Today was the first of four engagements to speak with the Primary Head Teachers in Argyll & Bute Council to provide an update on the work done so far in my project. The meeting this morning was with Head Teachers in the Helensburgh & Lomond area of Argyll & Bute.

At the end of the presentation, I shared two examples of classroom resources – one called ‘Shelter in the desert‘ and one called ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star‘. As I indicated to the Head Teachers, all of the produced resources will make their way to the Education website of the council, but in the meantime you can find them here on my own site.(note to self: re-do homepage so that there is a link to all the other resources!)

To learn how to make either of these resources, check out the course on swict.com

A lovely wee footnote – if you were to be using either of these resources within Glow, then it can track how your pupils get on with them!

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Big news all over the world whilst I’ve been away, but Adobe Captivate 3 moved out of beta and into production. It’s always the way, isn’t it? You finish one set of tutorials, and a new version of the software is released! The good news on this front is that I was beta testing, so, I’m well up to speed with the new features. If you’ve waded your way through my course on version 2, then here are my highlights of what’s new in version 3:

• Multiple Mode Recording – it’s hard to tell which feature I like best of the new Captivate, so I’ll start with the obvious one. It was always a complete pain if you wanted to create a demonstration and an assessment simulation of the same activity, as you could only record one at a time. You would either have to record the same activity twice, or spend a significant amount of time editing one format into another. With Captivate 3, you can record multiple versions at the same time! How fabulous! Just imagine, you want to create a demonstration of something online or using an application, then you want to test your students knowledge of what you have just covered. Now this is a simple one stop process in Captivate 3!
• Improved PowerPoint importing – previously, when you imported PowerPoint slides into a Captivate project they would be imported as flat images, irrespective of any animations you may have had on the slides. This too was quite annoying, especially if you had spent time on the PowerPoint presentation in the first place. Now with Captivate 3, there is improved support for animations contained on your slides – excellent!
• Question Pools – I loved the question functionality of Captivate and Captivate 2, but I always wished that the questions could be randomised in some way – hey presto! Captivate 3 includes questions pools that store your questions, allowing questions to be drawn in at run time to provide variety for your students.
• ‘Hot Spot’ and ‘Sequence’ style questions – two new types of questions included in this incarnation, to add to multi-choice, true/false, fill-in-the-blank, short answer, matching and rating scale.
• Rollover Slidelets – one of my reasons for getting interested in Flash in the first place was the ability to reveal images/text/sound/video when your user rolls over a certain area of the screen. Now Captivate supports rich media in rollover areas, so when your student rolls over an area of the screen you elect, not just text, images and audio can be displayed, but video too.
• Animations -  in previous incarnations of Captivate, you could choose ‘no animation’, ‘fade in and out’, or ‘fade between’ for your transitions. Now there are loads to choose from (for those of you that just can’t help but animate things) 

There are loads of other new features, but these are just my highlights.

You can find out more at http://www.adobe.com/products/captivate/, or even pre-order your copy.

The big question – should I start recording tutorials for it now? ;-(

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Today we look at quitting.

You can find it here, or by typing the following address into your browser:

http://www.swict.com/resources/captivate/video/41.asp

All of 54 seconds today!

And that’s it! I hope you’ve enjoyed this little adventure in learning how to use Adobe Captivate 2. I haven’t covered everything that the program can do (this course was really just an introduction), but hopefully I’ve started you on a great journey?

If you do go on from watching these tutorials to making educational resources, then please let me know – who knows, maybe we could even collaborate on something that you’d love to create?

Thanks to those of you that have waded your way through this material, and to those of you that have been unpaid content editors – a huge ‘thank you’ to those that pointed out the problems! – if I’d have done it without you, the tutorials quite literally wouldn’t have worked!

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In the last lesson of this week, we’ll take a look at publishing your project. By now, you’ll have invested quite a bit of time creating your project, so this lesson will show you how to let others see it, or interact with it.

You can find the lesson here, or by typing the following address into your browser:

http://www.swict.com/resources/captivate/video/40.asp

This one is interactive, but if you watch it all it’ll take 4 mins 18 secs.

At the beginning of next week, we’ll think about quitting – literally.

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Captivate 2 on it’s own is very powerful. Combine this with a Learning Management System, and you’ll begin to see just what you could do. Today we look at the quiz manager, and how to make the most of the data a Captivate 2 project can generate.

You can find the lesson here, or by typing the following address into your browser:

http://www.swict.com/resources/captivate/video/39.asp

This one takes 4 mins 25 secs.

Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at publishing your project.

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(You can tell I’ve got other things on my mind at the moment, can’t you!)

One of the many aspects of a Captivate 2 project that you can alter is how one slide moves on to the next – today we look at transitions.

You can find the lesson here, or by typing the following address into your browser:

http://www.swict.com/resources/captivate/video/38.asp

This one takes a mere 49 secs.

Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at the quiz manager.

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Today we look at resizing your project so that it can be viewed comfortably in the browser. There’s nothing worse than a project that isn’t displayed properly in the browser window, forcing you to scroll to keep up with the on-screen activity. Fortunately, Captivate 2 makes it a simple process to resize your project.

You can find the lesson here, or by typing the following address into your browser:

http://www.swict.com/resources/captivate/video/37.asp

This one takes 2 mins 51 secs.

Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at working with transitions in your project.

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There must be something about Monday that makes me forget to add the link to the next tutorial! I’m sorry about that for those of you following this.

Today we look at working with project properties and preferences.

You can find the lesson here, or by typing the following address into your browser:

http://www.swict.com/resources/captivate/video/36.asp

This one takes all of 4 mins 7 secs.

Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at resizing your project so that it can be viewed comfortably in the browser.

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We’ve made it to the end of another week of Captivate 2 tutorials!

Today, we’ll look at ’skinning’ your project. For those of you completely confused by this term, skinning is a really clever addition to Captivate 2.

A ’skin’ wraps around your Captivate 2 project. The skin can contain a playback control, some borders around your project and, if you wish, a menu providing extra functionality to your project.

You can find the lesson here, or by typing the following address into your browser:

http://www.swict.com/resources/captivate/video/35.asp

This lesson lasts for 8 mins 8 secs – so much for keeping everything below 5 minutes, eh? (sorry!)
At the beginning of next week, we’ll look at project properties and preferences for your project.

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Today, we look at previewing your project in Adobe Captivate 2.

Previewing is brilliant – it lets you see how others will see your project. You can iron out any issues well before it gets anywhere near a server or a CD!

You can find the lesson here, or by typing the following address into your browser:

http://www.swict.com/resources/captivate/video/34.asp

This lesson takes all of 2 min 31 secs.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at ’skinning’ your project.

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