Why You Must Use a Cloud Document Management Tool?

If there is one thing that corporate organizations readily embrace, it is technology. Apart from helping them in cutting costs technology has regularly helped them in improving business process and in enhancing productivity and profitability. There are no prizes for guessing that cloud document management systems have been met with great success recently.

If you haven’t ever heard of these tools, the fact is that the world has only seen the tip of the iceberg and with its increased penetration it will soon be a part of every corporate daily work process. So why must you choose a cloud document management tool? Here are few benefits that you can’t possibly ignore.

• Safe and Secure – How often have you lost important documents, either their hard copy or the soft copy? This is something each one of us has faced somewhere in the past. For some this is a part of their daily life! When you use a cloud based document management tool you won’t have to worry about losing them. They would be stored on a secure cloud and would be accessible whenever you want.
• Reduces Cost – Your organization is spending thousands of dollars on its servers and backing up important data. Some organizations still prefer to store a copy of the data on CDs and DVDs. All this is expensive and with a cloud based system you can do away with this cost. As the corporate world is moving towards BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) culture these cloud based tools are custom-made for it.
• Compliance – There has been increased guidelines regarding storage and access of important corporate data. You can’t afford to lose details of your customers or any other important document to comply with the norms set by the regulators and these tools will prevent such ugly things from happening.
• Green Initiative – Paperless operation has become the global mantra towards a greener and better planet. And moving document management to the cloud will help you reduce creating hardcopies of every document. You will reduce your carbon footprint substantially and can claim yourself as a Green Crusader.

Summary – In this short write-up we talk about some of the benefits of Cloud Document Management tools and how they help businesses.

Clickers in the Classroom - How It Is Changing Education

As an educator you are well aware of ‘active learning approach’ where students partake in different activities as this method has improved classroom participation. While definition wise it is all about engaging students in reading, writing and sharing their opinion without the use of right technology it is a herculean challenge. In today’s world technology has invaded into every aspect of our lives and helped make serious improvements. Talking about education we have seen the power of PowerPoint presentations and Internet in terms of aiding classroom lectures and helping students gain in-depth knowledge in subjects being taught.

In fact technology has in true sense empowered education and made knowledge accessible to millions of students. It has helped improve success rate among students and benefitted the larger education scenario. Clickers are the next big thing that will transform education right from elementary level to higher education. 

Making Education Participative
How do clickers in the classroom help? They make classroom sessions more participative. Traditional model of teaching was a big disadvantage for students who were introvert or ones who lacked behind their peers in terms of grasping concepts. These students never really came out and expressed their opinions on the lessons that were being taught or even the fact that most of what had been discussed didn’t register with their minds. Clickers in the classroom allow students to share their opinion and feedback on what is being taught in the classroom. They allow students to participate anonymously in discussions which are their biggest advantage for students who lag behind their peers.

Generating Feedback
With this technological innovation trainer can gather instant feedback from their students and are able to gauge level of understanding among the students with respect to the lessons that have been taught. At every given point of time the teacher to measure the retention power of the classroom and work on innovative teaching methods that increases retention. They are able to build more active and integrated learning model that make the sessions fruitful and participative for the entire class and not just a group of few brilliant students.

Summary – In this short write-up we take a look at how clickers in the classroom are completely transforming the education system and benefitting the students. 

Interact Live With Your Audience Using Mobile Polling Technology

Modern web and app technology enables presenters to interact live with an audience. They can create questions and ask an audience to respond using a live mobile polling tool, like a dedicated app or website. Once the responses are collected, the results are displayed in the form of a chart. Audiences enjoy polling apps because it helps them connect to speakers and presenters. Most voting and polling apps are accessible via personal devices such as phones, tablets or computers, so meeting organizers do not have to hold their own technology inventory.

Keep all your attendees engaged and entertained in your presentation session

With the help of live mobile polling, you can keep all your attendees engaged throughout your sessions by providing them the opportunity to give feedback and ask questions anonymously. Now presenters can easily manage all kinds of meetings and classroom sessions by using real-time mobile polling.  Polling apps are a terrific way to bring participants into a group discussion and help speakers learn what the audience is thinking.

Audience can share their ideas and present their feedback

Everyone can share their ideas and present live feedback through the smartphones in their hands. Live mobile polling apps provide participants the platform to respond to questions or submit questions of their own at given ‘polling periods’, or at any time texting is enabled. The results submitted to speaker questions are displayed on participant devices instantly, providing the group insight into what those around them are thinking. The presenter can engage local and remote audiences at the same time, using a mobile polling tool that works with both physical clickers and smartphones.

Gain valuable insights about what your audiences think

Audience response technology lets a presenter conduct mobile polls and surveys. The data gathered from those surveys often provides valuable insight about the audience. Live mobile polling technology is truly versatile and works wonders for audience surveys and interactive voting. Participants can vote online using web-enabled devices like smartphones, tablets or PCs and answer anything from a simple question to large survey questionnaires.

Using A Voting App Is The Quickest And Easiest Way To Conduct Elections

Do you want to streamline your election by allowing participants to vote with mobile devices? Since we have apps for everything today, why can￢ﾀﾙt we have an app for voting, too? Voting apps serve as an accessible and secure platform to conduct leadership elections, voting on motions, and consensus polling. With smartphone voting apps, data is collected quickly, calculations are performed flawlessly, and results are immediately accessible following every poll.

Controlled, Easy Access

Smartphone voting apps allow users to open voting to the masses, or restrict it to a small, closed group. Participants are instructed to visit a website and join the vote. Access to the voting session can be open, or participants can be forced to enter information such as name, title, organization, or passcode to gain entry. Vote administrators can select the most secure access keys and require a large or small amount of user information prior to entry. Additionally, with known participants, voting groups and voting rights can be selected such as regional voting, group voting, proxy voting or weighted voting options.

Variety Of Display Options

With electronic voting systems, users have a variety of display options to share or restrict from participants. Vote totals can be shown in graphical forms such as bar, line, and pie charts, or data can be expressed as absolute number or percentage. Voting rules can be applied requiring a simple majority or 2/3 consensus or customized to your specific need. Additionally, voting can be anonymous or public. With smartphone voting, user can choose to show live how each participant is responding in real time or show only vote totals removing name designations from the display.

Reports And Voting Data

After an election or motion vote, all data is recorded within the smartphone voting application. The data lives online in a secure and protected environment. It can be accessed from any device with appropriate privilege and is immediately available for download.  The data can be sorted and reported in a variety of formats. Additionally, all voting data can be printed or emailed directly to your participants.

Response Technology Creates Interactive Learning Environment

Highly interactive learning environments make teaching a fun and pleasant experience. Classroom response technology allows users to increase the level of interaction between the instructor and his/her students, boosting the engagement level of the learners. Classroom response systems utilize wireless hardware technology along with interactive polling software. During an instructional session or assessment, a teacher can use their computer or smartphone to operate the polling software and to display the question content along with the student responses.

Students can answer using their keypads or mobile devices

The students can use keypads or mobile devices to respond to questions asked by the instructor. The result of each individual response is aggregated and displayed graphically in real time. Classroom response systems can be utilized by instructors to grade students and to assess their responsiveness in the classroom. Classroom attendance can also be gathered quickly and easily using a CRS. With the help of group response devices called clickers, students can immediately give their feedback allowing teachers to conduct classroom polls, quizzes and tests with ease.

Increased level of knowledge retention and better understanding of topic

Response technology greatly improves knowledge retention through immediate reinforcement of correct and incorrect responses. A question is asked to a group of learners, the group responds using the clickers or mobile phones and the results along with the correct answer to the question is shown to the group in real-time. Every student can participate in the discussion by using the hand-held device and their responses are collected and stored in the database for further evaluation. Each week, month or semester, the results can be evaluated through reporting and analysis modules built into the software, or online, where data is aggregated and stored in a private account.

Response data is integrated with the Learning Management System (LMS)

Every student is assigned a code (ID) and his or her responses are recorded against that ID. The response data of the student is integrated with the Learning Management Software and it imparts chance to the teacher to closely monitor the performance of the individual student. Another crucial benefit of the Classroom Response Systems is their ability to generate reports from the student’s data stored in the database. This system makes the entire environment of the classroom exciting and more fun-filled.

Interact With Your Live Audience In Real Time - Voting Apps

Creating surveys and opinion polls can be a time-consuming and tedious task. Over the years, we have come up with the number of ways to simplify the job of polling the audience. Presenters can utilize mobile voting apps to interact live with their audience. You can create questions, ask your audience to answer the questions and to vote and you can also discuss results live in no time.
                                                                 

No limit to the number of polls you can create

There is no limit to the number of polls you can create. It is a quick and simple way to organise your RSVPs or you can also let your audience cast their votes with the help of mobile devices in their hands. Creating a poll is quite easy now as the user just needs to open their account, select the type of questions they want to pose in front of the audience, enter the details and create live polls while the presentation session is in progress.

Audience can use mobile devices to join polls in real time

The audience can use their smart phones or the tablets to join the polls in real time and they do not have to download anything. So with the help of voting apps, speakers can engage their audience anonymously and in real time and can increase the effectiveness of their presentations.

Radically transform the power of your conversation

So if you are talking to hundreds or thousands of people in a conference, then this application can help you to radically transform the power of your conversation. Your audience can interact with you, critique with the help of voting apps and can also vote on the stage performance. You can learn amazing things about people around you in a new and engaging way.

Centralized Storage

Organizations with high employee counts, multiple office locations across a country, or throughout the world require a secure and centralized location to store presentation content. CloudVOTE Content Management Solution provides worldwide access to content coupled with the security international companies demand. Easy, convenient, and fast, content can be accessed quickly and viewed immediately through a browser or downloaded locally for offline use. Cloud-based solutions are quickly becoming the alternative to Virtual Private Networks because they require less IT management and control, saving organizations time, money, and aggravation.

Control, Manage, and Distribute Content

Content stored in the cloud is easily controlled. Content Management Solutions allow organizations to upload content to the cloud. Once training curriculum and presentations are online, company administrators can edit the content, manage its distribution, and assign it to locations, teams, or individuals. Access to the content is only granted by content administrators, so individual users are limited to the content they are assigned and nothing more. To access curriculum, users login to the content management cloud with their laptops, tablets and phones. The content assigned to the user is immediately available of online or offline use.

Protect Content from Unauthorized Changes and Edits

Management teams, graphic artists, and training experts work hard to perfect the company messaging. It is vital that finalized presentation content remains unchanged and intact. All employees must stay “On-Message” or “On-Brand” and changes from one employee to the next, or one location to the next threaten to weaken an organizations brand. Content Management Solutions allow organizations to lock presentations down in a format that does not allow for changes by individual users. With a secure content management platform, companies can trust that their presentations remain pure to ensure compliance with legal reviews and government regulations.

Report on Use

Perfecting training, messaging, and presentation content is the goal of most management teams. It is often difficult to understand which questions and slides are effective and which ones are not. Content Management Solutions provide insight on user metrics such as how many times content has been viewed or downloaded. Presentations stored in the cloud provide additional data such as how long a user stays on an individual slide and what is the average presentation time from start to finish. Content Administrators also have a record of which employees are using the content and which ones have not. Due dates and completion times can be assigned to content to ensure it is consumed within a given date, week, or month.

Faster and Instant Online Learning Solutions

Today, people look for faster and instant online solutions to fulfill their learning needs. The field of learning often leads technological advancement everywhere. The new methodologies for learning have evolved with the development of learning management software. Online learning provides same teaching courses which are offered by the traditional mode of education, but it is powered by the advanced online learning tools. The learning management software is utilized in education, administration and even in the corporate sector to make learning a fun and interesting activity rather than a burden.

Evaluate progress of attendees from time to time

The system is utilized by schools and colleges for assessing and monitoring the learning needs of the students. Businesses use learning management software during corporate training sessions to train their employees and to evaluate their progress through the generation of assessment based reports. The teaching as well as the training industry has greatly advanced through the usage of online learning tools.

With a simple click gain access to range of learning resources

• Store your training content in the cloud for centralized distribution and management.
• Improve interactivity between the facilitator and students, increase retention and understanding of key ideas of the study materials.
• Use automatic reporting to assess the impact of various types of learning processes, teaching methods and help adjust the content quality.
• Create and deliver the content, monitor the participation level of the learners, and assess the performance of the students over time.

Built in survey tools and web conferencing technology

Many interactive features like threaded discussions, online conferencing, discussion forums and various other tools makes learning fun, easy, and interesting. An effective learning management software is the one which is available with support, and which can be utilized 24/7/365. Some instructors require integration with the web conferencing technology to support trainees and customers.

In some training environments, students aren’t allowed to bring their smartphones to the class, or the connectivity restrictions prevent them from functioning correctly. In these cases, dedicated, personal survey tools, such as wireless “clickers”, which can also be incorporated in the learning systems allow the presenter to query his audience while offline, and store the information collected for later use.

Increases Level of Interactivity Between Audience and Presenter

Online audience response systems are a technological boon for increasing the level of interactivity between an audience and presenter. With the help of this online polling tool, audiences can participate in polling sessions. Through participation, group engagement is elevated and retention of knowledge is greatly increased. The polling system helps the presenter keep track of participant responses and organizes that data in graphs and detailed reports. The audience can participate in the polling sessions by selecting the most appropriate answers from the choices that are provided.

Analyze individual responses during the training session

The online polling tool gathers participant results and aggregates the data visually for the presenter. The response software organizes the data by group, by question, and by participant, allowing for immediate and post-event analysis. The data can be stored locally, uploaded to a secure cloud, or printed out immediately following any session.

Audience understands key concepts in an easy way

The online polling tool promotes a high level of interaction and discussion which increases participant knowledge retention and raises attendee engagement. Response systems, often referred to as Classroom Performance Systems or Student Response Systems, are utilized by teachers in their lessons where they promote lively discussions, are used to review key concepts and provide a platform to evaluate learners. Audience Response Systems are also popular in corporate training environments, as well as academic institutions for their effectiveness in presentations and training sessions.

Raise participation and increase knowledge retention

By engaging participants in a two-way conversation rather than a traditional one-way didactic lecture, online polling tools greatly increase group participation. Additionally, the anonymity provided by online polling provides even the most timid participant with a platform to respond. Online polling also allows presenters to immediately reinforce key points by highlighting correct and incorrect answers. The immediate reinforcement of correct responses greatly increases participant knowledge retention.

Perfect Tool for Instructor-Led Group Training

Learning Management Systems (LMS) are an essential tool for companies and institutions looking to gain a competitive edge in today’s global marketplace. All of the training content, results of each training session and trainees’ performance can be tracked there. However, the traditional LMS are missing one crucial component – in-class interactivity, one-on-one engagement and ability to get feedback on the lesson itself, or collect responses to the questions electronically.

Interactive Learning Management Systems (ILMS) fix that problem. They are optimized for instructor-led group training and enhance training content with the ability to collect responses and answers from groups of trainees. The responsive training platform links learners with their responses from either dedicated, wireless, hand-held audience response devices, or from their own smartphones and tablets. ILMS can document attendance, participation, and proficiency of key topics.

Easy to use group assessment tools

• Traditional Learning Management Systems are optimized for a single-learner, self-paced training and struggle with tracking individual performance in group settings.
• Most organizations favor instructor-led training over self-paced instruction, because instructor-led training consistently yields better learner outcomes.
• Interactive Learning Management Systems allow trainers to conduct group lessons and collect individualized results.

Speed up tracking trainees over time

• Traditional assessment requires paper tests, scantron forms, or online quizzes to be completed by individual learners and compiled by instructors by hand or though software applications.
• Interactive Learning Management Systems enhance training content with question and answer capabilities allowing groups of individuals to respond to questions in real-time.
• Trainers can use the technology to show their learners how the group responded to a particular question, thus closing the knowledge gaps
• Instructors can generate reports immediately after each session is complete, or aggregate the results from multiple sessions taken over time.
• Trainees are linked to a specific course by signing into the session with a mobile device or registering a classroom response keypad to their employee ID number.
• Individual trainee data is stored in the Interactive LMS for analysis or exported to third-party systems.

Simplify training content management

An Interactive Learning Management System allows instructors to upload training content to a cloud service. Once uploaded over a secure, encrypted connection, the content is private to the user who put it there, and only available for distribution if delegated (assigned) to another user with explicit permissions. Training administrators can assign training curriculum to a specific facility, department, or trainer. Training results are uploaded from individual sessions and stored centrally where they can be aggregated, reported on, and exported.

Put Learning into a High Gear by Making it Interactive

 

Highly interactive environment is crucial for the transformation of learning into an extremely effective and enjoyable experience. Classroom response systems bring interactivity to lectures, classroom discussions, presentations and various other training and education sessions. With instant feedback and questions answered in real time, academic and corporate worlds take their learning into new heights.

Increase level of interaction between teacher and students

Interactivity is created between the trainer and the trainee by the classroom response systems that combine wireless audience response clickers with interactive polling software, most often integrated with PowerPoint.

These systems have been increasingly utilized in carrying out classroom surveys, voting and taking the responses of the local and remote audiences.

Assess student’s response in real time

• You content is projected on the screen and the classroom response system displays the questions to the audience. Participants then make use of the wireless keypads to answer the questions in real time.
• All the results are collected by the response software and are displayed after the polling has been closed.
• All of the information collected by the response technology can be used to evaluate, grade and track progress of the students. Additionally, a polling system can take the attendance of students present in the classroom.

Get immediate feedback while the lecture is going on

• Teachers can discuss with their students the reason why they chose a particular answer and can reinforce the key points of the discussion and or material.
• Using classroom response systems is completely anonymous in comparison to other traditional methods like raising hands. However, presenter can choose to track keypads and their holders using a participant list.
• With the help of the response keypads, audience can give immediate feedback at the time of presentation and the presenter can have a timely understanding about their level of comprehension.
• This technology is extremely useful in the execution of the quizzes, polls, research and seeking immediate replies.
• After closing each of the question & answer sessions, response software displays the results graphically, as well as stores data for future reporting and assessment needs.

Classroom response technology makes learning fun and interactive

The students will have improved attention in the classrooms and they will be able to retain the subject matter for a longer time. In fact, using a classroom response system can increase retention of the course material by 40% over a period of 3 weeks and promote discussion among students which improves understanding about the subject.

Create detailed and more customized lesson plans

After each session, the teacher can generate reports from the data, which is collected and stored in the software. Reports can be customized and will enable the teacher to determine the level of effectiveness of his/her lectures. By studying the answers given by the students, underperforming ones can be easily spotted and given extra attention. The teacher can create a more detailed lesson plan for certain topics and can closely monitor the performance of the students in various subjects.