Teaching Tools & Technologies

Over the course of the last five years, educational technologies have begun to play a more significant role in my day-to-day work. I have been working on transitioning many of our face-to-face training sessions into online and blended courses, and exploring new technologies to create an engaging learning experience has been a big part of this process.

Along the way, I have learned to use a range of new technologies which I have found to be incredible useful in creating engaging online learning content. So far, this has ranged from Articulate Storyline, Adobe Captivate and iSpring, to other tools for creating interesting media such as Powtoon and Videoscribe. At the same time, I feel there is still an endless stream of new technologies being advertised to me from collaboration tools to digital whiteboards, storyboarding tools to video editing software; figuring out which one to try next has been challenging as I’ve felt overwhelmed with choice.

My desire to enroll in this course came from both an interest in knowing how technology impacts the work we do, but also what technologies exist to help me achieve my goals. From some of my prior courses, I’ve learned that my peers tend to be some of my greatest learning resources in this regard.

Between our synchronous session two weeks ago, and the eLearning modules that were developed by the groups this week, I was introduced to a variety of new technologies that I wasn’t familiar with before. This was especially helpful as I felt it gave further context in to how these tools could be used in a way that is more relevant to my work; I felt like these tools had been vetted, and I didn’t have to filter through the sales efforts that come trying to figure out what that tool is by reading a website.

For this week’s reflection, I wanted to highlight some of the tools that I learned about and how I feel I could use them in my own work.

Kahoot!

1. Kahoot

A few of my peers talked about using Kahoot in educational settings, but it also has a lot of great features for adding gamification elements to our training sessions. I especially like that Kahoot can be used to create interactive games for face-to-face training sessions as well, bringing the excitement of the trivia interactions into the classroom.

2. Quizlet

I’m always on the hunt for easy to use, free resources that I can use to make online courses more engaging and interactive. I could use Quizlet to create study sets for some content that is important for our employees to know, but that often are forgotten if they are presented in a boring way. This could work well for introduce policies, first aid procedures or tips for working with children with special needs, as there are a number of great Quizlet lessons that have been created that would be applicable to the work that our employees will be doing.

3. Wix (for more than just websites)

I was excited to see how two of the groups used the Wix builder for their elearning modules. I especially liked the walkthrough style activity that team Eh plus created for their module assessment. I also liked how team STEMS used the each subpage in the website as a “lesson slide” with an obvious flow to take the learner through their course in the correct order. I didn’t know that Wix had built in quiz features and could definitely see this as a great tool for building more elaborate eLearning modules as well. As it turns out, it’s been great for creating this blog too!

4. Leaders and Legends of Online Learning

While I’ve only listened to the first interview with Tony Bates, I found this podcam very interesting and loved learning about the evolution of Blackboard. I was a WebCT user when I was doing my undergraduate degree, and used CourseSites by Blackboard as our primary LMS when we first introduced online training courses, so I was immediately hooked. I’m looking forward to seeing what else I will learn as I listen to the other episodes in this podcast series.

Having learned about these new tools inspired me to do a bit of research and find out what are some of the most tools and technologies for instructional designers. I want to challenge myself to try some other new resources to enhance my elearning courses, this year and came across a few additional new ones that I would like practice with.

StockSnap

For as long as I can remember, I have limited my use of photos to Google images and accepting the fact that my company will not pay for stock images. StockSnap has an amazing range of images that are all under creative commons licensing and free to use. It’s a whole new world!

Coggle

This tool will be great for creating concept maps as we are trying to map out new training programs and concepts, and make sure we cover all the key points. I often use a whiteboard and post-its for this process, but this would also allow my team in other offices to have a more hands-on role in developing these.