Thursday, July 31, 2008

Portfolio Web Site

I put together a portfolio website with my newly learned Dreamweaver skills. My intentions of the portfolio website is to share some of my work and tell you a little more about who I am. At this point, it doesn't contain much but ultimately it will contain a collection of my work in instructional design. This is definitely a rough draft, as it is going to be an ongoing project throughout the ed tech program at San Diego State. Please take a look at it and let me know if you have any suggestions.

My Portfolio Site

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Flash Rookie

I earned rookie status in Adobe Flash by making my first GIF animation. I had always been interested in this and was surprised at how easy it is to learn Flash. After playing around with this a little I am amazed at how skilled some people are with the drawing tools. I found the drawing tools very difficult to work with. Any tips or tricks for becoming better at using the drawing tools in Adobe products?

What spurred me to get started with Flash is an assignment for a web development class I am taking. The assignment required that we use the drawing tools to draw a sunrise with a flower sprouting out of the ground. Although this is a very basic start in Flash I had fun and I am looking forward to learning more so that I am able to develop custom animations for future eLearning courses. Click here to check out my very first GIF animation.

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Progress on Management Training Program

Months and Months ago I mentioned how I am starting my first larger scale eLearning project in a posting titled Manager Training Program. I am now knee deep in the project and learning a lot along the way.

I designed and developed a prototype for the first course and it is under review now. I am expecting that there may be some barriers I have to overcome due to the fact that this is a big change in how we facilitate training programs, and nobody likes change.

Due to budgetary restrictions I am limited to Power Point in combination with a PPT to Flash Converter as my authoring tool. This has actually gone surprisingly well and I am having a hard time figuring out what the major authoring tools out there have over power point when it is used with a Flash Converter. This has proved to me that the instructional design truly is the most important part. With good design, a power point can become a high end eLearning module.

So far the only hiccups I came across along the way was finding a good ppt to flash converter. I went through several trial versions finding something that worked well with MS Office 07. In "Better than Bullet Points" by Jane Bozarth, she recommends a product called PowerConverter that works with MS Office 07 but I was not happy with the results. PowerConverter did not like anything that used "Motion Path" animation. After testing with the trial versions of several different products, I ended purchasing the PPT 2 Flash Converter by Wondershare and so far it has worked well. I was not able to get it to work with PPT 07, but after saving the file as a PPT 03 it worked like a charm. I also had a little trouble removing the control bar from the flash player but the support staff quickly responded with a solution. The quick response from the support staff is what prompted me to make the purchase. Good job Wondershare.