What are authoring system? How are they used for teaching and learning?

After reading Chapter 5 last week, we all know the advantages of using administrative software as a tool to make you more productive as a teacher. We did improve the effectiveness with the help of all these kinds of software. In fact, there are also other kinds of software which can help educators, as well as students, in teaching and learning process. Academic softwares, such as authoring systems, Desktop Publishing, Graphics Software, are some good examples. As we explored before that learning styles are different from individual to individual, so educator should vary their teaching methods to meet all the learning styles for different individuals. It is necessary for the educators to create their own instructional multimedia lessons to accomadate the students in their classes. Authoring systems can help teachers to realize this.
We often talk about some kinds of software, such as Hypercard, Hyperstudio, Powerpoint, they are all called authoring systems. Especially, the powerpoint software is becoming more and more welcome to the users for its easy use and powerful effectiveness. Generally speaking, authoring systems include programs that create computer–based customized multimedia lessons and those that create lessons for presentation online. Authoring systems range from easy-to-use software to robust but more complex software that can create commercial–looking programs. A series of jumps or links are created for giving the students choices to move through the learning experiences in their own unique ways. All the software is supposed to help both teachers and students organize and present lessons, projects, or reports to the class.
Authoring systems were designed to create in-class presentation. With the development of WWW in education area, most companies modified their software to emerge with the HTML, which is a popular language used widely in developing website. So educators can also use authoring systems to design their own lessons and display them online. In this way, students can approach the lecture through the internet at home. It is very easy for teachers to transfer their lessons into HTML format, for most of the situations the users just need to click a button and computers will take care of the rest. The internet browsers can translate the HTML data into computer display. Furthermore, internet authoring software shares many kinds of tools and features of hypermedia authoring software.
As I mentioned above in this article, it is very easy to learn how to use software to support both teaching and learning. Many teachers and students can even figure out how to use the authoring systems by themselves. Authoring systems are used very widely in recent days. Especially, they can help the educators to customize academic lessons to meet different needs form all kinds of learners.