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 relatively rapid advance of information technology, today, we have access to 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 offers them 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 a tremendous rate today, and some new kinds of breakthroughs are happening just as it seems it will approach a crescendo. We can’t foresee you don’t see it slowing down anytime soon. The tools that this gives us access to are much more potent than PowerPoint and can help both educators and their students in many different ways. But most importantly, they can make the process of creating educational content significantly more accessible and efficient, which means you can create better content and have more time to focus on other aspects of your work. This blog post will try to cover some modern software tools that can help you in this aspect.

Automated Testing

Creating good tests is one of the most complex and tedious processes that an educator can go through. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the most critical steps in your student’s education – a good test will adequately 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 challenging 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 that can automatically generate tests based only on a handful of information „fed“ to them by the educator. This makes the whole process much more accessible and much less predictable, and it will never fail to provide you with a good 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. Creating an environment where students can learn from their mistakes is exactly what you need to make them master the subject as quickly and efficiently as possible. Doing this was a real challenge before 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 many 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 simultaneously with a single work environment (such as a lab). 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, other methods work just as well. A relatively 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 is an excellent tutorial if the process is thought out correctly and is a great way to showcase the practical side of any software-based task quickly. It allows them to watch and imitate the tutorial in real time, pausing when needed and skipping over parts they already deem proficient.

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

Training Content Distribution

Once you create all your training content, distributing it properly to your students is still the issue. The age of textbooks is just about over, and information can be readily and easily accessed online now, which is 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 how you ensure everyone can access whatever content they need, and more importantly, you can organize it in any way you sense to fit.

Summary

As you can see, utilizing modern technology can significantly aid in creating training and testing content if you know how to use it. In this post, we’ve covered the four primary ways these software tools can help you create quality content with the least effort, but it doesn’t stop there. As long as technology keeps advancing, new and improved tools will keep developing, and keeping up with them is a surefire way to ensure your educational efforts are on par with the best.