The Instructional Designers Toolkit and League Table: What do I need to shop for?
- It used to be Captivate. Now it’s Articulate™ – Presenter that is.
- PowerPoint 2007. You can’t have Presenter™ without PPT. Oh and it has to be 2007, for two good reasons. The first is the selction pane (animating multiple objects is virtually impossible without it), the second the image enhancing and Smart Art tools. Even a graphics duffer can look good.
- Articulate Quizmaker™. It’s Flash, but not as we know it. Once you get beyond the FORM view and hit the SLIDE view you get a Flash™ style time line and the simplicity of PowerPoint. Branching scenarios etc…
- Articulate Engage™. Worth it for the labelled graphic and timeline alone.
- Captivate™. Yes really. For the rollovers mostly. Export as a single swf and mount in a Presenter file and no one will see the join.
- Fireworks or Photoshop. Good quality images a so important.
- Camtasia Studio. If you need motion screen capture, this is the best. Don’t touch the screen capture facility in Captivate.
- Audacity. How can such a great audio editing tool cost nothing? It does!
- Flash and Illustrator. Hard to separate these two. Design the vector graphics in Illustrator and copy and paste them into Flash for crystal clear and interactive images.
- Hex Colour finder. Trying to match a colour? A great tool – and free.
- Screenhunter™. Capture onscreen images – for free. (Note Fireworks has a competent screen capture tool also, it just takes longer to load)
- Premier Pro/ Final Cut Pro. If you’re editing and rendering video either will do.
