 16:28:27 +0000

Blueberries

Blueberries have more antioxidants—those magical molecules that can help prevent a host of maladies—than 40 other common fruits and vegetables tested.

The antioxidant plant pigments that make blueberries blue guard against heart disease, cancer and age-related blindness and memory loss. They’re also tops when it comes to preventing urinary tract infections, thanks to antioxidant epicatechins, which keep bacteria from sticking to bladder walls.

How much? 1/2 cup (125 mL) of blueberries equals one fruit and vegetable serving per day.

Tip: Sprinkle blueberries on your pancakes at the last minute—cooking the berries destroys valuable vitamin C.

Garlic

Garlic has antibacterial, antifungal and antiviral properties. Most of its disease-fighting potential comes from its sulfur compounds, which act as antioxidants, providing many of its cardiovascular benefits. Just six or more cloves of garlic a week can slash your risk of colorectal, stomach and prostate cancer in half compared to eating one clove a week or less.

How much? Incorporate at least one garlic clove into your diet every day.

Tip: Chop or crush your garlic, then let it stand for 10 minutes to fully release its healing potential.

Olive oil

Pres an olive and you get one of the healthiest fats in the world. The main benefit of olive oil is that it lowers “bad” LDL cholesterol and raises “good” HDL cholesterol, thanks to its monosaturated fats. Olive oil is also packed with antioxidants called phenols, which may protect artery walls from cholesterol buildup.

How much? Include up to 1 tablespoon (15 mL) of olive oil in your diet every day.

Tip: Look for “virgin,” “extra virgin” or “cold-pressed” oils, which are extracted by pressing alone. Solvents and heat used to produce “light or “extra-light” oils destroy antioxidants.

Broccoli

Consider broccoli your number one cancer fighter, thants to its sulfur compounds, such as sulforaphane, which you can smell as broccoli cooks. These compounds signal our genes to boost production of enzymes that detoxify potentially cancer-causing compounds. Eat more broccoli and you could slash your risk of everything from breast and lung cancer to stomach and colon cancer.

How much? 125 mL (1/2 cup) of cooked broccoli is one fruit and vegetable serving.

Tip: Steam broccoli for 3 to 4 minutes until it’s crisp-tender to free up more of its sulforaphane.

Yogurt

Yogurt is a great source of bone-building calcium, but its real strength lies in live beneficial bacteria, know as probiotics, that keep down the growth of harmful bacteria in your gut. Eating more yogurt could help with inflammatory bowel disease, ulcers, urinary tract infections and vaginal yeast infections.

How much? ¾ of a cup (175 mL) of low-fat or fat-free yogurt with live cultures is one serving of milk/dairy products.

Tip: When coating chicken, pork or fish with bread crumbs, replace the eggs used to moisten the meat with plain yogurt.

Oats

Oats’ cholesterol- and blood pressure-lowering powers come from beta-glucan, a type of soluble fibre. One cup (250 mL) a day of cooked oat bran, 1 ½ cups (375 mL) of cooked oatmeal or thee packets of instant oatmeal provide enough beta-glucan to lower blood cholesterol by about five percent and heart attack risk by about 10 percent.

How much? Aim for 10 grams of soluble fibre each day. Cooked oats contain 2 to 3 grams per serving.

Tip: Buy the type of oatmeal you’ll eat. It doesn’t matter if it’s steel-cut or instant.

Flaxseeds

A tablespoon of ground flaxseed sprinkled over cereal or yogurt provides an easy 2.3 grams of fiber, often more than what’s in the cereal itself. But flaxseed is most revered for its lingans. These act like estrogen in the body, blocking estrogen receptors on cells and contributing to reduced rates of certain hormone-related cancers, such as breast cancer. Their anti-inflammatory power may also help keep conditions from acne to asthma at bay.

How much? Sneak 1 to 2 tablespoons (15 to 25 mL) of ground flaxseed into your diet daily.

Tip: Make sure your flax is ground; otherwise, the seeds will come out the same way they went in (whole), and you won’t reap the health benefits.

Cinnamon

Cinnamon is one of the most powerful healing spices. It’s become most famous for its ability to improve blood sugar control in people with diabetes. The apple pie spice can help prevent blood clots and has antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties. It has been shown to conquer E. coli, among other types of bacteria.

How much? As little as ¼ to ½ teaspoon of (1 to 2 mL) a day could cut triglycerides and total cholesterol by 12 to 30 percent.

Tip: Sprinkle some cinnamon on your daily coffee to reap the benefits of this super-spice.

Tea

Tea is one of the most potent sources of antioxidants in nature (more potent than any fruit or vegetable).

Tea’s antioxidants offer protection from heart disease, stroke and cancer. They appear to protect against heart disease by slowing the breakdown of “bad” LDL cholesterol, preventing blood clots and improving blood vessel function. People who drink a cup or two of tea a day have a 46 percent lower risk of developing narrowed arteries.

How much? Brew up two to five cups daily.

Tip: Drink most of your tea between meals since the tannins interfere with the absorption of iron from food.

Beans

Beans are in fact good for your heart, thanks in large part to their soluble fibre, which soaks up cholesterol so the body can dispose of if before it can stick to artery walls. Studies find that diets high in soluble fibre can cut total cholesterol by 10 to 15 percent. A recent study also ranked beans among the top antioxidant foods.

How much? ¾ cup (175 mL) of beans equals one serving of meat and alternatives.

Tip: Beans contain more protein than any other plant food, but the protein is incomplete. Eat a grain such as rice at any time of the day to “complete” the protein.

Article adapted from best health magazine canada

Introduction to Adobe Acrobat 9

admin — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 18:18:00 +0000

By Sam Moore

Department: Computer Applications
Instructor: Donna Baker

Everybody knows what a PDF document is, right? It’s a file that you print. If that’s all you’ve seen Acrobat do, you’re in for a huge surprise! In this course, you’ll discover how to bring together a wide range of content from dozens of programs that you can reuse and customize in Acrobat 9 Pro. Need to change some text? No problem. Create a new file? That’s easy. Add a page from this file and an image from that file? Not a big deal. This software allows you to do all that and more!

Bringing together content is just the beginning. You’ll work with many features, such as backgrounds and bookmarks, to help unify your documents and add navigation to guide your users. You’ll see how to protect your work using password security. For the grand finale, you’ll discover how to wrap a set of PDF files (and other documents, too) into a PDF Portfolio, complete with a Flash interface and display features.

Have you ever sent a document to a few people for feedback and then had to wait for replies? You probably had to send reminders, and maybe you even missed a deadline. If so, you’ll be amazed at how the collaboration tools in Acrobat help you conduct, control, and manage the document review process. You’ll even find out how to work in real-time using a chat window in Acrobat 9 Pro or online using a free Web conferencing room.

This course will also give you a taste of how Acrobat 9 Pro uses artificial intelligence to automatically find and configure fields on a page to convert to a form. It may sound complicated, but you’ll be surprised at how simple it is! Then you can use form tracking features to send your form to others to fill in and send back to you, collect the data automatically, and zero in on results using filters and sorts. You can even send the results to a spreadsheet if you like.

Throughout the lessons, you’ll see why Adobe Acrobat has become the best-selling Adobe software of all time. You won’t find instructions that show you how to complete meaningless exercises. Instead, each lesson works with an important Acrobat 9 Pro feature or process. Along with guidance for using the features, you’ll learn how to use the program for your own work and communication needs, and you’ll discover just how much you can do with PDF documents!

For more information about this course, please click here.

Related Courses

Introduction to InDesign CS3
Design Projects for Adobe Illustrator CS2
Introduction to Microsoft Word 2007
Introduction to Microsoft Visio 2007
Fundamentals of Technical Writing

Introduction to Dreamweaver CS4 - New Instructor-Facilitated Online Course

admin — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:42:33 +0000

By Sam Moore

Department: Web Page Design
Instructor: Robert Fuller

Would you like to learn to use Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 to design, create, and maintain user-friendly Web sites that are full of professional-quality Web pages? If so, then this is the class for you! You won’t need any prior Web design skills or knowledge of code. We’ll start at the beginning, and through engaging lessons and hands-on exercises, we’ll build a sample site from the ground up.In the process, we’ll explore the program’s interface and how to set up Dreamweaver for building as many sites as you like with a minimum of effort and repeated tasks. You’ll find out how to insert and format text, work with image files, and see exactly how hyperlinks work. We’ll also take a short tour of Dreamweaver’s Flash tools, work with tabular data, and get a handle on frames—getting clear on when to use them and when not to.As we build a site together, you’ll master the basics of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and even pick up a little HTML. By the end of the course, you’ll be well-prepared to learn more about HTML or CSS if you want to take your skills to the next level. So get ready for a great adventure that will show you just how simple and fun Web design can be! For more information about this course, please click here.

Web 2.0: Blogs, Wikis, and Video Podcasts

admin — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:50:46 +0000

By Sam Moore

Department: Teaching and Education
Instructor: Robbin Sellers

In this course, you’ll learn how to create, manage, and promote your own blog, wiki, and audio and video podcast. Each of these amazing Web 2.0 tools gives us a chance to interact, share ideas, and collaborate with others from home, at work, or in a classroom.You’ll begin by developing a plan for the content, setup, and long-term maintenance of a blog, and then you’ll use free blogging software to put that plan into action. Next, you’ll discover how you can use wikis to facilitate group collaboration. You’ll practice editing a wiki, and then you’ll create your own. After that, you’ll learn how to record a professional-sounding audio podcast with a very simple recording tool you already have. You’ll edit the file with another free software program, add music to it, and then post it online for others to enjoy. Finally, you’ll find out how to record a video podcast. You’ll use pre-recorded video to learn the editing process, and then you’ll apply what you’ve learned to your own video file. You’ll edit it, add special effects, drop in a podcasting-safe music file, and then publish it online.

Through hands-on exercises, you’ll discover the benefits of using free Web 2.0 tools like Blogger, Wikispaces, Audacity, and YouTube. Guided by an expert instructor, you’ll find that creating Web 2.0 tools is much easier than you ever imagined. And by the end of this course, you’ll be amazed how much you’ve accomplished.

Whether you want to use Web 2.0 tools for personal, business, or educational projects, this is the course for you!
For more information about this course, please click here

Advanced Microsoft Excel 2007

admin — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:28:43 +0000

By Sam Moore

Department: Computers and Technology
Instructor: Chad Wambolt

Any proficient Microsoft Excel user will agree that MS Excel is a very powerful analytical tool. Wouldn’t it be great to learn how to effectively use all the advanced Excel features at your disposal? In this practical and information-packed course, you’ll see how to maximize Excel’s functions and capabilities.Most organizations rely heavily on Microsoft Excel to consolidate, analyze, and report financial information. Your company is probably no exception. By learning these advanced techniques, you can become more valuable to your organization. Your ability to generate information with increased accuracy, timeliness, and usefulness will lead you and others to better decision-making.

Over the next six weeks, you’ll see how to use the additional analytical tools provided by Excel add-ins. You’ll become skilled in the use of validation to protect the integrity of your worksheets from other, less experienced users. You’ll impress your coworkers by learning how to add functional and eye-catching controls to any worksheet and how to use scenarios and data tables to quickly perform multiple what-if analyses. You’ll discover advanced techniques for PivotTables, such as creating calculated fields and calculated items. You’ll become adept at consolidating and importing data from other sources, and you’ll master the art of conditional formatting to highlight duplicate entries and other common worksheet problems. Learn how Excel 2007 table tools take the complexity out of table creation and management. As you become proficient at nesting functions within other functions, you’ll be able to accomplish just about anything Microsoft Excel has to offer!
For more information about this course, please click here

Praxis I Test Preparation

admin — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:14:35 +0000

By Sam Moore

Department: Test Prep
Instructor: Nicole Taylor-Buckner

Are you a prospective teacher who needs to pass the Praxis I Exam? Have you already attempted the Praxis I and not been successful? If you answered yes to either of these questions, then this course is for you! You’ll develop all the skills you need for the test as we review and prepare for everything it includes.You’ll get familiar with the different types of questions that appear on the Reading and Writing tests. You’ll master the many areas of math that you’ll be tested on: number operations, negative numbers, exponents, square roots, order of operations, decimals, fractions, percentages, algebra, geometry, data analysis, graphs, probability, and measurements. To prepare for the essay, we’ll discuss what constitutes a high scoring one. We’ll also go through the process of writing an essay in the amount of time allotted.

You’ll learn useful test-taking strategies and get plenty of practice questions that are similar to what you’ll find on the exam. You’ll also have the opportunity to take a full-length practice test in each subject area. Using clear explanations, numerous examples, and graphics and animation, this course will not only prepare you for the Praxis I, but do so in a way that’s fun and interesting. After completing this course, you’ll be totally ready to pass the Praxis I Exam!
For more information about this course, please click here

Going Green at the Workplace

admin — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:50:09 +0000

By Sam Moore

Department: Business Administration
Instructor: Brad Bergman

Learn how to position your business as a responsible environmental leader in a world of green consumers and carbon-conscious regulators. In this course, you’ll discover how to save energy, save money, and reduce your carbon footprint, all at the same time.First, we’ll talk about how you can trim your energy costs without reducing your productivity by making your lighting, HVAC, and building control systems more efficient. After that, we’ll explore ways to cut your water bill and look at waste reduction strategies that can save you money while helping you move toward a sustainable business model. We’ll also delve into transportation and shipping, examining the benefits of alternative fuels, hybrids, and all-electric vehicles.

Next, you’ll get a primer on renewable energy and learn how to integrate wind and solar power into your energy use plan. You’ll also learn about buying green power, carbon offsets, and renewable energy credits. And finally, you’ll get the information you need about LEED accreditation and how to measure and manage your carbon emissions in order to comply with any eventual carbon tax or cap-and-trade system.

Throughout the course, you’ll examine real-world examples of energy-saving solutions and find out how to calculate the costs, benefits, and paybacks of these projects. You’ll also learn how to communicate the environmental benefits of your actions to your customers and your business partners, transforming your business into a leader in the green economy.
For more information about this course, please ckick here

Teaching Grammar for ESL/EFL

admin — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:16:12 +0000

By Sam Moore

Department: Career and Professional Development
Instructor: Diane Larsen-Freeman
In this course, you’ll come to see English grammar as a three-dimensional process that’s useful in bringing coherence, cohesion, and texture to writing and speech. We’ll begin by considering seven definitions of grammar that we’ll draw on throughout the course. We’ll also discuss the differences between patterns and rules, and why second-language learners benefit from our instruction on both.You’ll learn why students need to understand the three dimensions of grammar—form, meaning, and use—and how seeing grammar as a dynamic and changing system helps students overcome many of their grammar challenges. You’ll also see why teaching grammar in a way that makes it personally meaningful to your students brings the best results.

And since teaching isn’t just about presenting lessons, we’ll also go over the importance of “reading” your students—observing them to try to figure out what learning process they’re using. We’ll contrast rote or mechanical practice with meaningful practice, and we’ll go over guidelines for creating activities and adapting your textbook exercises to get students working on the unique learning challenge presented by each different grammatical structure.

For more information about this course, please click here.