Grava to Bring Simplified Authoring of Educational Software

by Don Burnett

I was expecting to see this mentioned at Mix08, but so far nothing, until eSchoolNews broke the story about this exciting new product in their most recent online article. So what is Grava ? It's a rocking new educational software authoring tool that makes it easy. It has all the good looks of a WPF based application, but offers educators and courseware authors the ability to create very exciting applications easily with great visualization capabilities.

Grava is a very forward thinking product from Microsoft's Education division. It's probably one of the first products to really deliver on the promise of WPF in applications developed for it.

According to eSchoolNews:

"The Grava development tools, which Microsoft previewed at the British Education and Training Technology Conference in mid-January, are meant to stand alone as separate applications. A Grava SDK (Software Developer Kit) tool is designed for publishers and developers of educational software, while a different authoring tool will give those with less programming experience--such as many educators--the ability to create their own media-rich content to be viewed with the Grava player, Microsoft says.

By introducing these new tools, Microsoft hopes to reduce the time and money spent creating educational software for schools. Because developers won't need high-level programming expertise to create Grava-based programs, the tools could eliminate the common software development cycle in which a subject-matter expert creates content, then hands it off to a programming team to write code, which then returns it for more changes, and so on.

Using Grava, "developers can create very rich [educational materials] ... to make learning much more fun and engaging," says Ravi Soin, product unit manager for Microsoft's Education Products Group. "

This is a very exciting development for schools and this new program from Microsoft could be a revolutionary product for courseware and content development because it will not require a programming team to develop usable courseware content.

There have been other "authoring systems" in the past, but none that take advantage of this rich feature set found in Windows/WPF and can allow rich content development without high level programming and scripting skills.

I am really excited about Grava and what it means to the educational community and it's something you should be on the lookout for. This is another great example of Microsoft leading, and not following the market.

 

Technorati Tags: Grava,eSchoolNews,Microsoft Education