One of the areas of training where I am keen to see the use of more technology is in the corporate training room. And I'm not talking about using a DVD player or showing an e-learning course on a big screen.
Instead, I'm interested in how we can introduce collaborate learning tools into our training sessions, similar to the ones that we can use in webinars. In fact, in my opinion, having delivered webinars for over three years now, I'm increasingly convinced that we should retro-fit some of the web-conferencing techniques we use in virtual classrooms back into their face-to-face equivalents.
I'm sitting on the fence when it comes to interactive whiteboards. Whilst popular in schools, where the teachers have the chance to become very familiar with them through constant use, in the corporate world, my own experience has shown that we don't use them enough yet to truly understand how to get the most from them.
So I was very interested to see the new YawnBuster tool from Harbinger Knowledge Products, which enables you to add interactivity to your PowerPoint slideshows. There are eight templates to choose from which cover exercise types such icebreakers, activators, group exercises, energiser and closers.
Personally, I liked the Show of Hands (polling), Brainstorm and Sequence (ranking items), along with the Key Takeaway (the ability to create summaries and next steps, etc. at the end of each session topic) interactions the best. The others were based on quiz or competition formats, so maybe less popular for a UK/European audience and I would have preferred these interactions to have the automatic marking of the answers, as they currently rely on the trainer manually clicking "correct" or "incorrect buttons each time.
For me, without the need to get to grips with an interactive whiteboard, YawnBuster allows us to introduce more interaction into our training rooms alongside a tool that we've been using for many years now.
