Educational Technology Blog

Articulate for Authoring

Niall — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 16:20:25 +0000

Since writing my reviews of Xerte and eXe, Media Services have started authoring using Articulate. Unlike Xerte and eXe, Articulate is a proprietary desktop system built on top of PowerPoint. Its main advantage is that it combines ease of use for those familiar with PowerPoint (nearly all lecturers at this stage!) with tools for creating quizzes, surveys, interactions and for basic video editing. There are about 20 templates for creating questions including variations on multiple-choice, open answer and drag and drop. Media can easily be incorporated into all question types. Quizzes can be made SCORM compliant. Articulate Engage Interactions allow the creation of specialised pages such as labelled images, pyramids and glossaries. Flash developers can develop their own Engage Interactions using the Engage Software Development Kit. They are encouraged to share them with the Articulate community.

Importantly, the templates allow for considerable flexibility in question design and layout. The standard styles are quite attractive too giving a professional look to learning materials created. Its ease of use, familiarity and special pricing through the NDLR all led me to select Articulate for the latest elearning projects where content would be created by academics.

Articulate is well-supported through its own forums and through active online communities. It hosts the Rapid eLearning Blog which has regular, practical tips for articulate developers. Its Community Showcase highlights work from members around the world.

Using Xerte, I grew to like web-based development for team projects, this has the advantage of a single master version that everyone works on. With Articulate we are back to version control management with multiple versions on different PCs (and it does not run on a MAC). Apart from that I am very pleased with our experiences with Articulate.

Reply in haste … Repent at leisure

Niall — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 15:58:20 +0000

According to a survey of 2,000 people in today’s Independent (UK) online, 20% admitted to sending an inappropriate email in a moment of anger, while 31% have accidentally hit “reply all” instead of reply. Accidentaly replying instead of forwarding is another common error.

Avoid Death by E-Learning

Niall — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 15:10:29 +0000

How not to do it? ‘Avoid Death by e-Learning‘ was created by Teach America and entered for the Articulate Guru Awards. Irony lives. Enjoy!

Did it win? See Award Winners from 2009.

Wordle for Word Clouds

Niall — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 11:52:30 +0000

Wordle is a free web service that allows you to create attractive word clouds based on the number of times a word appears in your text. Below is the word cloud for this blog in the default colour scheme.

Word size is proportional to its frequency in the text. Some words appear more than once. I am surprised by the relative sizes of some names. Unlike the tag cloud on the right of this blog, the words are not clickable and so do not link to the related blog posts.

Bringing Interaction to Art

Niall — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 16:29:20 +0000

Adobe Flash Catalyst allows graphic artists to be web developers by making their designs interactive. Designers with no programming skills can add buttons, scroll bars and transitions to a Photoshop or Illustrator image to make into it an active interface. Media and text can be dynamically read from a database to populate the interface with content.

Educational technologists and academics with a visual orientation could find Adobe Flash Catalyst to be a useful content development tool. Adobe Flash Catalyst is part of Adobe Creative Suite 5. Tutorials are available on Adobe TV.