Creating Great Content with Great Tools

Education is an art as old as humankind itself, and just as humankind evolves so do our techniques in passing down knowledge and expertise. And thanks to the rather rapid advance of information technology, today we have access to a myriad of fantastic tools that can make this process easier, more intuitive and far more efficient.

However, the fact that many reputable and proficient educators have yet to catch up with all the opportunities that technology is offering them still remains, so these newest tools are often ignored, or it takes a significantly longer time for them to get accepted by the general public. An excellent example would be Microsoft PowerPoint – the most popular presentation software to-date that most educators use nowadays. And while it’s widely used, it effectively took more than ten years for it to become the standard, and for educators to yield and realize how much it can help their layout and presentation efforts.

Software technology is evolving at an amazing rate today, and some new kind of breakthrough happens just as it seems that it’s going to approach a crescendo, and we can’t foresee don’t see it slowing down anytime soon. The tools that this gives us access to are much more powerful than PowerPoint, and can help out both educators and their students in a number of different ways. But most importantly, they can make the process of creating educational content significantly easier and more efficient, which means that you can create better content and have more time to focus on other aspects of your work. We will try to cover in this blog post just some of the ways in which modern software tools can help you out in this aspect.

Automated Testing

Creating good tests is one of the hardest and most tedious processes that an educator can go through. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the most important steps in your student’s education – a good test will properly gauge how well the student has mastered the craft, as well as how proficient the teacher was at passing down the knowledge and information necessary to complete the test with adequate results. Constantly coming up with tests that can do this right is really hard work, and it is not something that every educator has the willpower to go through.

However, the good news is that now there are software tools out there that can automatically generate tests based only on a handful of information „fed“ to them by the educator. This makes the whole process much easier, much less predictable and will never fail to provide you with an adequate test, providing you have the skills necessary to put one together yourself.

Simulation Courses

The single most efficient way of learning is through the trial error process, and creating an environment in which a student can learn from his or her own mistakes is exactly what you need to make them master the subject as quickly and efficiently as possible. Doing this used to be a real challenge prior to modern technology and would have taken a long time to set up. If, for example, you were teaching a subject related to working in a laboratory with chemicals, you’d have to have a wide array of tools and machinery at your disposal. Then you would have to prep your students with a multitude of complicated rules before they even enter the lab lest they should damage something, and walk them through every step of the way.

With software-based simulation tools, this is no longer the case. Creating a training course that your students can access from their laptops is much simpler, and much more efficient, than if they all had to interact with a single work environment (such as a lab) at the same time. However, the effect is the same – students are given the ability to learn through trial and error, in a simulated environment that they can use with ease and confidence.

Even though an interactive environment is often the best way for students to learn, there are other methods that often work just as good. A rather new way of teaching that can be applied to elaborating on virtually any computer-based skill is screen recording – namely, the educator uses a simple, intuitive piece of software to create a video snapshot of their screen, often with live commentary. This serves as an excellent tutorial is the process is thought out correctly, and is a great way to quickly showcase the practical side of any software-based task. It allows them to watch and imitate the tutorial in real time, pausing when needed and skipping over parts that they deem themselves already proficient in.

For this very reason, this is a huge step up from the conventional, live approach where an educator speaks, addressing an amphitheater full of students and sticking to a pace that students may or may not be able to follow properly. In such manner, every student can learn at their own pace and review the content as many times as needed.

Training Content Distribution

Once you create all your training content, there’s still the issue of distributing it to your students properly. The age of textbooks is just about over, and information can be readily and easily accessed online now, which is definitely something to take advantage of.

Keeping learning materials on the Cloud and sharing them with your students selectively comes to mind, and of course there are a lot of fantastic tools out there that do just that. This certainly is the way you to make sure that everyone can get access to whatever content they need, and more importantly you can organize it in any way you sense to be fit.

Summary

As you can see, utilizing modern technology can greatly aid in creating training and testing content, if you have an idea on how to use it. In this post, we’ve covered the four basic ways in which these software tools can help you create quality content with the least amount of effort, but of course it doesn’t stop there. As long as technology keeps advancing, new and improved tools will keep getting developed, and keeping up with them is a sure-fire way to make sure your educational efforts are on par with the best of them.