DiscDogger’s Toolkit Coming Soon

“The Book”

Some of you may know that we have been working on a book for several years now. It’s been a long tough slog, I’ve had 80+pages written for a couple of years now, but I’ve been unable to organize it and get it together in a fashion that would serve discdoggers of all levels and abilities.

Roadblocks

We’ve run into a bunch of roadblocks that just make a book fairly unwieldy at this time. There is the fact that there really is not a vocabulary for our game, which means that any serious instructional book has to devote a good deal of time to defining and explaining all kinds of things that discdoggers do and that most of us take for granted. Then of course the subject matter is a bit hard to explain in words alone, for instance it takes a couple thousand to give a good explanation of the concepts involved in teaching the vaulting skill, and the vaulting skill is one of a few dozen concepts that need to be completely fleshed out for us to be satisfied with the instruction.

Online Learning

Last summer I had an epiphany,”I am the Book.” Wow, what a change that made. It was at that time that we hooked up with Jason and Andrea Rigler of Webmanna and started to  develop our Distance Learning Program. Over the last 8 months we have put together over 100 articles and 50+ instructional videos for these programs.

Offline Learning

The feedback on our Disc Dog Foundation and Bitework for Behavior classes has been awesome, with many of the students  immediately signing up for another class. It’s valuable. Online learning can be tricky though. Video is hard to handle online. Fast forward, rewind, protecting content, dealing with browsers and different platforms. It’s not at all simple. We started to look for a way to put our class content in a package that could be used for offline viewing.

The Toolkit

Enter Steve Donohue. Some of you may know Steve for his incredible canine sport photography. What some of you might not know is that Steve is a really awesome software and web developer. I hit Steve up on Skype a couple of months ago and talked to him about putting together the DiscDogger’s Toolkit. A week later he put a prototype in my hands. It was awesome. We’ve added a few bells and whistles to that initial prototype and are almost ready to make it available for purchase to the general public.

The Toolkit is built on Adobe Air (DVD Installation Disc) and includes two PVybe Hero X-tra Discs.  It is a cross platform compliant (Mac,Windows, Linux) Desktop application that you install on your machine . It’s fast, intuitive and efficient and totally blows a book or an eBook out of the water – not even the same sport – over 100 pages of text and 2 hours of complimentary video instruction.

Steve and I are tying up some loose ends on the project right now and will be taking initial orders for the Toolkit in the next week or two. You can expect to see some additional information here on our blog over the next little bit, but please, if you’re interested, ask some questions or share your thoughts with us in the comments below.

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Responses

  1. Hi Ron,

    Is it ok for you if I offer free support (clinics on field, on phone ) for any Romanian that will buy DiscDogger Toolkit ?

  2. I missed out on the distance learning much to my regret (time/$/etc.) so I am VERY excited by the toolkit possibility! FYI you might try hooking up with Casey Lomanoco up in NY she’s KPA and doesn’t do disc stuff so might be willing to partner to some extent:

    http://www.rewardingbehaviors.com/

    Good luck with the move!!!

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