5+1 Digital Tools for Trainers and Educators

L&D professionals are truly adviced to pay attention to new digital educational tools. Some of these tools make the trainer’s / teacher’s work easier, while others completely renew the course of adult education, mainly in the filed of corporate trainings. Here are the five favourites of mine:

I dream of a paperless L&D industry

Google Forms

If you count out that

  • 8 participants in every training
  • fill a one-pager feedback sheet
  • one trainer conducts approx 20 training each year
  • 10 trainer conducts 200 training a year
  • and 10 L&D companies makes 2000 training a year

than how many papersheets does this mean a year? Maybe not that much, but all of them are used pretty unnecessarily. I have a problem with the traditional happy sheet anyway. First: participants tell all the “happy” things in the closing session, why to ask for those things again? With a feedback sheet filled one or two weeks after the training possibly more objective opinions and evaluation are to gain.

Digital (happy) sheets are typed in by participants, and transformed into a pretty and crear pdf file by Google. Your work? A couple of clicks instead of an hour long work with typing and document formatting. And as we know, by the elimination of typing and other CTRL+C CTRL+V type of activities, our quality of life can improve by more than 30%. That is my main reason to choose Google Forms instead of paper.

Promote – Online Learning Platform

Promote is a simple, solid and sexy online dashboard, where all the information of a training / course (training materials, pre- and post-event tasks, organizatinal issues) can be accessed by the participants. A digital environment like this truly motivates participants / students to start to learn before, during and after the training. What is more, Promote is social too – that is the main reason why using it (playing with it) is hard to stop.

The trainer can give short materials and raise questions for the participants, so they can define personal learning objectives or introduce themselves. The trainer can check the participants’ progress, therefore s/he can give personal help to those who need it. I don’t know any better tool for blended learning.

Google Hangouts

Google Hangouts is a Skype that is actually usable.

A UX professional may engross my problem with Skype. Talking about myself, I only feel that it is difficult to use. The interface of Google Hangouts becomes clear and cozy in three minutes. Plus it has a couple of functions skype doesn’t have now and won’t have either. These functions are partly sweet cranks like getting a hat or a mustache for our faces. But the built-in stopwatch or the collaborative blackboard can be used for real work. Using Hangouts, the facilitator can mute or block out participants. There are situations where this function comes handy.

Hangouts can be used not just for consulting, coaching / therapy and trainings. The (group) discussion can be recorded and broadcasted in real time on Youtube. Viewers can simply post questions before, during or after the discussion on the wall of the online event. The phenomena of online discussion groups raises bags of exciting methodological questions. How can the formation of a free and private atmosphere be relieved? What are the additional tasks of the online facilitator?

It is worth to try this kind of group experience! I’ve already participated on an online roundtable, so next I’d love to go to a Hangouts based conference!

(Hangouts is not only a tool for organizational, but for P.E. trainings as well. Great Hangouts based yoga sessions can be found in Take Yoga Now or Yogurus G+ groups.)

Fligby

I don’t know how grounded are Jane McGonigal’s points about gaming, but they sound reasonable. When I hear my friends’ strategic debate in the break of a Word of Tanks war, I always think that they only need a good facilitator and a focus topic (eg. leadership skills, conflicts, cooperation, negotiation etc) to transform the conversation into a cooperation-developement training.

Fligby (Flow is Good Business) is a leadership simulation game, therefore it is not about shooting, but about managing a Turul Winery in California. The game is based on Csíkszentmihályi’s flow theory. It aims to teach players how to create and maintain an every day flow-based workplace environment.

Most of the skills developement trainings contain pair or group exercises to call forth and examine the usual individual and group behaviours in an experiential, risk-free environment. Using online games, these excercises are simply “outsourced”: participants can have the experiential basics of the training autonomously along with their own learning needs.

Fligby is not a group game. The only group thing in it is that the trainer / facilitator gets all data about participants’ online behaviour, so s/he can analyze the group’s performance in the game, but there is no social element in the game. But a real FPS could be played together by a management / professional team. And an RPG based session could start with a full afternoon / evening Lanparty. I’d love to facilitate a training like this – imagining how I would prepare for such an event… I would have to know the game used, inside-out.

TrainedOn

From a trainer’s perspective it is really hard to understand why an education schedule-planning app like this haven’t existed before. It is like sticking post-its on a big board – simple drag and drop. The elements (sessions, and excercies) of the training can be thrown to the board, and can be rearranged any time. What’s more, the beginning of the day can be set, so TrainedOn counts as you add the time of the excercises and you’ll automatically see when you get to lunch or to the end of the day. (This function is a real redemption, because counting the time over and over again is something that I really don’t like to do whil planning a session.) If the plan is ready,click the pdf button, and send the schedule to the client / participants.

And of a lot of little training schedules sooner or later will accumulate as a company / country / worldwide collection of knowledge-sharing. Here is an open leadership workshop for non-profit leaders. TrainedOn makes training planning a real, environment friendly flow.

If you miss some features from TrainedOn’s freelancer version, check what more it has for you.

+1: Prezi.com

You had plenty of ideas about the ways one can use Prezi. But bet that you haven’t thought about using it on an (online) meeting / training / worskhop to make notes with the help of a projector!

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