Articulate Live Recap - Part 3

Still feeling a bit under the weather. I came back to the room after the last session and just crashed for about 3 hours. Woke up feeling a little better and not really able to sleep. So I'm going to see if I can wrap up my notes for Articulate Live.

I didn't know you could do that in with Articulate
Gary Wasiluk of 3M

It didn't exactly live up to it's name because most of the things shown, I did know that they could be done in Articulate, but there were a few fresh bits of knowledge. I didn't capture the step by steps of the how to's, because they went so quickly and the session files are supposed to be online. I haven't found them on the Articulate site or the ELearning Guild site, I don't know if that's because I'm a out of it and not thinking clearly, or if stuff hasn't been posted yet, but I will follow up when I have a link. Here are few examples of the stuff I found interesting:

• Transparent background in Engage: You can put an Engage with a transparent background into presenter and use the interactive aspect of engage over your presenter content. I have some questions about this and haven't really thought through all of the possible applications but seems like there're some intriguing possibilities.
• Video in presenter panel: This is something that never really struck me as a very interesting or useful thing, because it always seems like just a superfluous talking head over in the upper left corner, but in the example that he presented, he used full left hand panel and it looked really sharp.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Trick for embedding YouTube video: Using the html object and pulling the url (just the url, not the full embed code) from the embed code on the YouTube page + height and width. Only caveat I would add here is that this does leave you open to a problem if the video is yanked from YouTube for copyright or TOS violations.
• Recommended: Dave Moxon's blog
• Recommended: Kineo. He talked about this as an add on tool for presenter. Did I get that right? I went and looked around the site briefly, but didn't see an Articulate connection. There was a lot of nodding in agreement when he brought it up, so seemed like something worth to looking into.
  

Sure-Fire Tips to Make your Articulate Courses Look Better
Dave Anderson, Countrywide

Good session. Preaching to the choir, from my point of view. The basics:

• Create a visual style guide. Fonts, colors, images etc. to establish a consistent visual experience.
• Basic understanding of fonts and what font for what purpose.
• Select display fonts appropriate to the message.
• Select graphics with a consistent stylistic approach.
• Don't pick an image based solely on the subject matter, also consider: composition, point of view, temperature etc. as these aspects influence the massage of the image. Interesting point here: he used temperature as an example and said warm colors represent danger, anger, conflict and cool colors represent calm and safety. I would have said warm = comfort, safety, home and cool = sterile, lack of compassion or emotion. I can see an argument both ways so I guess it depends on the quality of temperature.

This Ain't your Grandma's Quizzing Tool
Tom Kuhlmann

Great to hear Tom speak in person. He does really cool things with Articulate tools and if you don't follow his blog, you should! He was moving pretty quickly in this session and (again) the files are (going to be?) posted on the Articulate site...I haven't found them yet, but I haven't done a thorough search. In the meantime, take a look at these examples. Lots and lots of inspiration here.

Guru Awards
More great examples. I won't spend the time talking about them. Just go look and be inspired.

That's it. That was ArticulateLive09 from where I sat. I hope these notes are helpful. Feel free to post question or comments. Tomorrow on the plane, I'll start working on notes from the ELearning Guild Gathering sessions. Stay tuned!