This semester in 681 was a great opportunity to gain enough experience with Adobe Captivate that I will be able to open the software in the future and be able to start a project without much review or direction. While the two day Adobe sanctioned course I took was great, it was only two days so a lot of what I learned was somewhere between my memory and my notes. By focusing on Captivate for 12 weeks I able to take what I had learned in both classes and hone those skills over a period of time which certainly will help my retention of content.
Our final class session was the final project review, where each student shared their project while other classmates listened to the dialogue between student and professor and also was able to observe the module. I was able to get my project together in time and there weren't really any last minute mistakes that I missed before uploading to the server. However, remember how long it took me to create those photoshopped multi-action buttons? Well I took all that time but then saved them incorrectly, so while my presentation clickable button appear grey I would have preferred they the purple buttons which appeared as the default buttons. Ultimately, I would like to go back in and update the buttons; I realized it is a simple yet time consuming task and I needed to ensure other parts of my project were suitable for submission.
During our final session I was able to view a few projects created by my classmates. I really liked the way one student used the Slidelet tool to highlight their navigation buttons. I have thought about replacing the zoom used to highlight specific tools with the Tool Bar with the slidelet. I want to compare both and see which produced a clearer capture of the tool, as I found the Zoom tool to be a bit grainy.
Another of my classmates used images in their quiz by way of the matching question. In the left column were the names of the paintings and in the right images of each painting, allowing the participant to drag and drop the images to it's name. I thought this would be interesting to see if I could make the left column an image and then have participants drag the definition of the tool to the image of the tool they would see within InDesign.
Overall, I think it this semester has given me the opportunity to become comfortable working in Captivate which in turn will allow me to use Captivate successfully at work to create innovative training solutions for our internal clients.
Next semester I'm taking Project Management and the Principles of Training & Development (required course) - hopefully those classes will give me something to share with you all via this blog.
Until Then!
PS. I can't forget about the Upcoming Races widget over there -->
Tomorrow night is the Boordy 5k I'm excited to run like the dickens through this field. What I'm not excited for is the hilly, terrible, fabled Annapolis 10 Miler next weekend - let's hope it hurricanes!
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Week Nine & Beyond
Greetings from Crunch Time!
Since Week 8 we had a few more review sessions and was able to see everyone's projects progress as the deadline got closer. The computer I was building my project on was replaced, luckily I was able to save my files - the bad news was that it took forever for our purchasing department to reinstall Captivate on my machine. In the meantime I downloaded Captivate 6, which is pretty cool except it is not backward compatible. So in 18 days when my trial expires, my module will be frozen in its current state forever. Unfortunately I cannot copy and paste between versions of Captivate so at some point I will have to recreate the module entirely. This isn't a terrible thing, though since I have learned quite a bit since I started building the module and will the rework as an opportunity to perfect some techniques.
Capturing the simulations of InDesign were tricky. For some reason the videos were capturing extra frames that didn't even show up during the recording, but once it was added to my project these phantom frames popped up and could not be covered. After a bit of fooling around I figured out how to minimize the appearance of these frames and then was able to delete the slides it did show up in.
I did have a few issues while recording audio, for some reason no matter what headset I used and where I tried to record there was always an echo that didn't occur in the audio recorded a week earlier. Eventually I reverted back to my audio safety net of Adobe Soundbooth. I was able to record the last few pieces of audio in 15 mins using the amazing internal microphone on my macbook.
Macbook Mic - 1 LogitechFancy Schmancy Headset - 0.
As things are winding down the next post will cover our final session and the great work put forth by my classmates!
Since Week 8 we had a few more review sessions and was able to see everyone's projects progress as the deadline got closer. The computer I was building my project on was replaced, luckily I was able to save my files - the bad news was that it took forever for our purchasing department to reinstall Captivate on my machine. In the meantime I downloaded Captivate 6, which is pretty cool except it is not backward compatible. So in 18 days when my trial expires, my module will be frozen in its current state forever. Unfortunately I cannot copy and paste between versions of Captivate so at some point I will have to recreate the module entirely. This isn't a terrible thing, though since I have learned quite a bit since I started building the module and will the rework as an opportunity to perfect some techniques.
Capturing the simulations of InDesign were tricky. For some reason the videos were capturing extra frames that didn't even show up during the recording, but once it was added to my project these phantom frames popped up and could not be covered. After a bit of fooling around I figured out how to minimize the appearance of these frames and then was able to delete the slides it did show up in.
I did have a few issues while recording audio, for some reason no matter what headset I used and where I tried to record there was always an echo that didn't occur in the audio recorded a week earlier. Eventually I reverted back to my audio safety net of Adobe Soundbooth. I was able to record the last few pieces of audio in 15 mins using the amazing internal microphone on my macbook.
Macbook Mic - 1 Logitech
As things are winding down the next post will cover our final session and the great work put forth by my classmates!
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