How do you stay up to date?

Even if you are an 'old-fashioned' facilitator who doesn't think you use a lot of technology in your role, you probably use more than you think. Maybe not for the actual facilitation side, but in what you do up to that point.

The fact is, learningapps make our life easier. And whether it's during the research phase, our own personal productivity, collaborating with others, creating materials, administering learning, marketing it, or delivering it, you probably use more tech than you realise.

Even if you actively seek out learningapps and technology to use and consider it central to your offering, you probably only use a tiny fraction of what's out there. You're probably only aware of a small amount of what you COULD use. Most weeks in out VIP community, someone casually mentions an application or tool that is every-day to them yet others haven't even heard of.

And of course, if you don't know about it, you can't use it.

The trouble is, the sheer amount of technology and apps out there is overwhelming. Keeping up with it can be a full-time job! Jane Hart compiles a list every year of the top 100 tools for learning, which you can see here. The first time I saw this list, I didn't even realise that some of them would be considered as tech - they are so integral to what we do.

There are tools for research and curation...

• Pocket
• Evernote
• Blinkest
• Google Alerts
• Airtable
• Padlet
• Snagit

Tools for personal productivity...

• Trello
• Asana
• Calendly
• Toggl
• ChatGPT

Tools for training design

• SessionLab
• MS Office
• Articulate
• 7 Taps

Tools for materials creation

• Canva
• MS Powerpoint
• Powtoon/Vyond
• Sketchwow
• Prezi

Tools for collaboration

• Zoom
• MS Teams
• GoogleDrive
• SessionLab
• Mural/Miro
• Slack

Tools for Virtual Delivery

• Zoom
• Mentimeter
• PollEverywhere
• Jamboard
• Mural/Miro
• Kahoot
• Quizlet
• Streamyard

Tools to manage training/coaching

• Giraffepad
• LearnDash
• NewZenler
• Quenza
• Many LMSs!

Tools to create stand-alone audio/video lessons

• Vimeo
• Camtasia
• Audacity
• Loom/Screencast-o-matic
• Canva

And this is only scratching the surface! You can probably add at least one thing to each list without even having to do any research.

The fact is, whatever you need to do, there's probably a tool/app out there that is perfect for the job. We just need to know about it! Sometimes, you don't even know that a tool will be useful to you until it's brought to your attention.

That's the beauty of regular discussions with peers - we learn what each other uses through conversation. No sales pitches and vastly reducing the hours spent searching for the right thing. We can then investigate those that spark our interest some more and incorporate it into our practice.

And this is one of the things we will discussion at the Training Design Festival on 30th June - What tools/apps/tech do we use to design training, facilitate it, manage it or just make ourselves more productive.

Why not join us?