Adobe Captivate and Jing User Manual - Essay Example

Adobe Captivate and Jing User Manual First Last Dr. TeacherFirst TeacherLast Number 12 August 2010 Adobe Captivate 4.0 and Jing User Manual Adobe Captivate 4.0 User Manual 1. Opening, converting, and editing a PowerPoint presentation inside Captivate: There are three steps to manipulating PowerPoint presentations in Adobe Captivate. You can Import slides or full presentations into Captivate, Edit them seamlessly by making desired changes, and Publish them in various multimedia formats. There are multiple ways to import or open a PowerPoint presentation from within the Captivate interface. To import a presentation in a new project, start Adobe Captivate and click on “From MS PowerPoint” under “Create Project” when the dialog box opens. An alternate way to open a presentation is to click “Blank Project” instead of “From MS PowerPoint” in the opening screen. In the dialog box that opens, click on “From MS PowerPoint” and select the presentation needed. A file open dialog box will pop up. Select the file you wish to import and click Open. A dialog box appears before the selected presentation is imported. This is shown on right. You can select individual slides, resolution, and the manner in which the slideshow will advance once imported into Captivate. After making your selections, click OK button. At this point the entire presentation is available inside the Captivate interface. Double clicking on any slide opens it in the “Editing” view which looks like the figure below. Press the “Edit” button to open the editing interface of PowerPoint from inside Captivate to make changes. After editing, any changes that you save are committed to both PowerPoint file as well as to Captivate project. Adding personal voice to slides: Personal voice can be added to slides in two ways. Firstly, users can select a slide and record their voice directly into it while the project is open. Secondly, it is possible to import a pre-recorded audio file containing personal voice recorded separately at another system or at another time. To record a voice directly into the slide in an open project, press F5 or click on Record in the Audio drop down menu. A dialog box displaying options for voice recording will open. One can record over the current slide, select slide by slide number, or record for the entire presentation. Audio buttons allow begin, end, and pause in recording. Once recording is complete, it can be played back and edited as well. Additionally, user can change the target slide for recording during the recording process itself. Once recording is complete, click the Stop button in audio buttons set, and click OK to save the recording. To import a pre-recorded audio file, click F6 or the “Import to slide…” menu item. An open file dialog box will appear and the specific file required can be selected. These file would then appear in the audio section of the selected slide. Adding Captivate’s computerized voice to slides: Adobe Captivate can read out slide notes using the built in synthesized computer voices. To activate text to speech, open the slide in edit mode. Click on the green dot under “Text to speech” column just above slide notes window. The green dot will change to a green arrow as shown below. Clicking on the green arrow will turn off the text to speech function and it will turn back to a green dot. As the green dot changes to the green check arrow, a “Convert to Speech” button appears. Click this button to view the choices in computer voices available, select the desired voice, and click OK to begin. Inserting text boxes, animated text, and animations: Captivate allows setting up of text boxes, animated text, and other animated objects in slides. In this section, we will see how to set up each of them. Text boxes are placed in slides during the edit mode. Select an existing slide or create a new slide in which you want to place the text box. From the Insert drop down menu, go to “Standard Objects” and click on “Text Caption…” in the submenu. A dialog box appears with four tabs as shown. In the default tab, type the desired text. In the Options tab you can specify the duration and fading options for the text to appear. In the Audio tab sound can be recorded or selected from a library. This sound is associated with the text and will be played when the text appears. The Sizes and Position tab can be used to exactly specify the coordinates at which the text will appear. As an alternate, the text position can also be moved and placed by drag and drop. Click on OK to continue. All options can be changed by double clicking the caption later. Animated text can be placed in slides during the edit mode. This is done by using the “Text Animation…” option. Select an existing slide or create a new slide in which you want to place the text animation. From the Insert drop down menu, click on “Text Animation…” in the submenu. A dialog box appears with four tabs as shown. In the default tab, type the text that will be animated within the slide. Change the animation style by choosing from available styles under “Effect:” In the Options tab you can specify the duration and fading options for the text. In the Audio tab sound can be recorded or selected from a library. This sound is associated with the text and will be played when the text animates. The Sizes and Position tab can be used to exactly specify the coordinates at which the text will appear. As an alternate, the text position can also be moved and placed by drag and drop. Click on OK to continue. All options can be changed by double clicking the caption later. Object Animations can be placed in slides during the edit mode. This is done by using the “Animation…” option. Select an existing slide or create a new slide in which you want to place the animation. From the Insert drop down menu, click on “Animation…” in the submenu. An Open dialog box appears which shows the list of animations available in the Captivate library. Choose the desired animation, or choose an animation from another folder, and click OK. A dialog box appears with four tabs as shown. In the default tab, set the transparency of the animated shape, or load a new shape. In the Options tab you can specify the duration and fading options for the animation. In the Audio tab sound can be recorded or selected from a library. This sound is associated with the animation and will be played when the animation appears. The Sizes and Position tab can be used to exactly specify the coordinates at which the animation will take place. As an alternate, the animation object can also be moved and placed by drag and drop. Click on OK to continue. All options can be changed by double clicking the caption later. Inserting Questions slides: Quizzes and questions of various types can be easily created using Adobe Captivate and, when published, offer useful online interactive content particularly for teaching and evaluation purposes. These could be “graded” or “survey” questions. Graded questions slides allow scoring, generate results, and offer choices of review. Survey questions do not have any scores attached to them. First select the slide before which you wish to insert a question slide. Then create the question slide by clicking on “Quiz” on the main menu. From the drop down list, click “Question Slide…”. A dialog box should appear with a list of possible question types. For this example, we will select the Multiple Choice question type. Also note the choice where you can either create a “Graded Question” or a “Survey Question” slide. For this example, Survey Question is selected by clicking on it. After clicking “Survey Question”, another dialog box opens as shown. Type the question to be answered in the “Question” box. Below that, a number of answers can be provided where each is preceded by a radio button on the left. Click on the radio button to specify the correct answer. You can click on Shuffle Answers to have the answer choices presented in a different sequence each time to the user. Captivate automatically creates several buttons, controls and text boxes when the slide is created. In the Options tab, you can specify whether the “Clear”, “Skip”, or “Back” buttons are displayed or not. In the Reporting tab, you can specify parameters to control how the scores are sent back to the learning management system. Click OK to continue. If done correctly, the example slide created above would look like this (see below) when published. Grading questions in Captivate: To demonstrate grading capability in Captivate we will follow similar steps to create Question Slides as in the previous section. Instead of “Survey Question”, this time the “Graded Question” choice will be selected. First select the slide before which you wish to insert a question slide. Then create the question slide by clicking on “Quiz” on the main menu. From the drop down list, click “Question Slide…”. A dialog box like the one shown should appear with a list of possible question types. For this example, we will select the Multiple Choice question type. Click on “Graded Question” to continue. Another dialog box opens as shown below. Type the question to be answered in the “Question” box. Below that, a number of answers can be provided where each is preceded by a radio button on the left. Click on the radio button to specify the correct answer. Type the number of points you wish to assign to this question for later scoring. Unlike the Survey Question, the Options tab in Graded Question allows setting rules on what the application is to do in case of correct or incorrect answers. Also, you can choose to check or uncheck the “Show Incomplete Message” option. This controls the warning message that appears when, during execution, a user does not answer the quiz or tries to move to next slide. See below for a sample Option tab display. Finally, the Reporting tab controls whether the graded scores are saved or not. If “Report answers” is checked as shown below, the user responses are tracked and automatically scored. Click OK to create the Graded Question slide. Once the slide has been created, it will look as shown below in Edit mode. A result slide is also added at the end of the quiz. The result slide for our example is shown below. Saving and publishing as an html/zip file to desktop: Captivate allows the user to “Publish” presentations in multiple formats. These formats include embedded (in HTML) and independent executable flash files. Captivate also allows connection with the web to upload the published files directly to servers through ftp. To publish a presentation, click on the “Publish” button on the main toolbar. A Publish dialog box opens as shown below. Select the destination folder by clicking on browse and then choose desktop. There are seven tabs on the left hand side panel showing the kinds of output available. Each tab has a number of options for customization. Using the “Flash (SWF)” option, a user can “Publish” a Flash file. Additional options are available through check boxes. For example, checking the “Export HTML” checkbox, allows creation of an html page with the Flash file embedded inside it. Checking the “Zip files” checkbox puts the output inside a zipped file. TechSmith Jing 2.3 User Manual Recording one’s voice on a PowerPoint presentation: To record voice over a PowerPoint presentation, open the presentation and go to the slide where voice recording is to begin. Roll over the mouse over Jing icon and click on Capture as shown below. A yellow single line grid will appear. Drag it to the top left corner of the slide and click once. Drag the mouse again and click on the bottom right corner of slide area. A yellow square envelopes the slide denoting that this area will appear in final output. Click on Capture button to begin recording as shown. A countdown starts and a film strip boundary appears on the sides of slide. After the countdown, recording will start. A timeline shows in seconds how long the voice has been recorded. Below that are Stop, Pause, Cancel buttons as shown. Click Stop when recording is to be stopped. As the recording stops, the screen on right appears. At bottom is the Save button and a file name to save is suggested. Choose a location to save the file. Capturing an image by selecting an area on screen and save on Desktop: Roll over the mouse over Jing icon and click on Capture as shown below. A yellow single line grid will appear. Drag it to the top left corner of the slide and click once. Drag the mouse again and click on the bottom right corner of slide area. A yellow border envelopes the area denoting that this area will appear in final output. Click on Capture button to take a snapshot of selected area bound by yellow border. As Capture is clicked, the following dialog box appears. It shows basic editing features on the left panel and options to Save or Cancel at the bottom as shown. Click on Save button. The Save dialog box appears. Choose the Desktop to save the file. References Adobe (2008). Captivate (version 4) [Software]. TechSmith (2010). Jing (version 2.3.10110) [Software]. Available from http://www.jingproject.com/ Read More