Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Articulate: PowerPoint to Flash - Easy!

The folks at Articulate invited me the other day to download their program and try it out. I had been using Macromedia Breeze to create PowerPoint - to - Flash tutorials and presentations, but when I finally quit my job at Honeywell I had to say a sorry goodbye to Breeze.

The download and install are simple, and like Breeze, Articulate shows up as a menu item in PowerPoint.

There are only 3 simple steps to create an Articulated presentation:

1. Create the PowerPoint presentation (add slide content and the narrative in the notes section of each slide, then animations)

2. Record the narration for each slide.

3. Publish the presentation to Flash format for web use like the example shown here where I created a tutorial for Brainy Betty users.

The nice thing about using Articulate is that the supporting materials - a pdf. manual and online tutorials make it very simple to become adept at - but the really cool thing about using the Presenter PRO program is that it allows you to create neat quizzes and surveys within your Articulate presentation that bring a great aspect of interactivity to your presentation as well. It keeps people engaged in what you are saying or telling or teaching and allows them to work back and forth with the content.

You can create Articulate for the web of course with the flash component, but you can also publish to LMS (learning management systems), CDs, and other deployment methods.

Do go check it out and try it. It's a fabulous value for the price and you'll be creating rich content and fantastic, engaging presentations in no time!

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Take a look at the new charts in PPT 2007!

Take a look at Brendan Busch's Blog and see the difference between the old PowerPoint charts and the new ones you can create with the new version. It's pretty amazing.