Our group has decided to use Adobe Captivate to create our instruction module for this course. I had never used this program before so I went onto Lynda.com to take a training on the basics of using the program. Naturally, I chose the longest version I could find. I am really impressed with this program and all its capabilities in terms of developing instruction for e-learning environments, creating presentations, and it's ability to import images, animations, widgets, audio and video from other programs like photoshop, etc. Additionally, the program's capabilities with creating simulations and evaluations are equally impressive.
I hope to get somewhat proficient with this program during the course of this project so that we can collectively deliver a high quality product for the assignment. But also it will greatly benefit me in my next assignment in the Coast Guard to be able to utilize this program's functionalities for developing instruction, evaluations and simply for presentation purposes. I understand that it's a relatively basic program when used for developing e-learning, when compared to programs like articulate, but it will still be a huge improvement to my developer skill set (which is almost nonexistent).
If you haven't used Captivate before, I highly recommend you check it out. I'm sure you're aware already but just in case - you can download it for free as an IU student from IU courseware. And take advantage of the free training on Lynda.com but go for the Captivate 6 training that's 3 hours instead of the 6 hour one.
Blog buddies, until next time.........Good night and good luck!
John
Hi John! I'm your new buddy :)
ReplyDeleteI've also used Adobe Captivate just last week for the first time in my life. I used the software for a slight unusual way.
I'm now taking an English course for international students who hope to get a teaching job at IU and for every two weeks, we need to present a mini 5 minutes lesson. On the day of the mini lesson, undergraduate students come to the class and one of them shoot our video. We can get DVDs that contain the video of the lessons.
A problem though is the videos saved in the DVD are burned with strange format. I can play them only with VLC. I did not like the situation to depend only one software to play my videos.
What I did was then, to use Adobe Captivate to capture the video played with VLC and saved the captured video with MP4. Although there was slight time lag between visual and audio components of the MP4 video, I now have a MP4 version of the video! I now can play the video with most standard video player. I can even upload the video to YouTube although I do not like to do so ;)
I'm wondering if you are using Mac and if you are a Window's user, things might be different. Yet, I was especially impressed by the software's ability of Universal Access. Means Captivate can detect other applications run at the same time and can capture the window of another application as well as stop the recording once I quit the application.
While the software is really simple, because it's simple, we can use the software for multiple purposes. In the sense, it could be much more powerful than more complex and highly specialized software :)
I'm looking forward to seeing your creative and powerful ways of using the software! ;)
Thanks, Kei. Yes, I agree that there is quite a lot that you can do with this program. We've started to play with the video options a little bit and it seems like the program is going to work just fine for what we need to do in our training. I still need to experiment with it further so I can get a better understanding of the capabilities for videos in Captivate.
ReplyDeleteGood luck with your project,
John