Captivating

I’m playing round with Adobe Captivate, moving slides from 3 old powerpoints on UN Peacekeeping into one Captivate presentation which I’ll use today as a flash movie, and also make available to my class as a .avi movie and  an audio only podcast.  I’m fining it a lot of work, but I think the extra flexibility of Captivate will be worth it in the long run.  This version is very basic, and does not yet take advantage of all the possibilities like quizzes, or branching navigation. You can theoretically do all of those in Powerpoint, but it is much more work – I found my way round the workspace in Captivate very quickly, and find it faster for more advanced work. 

I did spend about 8 hours on Saturday, mostly working on the audio for each slide on a slide by slide basis. Without the stimulus of an audience, I find it harder to get the flow of a proper lecture. On the other hand, recording the audio one slide at a time, with the old powerpoints open as cue cards, it is easy to go back and redo work.  Once I had the audio done, it was then easy copy over the text and illustrations from the old slides, and find new illustrations where I needed them to fill in extra time.  I ended up with more slides than I would have in Powerpoint, and each one has about 2 minutes of audio.  This is not a rigid rule – there are a few 30 second slides, and one goes out to 3 minutes. This seems to be about 1 slide per ‘paragraph’

Even before I watch this in class with the students today, I know I am going to spend a day next week ripping it apart and editing it to improve the visual and audio ‘highlighting’ of some key points with which I am unhappy. Then I need to break it into 5 x 10 minute segments, introduce branching navigation and add a review quiz.

That is next week’s problem. Today’s problem is that  the .swf version is 48 minutes long but the .avi is 1 hour and 35 minutes long?  How did I do that? Right, well I know how to fix that in the next half hour before the lunchtime seminar I’m going to.  At least I will have achieved the goal of getting at least one lecture moved up to a higher level of tech this semester.