There is always room for more education, however, storage space is sometimes limited for the lessons created. Teachers and educators around the globe continue to create more lectures and other forms of student-centered content on a daily basis, and SoftChalk is giving them a place to store that content.
SoftChalk, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, currently has more than 900 institutional customers around the world using the company’s desktop and cloud content platforms. There are more than 7,000 registered content authors using the SoftChalk Cloud product.
SoftChalk Cloud enables teachers to create content–video, photos, text, or web widgets–and manage their personal and public offerings. Users are given two gigabytes for personal storage and unlimited space for creating public content. Public content is shared with entire SoftChalk Community through the SoftChalk Learning Object Repository
“This content is shared with the global education community under creative commons licensing so that others can find, re-use, and re-purpose this shared learning content,” said Susan Evans, co-founder and CEO of SoftChalk. “SoftChalk Cloud is like YouTube, but for learning content instead of video content.”
Through the system, users are able to not only create learning content from text, images, and video, but can also create hot-spot images, crossword puzzles, and more than 22 other education related content activities, according to Evans. Whatever is created is interoperable with nearly any learning management system (LMS) like Blackboard, Moodle, or WebStudy, and can also be used without an LMS. All content created on the platform is given its own unique hyperlink and embed code to make it easily referenced from any web page, LMS, or an email.
Another feature for SoftChalk is the assessment activities and quiz questions can be embedded in order to track student score results with or without a LMS grade book.
“Educators love that they can transform existing course materials into interactive and engaging e-learning content with minimal time, effort and resources,” Evans said. “Content created with SoftChalk seamlessly integrates with almost any LMS giving them the ability to link a single SoftChalk Cloud content into multiple courses in multiple LMS, and track student score results into multiple LMS grade books.”
The software also keeps items up-to-date by automatically updating content in all linked LMS courses.
“An institution’s learning content can stay put, even if the institution switches their LMS to a new version or to a new platform,” she said. “All of this saves educators time and effort, while improving the quality of the content provided to students.”
Evans said the content available through SoftChalk is very different than other education technology companies which either offer software specific software products or social platforms for creating only a specific type of content.
“SoftChalk’s authoring platform allows educators to integrate many different types of content into interoperable learning content modules that can be used in almost any learning environment, including virtual classrooms and electronic classrooms,” she said. “SoftChalk is cross-curricular and can be used by educators to create content in any subject area. SoftChalk empowers educators by enabling them to easily and creatively produce e-learning content that engages students and ultimately improves student learning outcomes.”
The SoftChalk Cloud can be purchased by individual educators or institutions can purchase licenses under multi-license, site-license, and enterprise license programs and costs $395 per year for a single license. Also, educators who wish for more storage space when creating private content can purchase additional space.
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