Summertime is here and there are lots of opportunities to learn new ideas and catch up on some of the latest trends in learning and development.

Training Magazine's online website has a number of free webinars including:

Tuesday, July 13, 2010: Project Team Triage. Join Lou Russell to learn about ways to facilitate project team discussions quickly and effectively, and improve your project throughout before it’s too late.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010: Creating a High-Performing Workplace with Games, Social Media, and Virtual Worlds. Join Anders Gronstedt to learn how the future of learning is about online conversations and communities, podcasting on the go, and shared immersive-3D virtual-worlds experiences.

Thursday, July 15, 2010: Active Contributors in Social Learning: Helping Learners Acquire Motivation and Skills. Join Dr. Ray Jimenez to learn how the growth and success of social learning and mobile learning are accompanied by a new type of learner - the Contributor and how theyrequire a new set of skills and motivation to become active contributors.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010: Faster, Cheaper, Better: Really Rapid Instructional Design. Join Sivasailam Thiagarajan “Thiagi” and Tracy Tagliati as they show you how you can replace the traditional systematic instructional design model with a continuous, concurrent, creative, co-design approach to designing corporate training materials faster and cheaper to produce more effective transfer to the workplace.

Thursday, August 12, 2010: Emerging Challenges in Learning: Proving the Business Value. Join Jeffrey Berk to learn about the major challenges leading organizations face in measuring the value of learning and development.

If you’re not already a member, all you need to do is sign up at http://www.trainingmagnetwork.com. Once you're signed in, click on the Home page to view the list of free webinars. The site also includes links to archived webinars if you've missed past sessions.

ASTD is also sponsoring a free webinar that is facilitated by NetSpeed Learning Solutions:

Tuesday, July 20th 10am PST: From Blah to Aha! Ten Best Practices for the Virtual Classroom. Learn about ten best practices to help you move from Blah (boring, talking head presentations) to Aha (engaging, interactive classroom facilitation).

Space is limited so if you're interested, register at http://www.netspeedlearning.com/webinar/bestpractices/