Using effective audio-visual training aids in your learning events can help reinforce your verbal message significantly, while stimulating the brains of your learners and tapping into different learning modalities. By creating and using effective support material, you can help ensure that you will hold learner interest while helping them gain, retain, recognize, recall, and later use the information to which they are exposed.
Do not become so distracted by adding glitz and sparkle when creating training materials that you forget their intended purpose --- to reinforce you primary message. Two key things to remember about using audio-visual training aids are that:
1. They are supposed to supplement your message, not replace it. 2. You must keep your learning aids simple.
Trainers and educators traditionally use many types of material and items to help get their classroom message across to learners. Virtually anything can become a training aid. There is a multitude of commercially produced products and equipment. Trainers and educators can also design, build and use many items that they create in order to enhance their learning environments. There is no hard and fast rule about what classifies as a training aid, so if something works to help communicate an idea or concept, use it.
Training aids that tap primarily into the auditory and visual learning modalities fall into the audio-visual category. These are training support materials that you view with an electronic projection device or listen to through a playback system such as MP3, laptop computer, compact disk or cassette player. They can add a more polished and formal appearance to your delivery when designed and used effectively.
Computer-Generated Slides. Depending on the computer software used to create your presentation, you have an opportunity to add a variety of enhancements to inject pizzazz into your slides. Examples of popular presentation software