How can you expand your content knowledge for the Windows Server Hybrid
Administrator certification efficiently? Well, I'm a big proponent of
self‑inventory and you figuring out how you learn best and then choosing
your resources based on your learning style. VARK is a common model that you
see in the instructional design world.
V is visual. A is aural, or audio. Then we have R for read/write and K for
kinesthetic. Visual means that you learn best with illustrations,
diagrams, pictures.
I'm very heavy on the visual myself.
Aural is listening,
listening to teachers speak either in a prerecorded way like
you're doing here at Pluralsight or live. Again, I myself am an
aural, or audio, learner. I listen to the audio tracks on
Pluralsight courses almost every day.
Read and write is somebody who reads. You're in the Microsoft
Docs. You're writing summations. You're writing blog posts and
contributing to the community.
You find that you can learn by explaining. Again,
I'm that as well. And then we have kinesthetic. These are learners who
learn best by experience. They observe others doing the work, and then
they begin to experience it themselves.
So activity based, experimentation based. You could be like I am
multimodal; I am all four of these. I really am. I'm grateful for that
because that means that I have a much wider pool of resources that I
can benefit from when I'm studying.
What are some applications of this VARK learning style model in your
study approach? Well, it could be attending live training. That's
different from Pluralsight. I guess I say that against my professional
interests. But some people really do want live interaction with their
instructor and peers.
You could watch computer‑based training, like what we're
doing, and then communicate with me offline.
You can always do that. You could read online literature. I say
Azure in the slide, but we're talking Microsoft Docs because
you're going to be in the Windows Server docs, as well as the
Azure docs following tutorials.
We have cloud labs here at Pluralsight, for example. If you followed
my suggestion of building your own practice lab,
you can use Microsoft Learn's guided tutorials or just
experiment on your own if you are a kinesthetic learner.
Reading general print literature.
This I kind of shake my head a little bit. If you're going to
get a print book on Windows Server, at least that's
relatively stable from month to month, but the public cloud,
all three of the major ones, at least change on a daily basis, so print
books can be a bit dicey in terms of good current knowledge of cloud
computing anyway. And then there's participation in the community,
Azure, Windows Server users groups,
this sort of stuff. These are just some ideas to get you thinking.
Another technique that I use a lot is mind mapping.
Now I know that this illustration is impossible to read,
but that's not the point.
A mind map is a way for you to take your material and
organize it in a tree‑like fashion.
I mean there's no right or wrong way to mind map. It's what makes the
most sense to you. But what I've done here, I've defined the
well‑architected framework in the Microsoft Azure docs,
the five pillars of architectural excellence, and then that's the first
level of the mind map, and then it goes out from there.
This mind map allows you to,
if you're a read/write learner particularly, can help you solidify and
understand basically as a visual learner as well.
It basically allows you to see the relationship among different
bodies of knowledge and different concepts.
I love mind mapping. I like the mind mapping tool Mindomo. I give you a
link to the company in the exercise files. And no,
they don't know I'm giving them a recommendation.
I just like Mindomo because it works. Runs in a
browser, they've got mobile apps,
they've got desktop apps, and it gets the job done for me so it's worth it.
But for some people, mind maps can be invaluable to make sense out of a larger body of knowledge.