No programming necessary!

The promise of multimedia presentation software
for creating quality learning objects

Web poster presentation by Eli Collins-Brown and Cheri Toledo
Illinois State University
Curriculum & Instruction

Process

PowerPoint

• Eli created the PowerPoint files. (6 hrs)
• Audio recorded and editted using Goldwave (www.goldwave.com)
• Audio imported into PowerPoint
• Various output formats

Cheri took the final PowerPoint file and used the three different software packages to create the Flash movies. She kept of journal of her experiences with the different products, including how much time it took, file sizes, what challenges and issues she experienced, ease of use and impressions of final results. Here is a summary from that journal:

Wink – total time: 39 minutes
3.01 MB

After looking through the User Guide and clicking through the Tutorial I tried 3 or 4 times to capture a page, with no luck. I did not know the difference between the types of capturing methods, so after looking through the User Guide I decided to use normal capture. I began capturing slides. It was very boring and tedious to have to press Pause every time the screens changed. I followed the User Guide directions and rendered the project. There were no parameters on how to set timing on slides, so went with the default. After viewing the project it was clear that the slide transition was too fast. I changed the timing 1000 msec and rendered the project again. The transition was still too fast so I changed it to 1500 msec. This was a cumbersome process as I had to go through each slide and change the time by hand. After the transition was acceptable, I found that another problem was slides that were larger than the screen area. I searched User Guide for embedding sound instructions and found that sound cannot be added. It took some time to figure out how to save it as a Flash movie; I found that the problems with the screen viewing area were not an issue now.

Camtasia – total time: 64 minutes
7.54MB
To begin with, it took over 30 minutes to download Camtasia and the other needed software. During the download time I watched the instructional video from the Camtasia website. Once the program was loaded and initialized, I started the PPT, then pushed F9 to begin the Camtasia recording; as the PPT recorded I walked away and did other things for 15 minutes. In replaying it, I found there was no sound. I imported the MP3 files, then clicked and dragged them into the audio timeline – only the audio played, it was not linked with the video – I dragged the video down and it was still not linked to the audio. I looked through the user guide, but was ultimately unable to add the audio. It would have taken another hour or two to figure out how to add it and then to edit it to play with the video. The final product only played in the browser window – the Flash movie did not play. Additionally, the movie will not play in some browsers. Eli tested it in Firefox and could not get it to play.

Captivate – total time: 47 minutes
3.38 MB
Using this software with the PowerPoint was very frustrating. The PPT kept freezing and I had to restart it at least five times. This resulted in a total of 92 slides; the PPT had only 33. After capturing the final slide, it was necessary to go through and delete the extra slides. The entire process took 40 minutes. In addition to requiring extra work, there were unwanted cursor movements, miscellaneous marks on the slides, and the program did not capture the audio recorded in the PPT. This would not be a satisfactory method for turning a PPT into a Flash movie.

This This web site was created for a conference presentation made in April, 2005.
Please contact the presenters will any questions.

©2005 Eli Collins-Brown and Cheri Toledo