Sunday, December 16, 2012

Imminent to a screen near you: safety training by smartphones is nearly here

By Ian Pemberton


Look back ten years. Mobile phones were once that: mobile telephones. Laptops weighed as much as computers and were twice as thick. LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook were twinkles in the eyes of the soon to be technology professionals.

However in only 10 years, technology of communications has seen 1 of the biggest steps onward in growth since the development of the computer. The greatest progress in the last 2 years has been the beginning of the Apple iPad and the number of comparable devices that followed lately from other manufactures. The technology industry has known for ages that touch-screen devices are the future and have been attempting to perfect the blueprint for many years.

Not only was Apple the manufacturer that made a profit on the tablet, but in 1987 it became the forerunner with the creation of Newton, a PDA touch-screen with hand written text detection. Then Sony nearly took the lead from all its competitors with a micro tablet with Wi-Fi in 2004.

However it was only when the iPad was made with its tablet designer operating structure and appealing looks that the customer market lit up and lots of people lined up craving to be among the first to have one. But you do not need an iPad to get all that functionality and new power; it is designed into any number of smartphones that have farther processing power than your computer had a decade earlier and have fast come to rule the market for phones.

The consumer market is usually the early adopter for new technology; when the technology has ripened and become established then the industry will follow. Companies often wait for the format war to cease before picking the successful program. Prior wars were Blu Ray versus high def DVD & VHS versus Beta.

The war at the moment for tablet devices places google sponsored open source Andriod technology used in the newest handheld offering from makers such as Apples iOS platform against Acer and Motorola, initially made for the iPhone and now as well the iPad.

Generation Y

All this affects health & safety training as technology grows, training has had to adapt also to stay current to its audience. Mobile device technology has the chance to alter the way we deliver safety training programmes. This age of employees going into the workplace is the first to have grown-up with electronic contact, email, text, google, online social media sites and interactive voting no matter where they physically are.

To involve with such users we need to upgrade the way we teach. Like Bridget Leathley explains in her article, classroom "chalk and talk" teaching is not a successful way of delivery. Users need to be involved in their training and be enhanced by the exercise.

The first steps into new training has been by e-learning. Website based training courses track training, keep test scores and provide analysis of risk of individual employees. The past few years has seen e-learning speed ahead, providing businesses with important cost savings over conventional training and vital audit trail of risk assessments and teaching that is essential for all compliance training.

The newest wave of web based facilities also include editable courses, so that businesses can edit the courses to their exact sector without the normal high cost production prices. It additionally has authoring tools, so companies can create their own content and supply it to staff with pictures of their work place, their policies and procedures & company themes and logo.




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