How to PowerPoint

Here are three posts I did for the Rapid E-Learning Blog where I showed how to build out some ideas in PowerPoint.

Build a Puzzle

Build a Puzzle Animation in Just a Few Simple Steps walks though the process of building a puzzle sequence that reveals information as the learner advances.  There’s a tutorial as well.

Build a Cool Slide Template

Here’s How I Built That PowerPoint E-Learning Template walks through the process of building out a multi-colored template.  You can also download the PowerPoint files via the attachments link in the tutorial.

Create Your Own Handwritten Fonts

Over 100 Free Handwritten Fonts gives you links to a bunch of free fonts.  You’ll also learn to create your own for free.  Check out the tutorials.

If you regularly modify the free clip art you get via the Microsoft Office site, then you want to keep these 15 clip art styles close at hand.  You can learn more in this post 15 Interesting Clip Art Styles for Your E-Learning Courses via the Rapid E-Learning Blog.

The Rapid E-Learning Blog has a great post on how you can unzip your .PPTX files in PowerPoint 2007.  This is valuable because now can access the images you have in your PowerPoint files.

• Keep all of your images in one location.  Move the media folder to a place where you save your images.  Rename it to match the course and all of your images are now in one place. 

• Quickly save clip art images to your slides and then save the .PPTX file.  It’s easy to just drag and drop images to a PowerPoint 2007 slide.  Add images to your slides and then extract the file to have quick access to all of the images.

Go to the post and view the quick tutorial.  There’s also a link to a free image viewer and a program that lets you unzip your PowerPoint files.

Here are three blog posts I did for the Rapid E-Learning Blog that deal with graphics and visual design.  You’ll learn how use blurred images to direct the learner’s focus and how to quickly create silhouette characters and clip art.

If you don’t have a graphics editor and want to use more than PowerPoint to build your graphics try these:

Paint.net:  Free graphics editor that lets you do most of what you need to do.

Photoshop Elements: Great alternative to the more expensive full version and does all that you need.

Change the Focus of the Image

Blur Your Course Into Focus discusses ways to use a blur filter so that you can direct the learner’s focus.

Create Silhouettes

3 Easy Ways to Create Silhouette Characters shows three ways to quickly create silhouette characters for your slides.

How to Use Silhouettes

Following up the post above, here’s 5 Ways to Use Silhouette Graphics in Your E-Learning Course.  In this post, you’ll learn different ways you can use silhouettes on your slides and in your elearning courses.

These three posts will help you build better graphics for your slides and elearning courses.

I did a series of posts on the Rapid E-Learning Blog that explains how to get the most out PowerPoint when building rapid elearning courses.

Converting Your PowerPoint Slide to E-Learning

In this post I discuss ways to convert your slides into elearning.  I introduce a few different techniques and ways to make your slides look more interesting and make the content more interactive.

How to Convert Your PowerPoint Presentation into an Elearning Course

Using the Slide Notes for a Transcript

Most people use the slide notes for their transcript so I discuss ways to format the notes and how to use them in different ways other than just the transcript.

How to Get the Most Out of Your Slide Notes

Build Better E-Learning with PowerPoint 2007

For all the critics of PowerPoint, check out PowerPoint 2007 (and the soon to be released 2010).  It’ll make you rethink the criticism.  In this post, I reveal why PowerPoint 2007 is an excellent tool when you build rapid elearning.  In fact, if you do build rapid elearning course, you need PowerPoint 2007.  It’ll make your life a lot easier.

Here’s Why PowerPoint 2007 Helps You Build Better E-Learning

The cartoon above was inspired by a conference I attended.  In the session, the presenter went on and on about how PowerPoint was not effective for elearning and used PowerPoint to teach us this.

At another conference, I peeked in on a class that was teaching people how to build elearning courses.  Now the class itself wasn’t a hands-on workshop.  No, it was just a class that talked about learning and how to present ideas in an elearning context.

The irony was that this instructor had a plain white PowerPoint slide that was filled with about 15 bullet points.  You’d think that considering his use of multimedia to teach his pupils, he’d have applied some of his elearning principles to the slides he was using?  They’re not that different.

Anyway, enough of the diatribe.  Here’s a post from the Rapid E-Learning Blog that covers What Everybody Ought To Know About Using PowerPoint for
E-learning. 

As you’ll see in the demo, PowerPoint’s a very effective tool for elearning.  In fact, considering the cost, ease of use, and some of the new features in PowerPoint 2007 (and the upcoming PowerPoint 2010) I’d say that PowerPoint will continue to be the elearning tool of choice for quite a few more years.

Just to show that the critics are wrong, here are links to examples built in PowerPoint.  They were all published using the Articulate Studio ‘09.  There’s a free 30-day trial, if you’re interested in creating your own rapid elearning courses.

CPR Prototype Course

  CPR Prototype Course: This demo was built with just 20 slides.  The first slide is a Flash animation, the simulation activity is built in Articulate Quizmaker ‘09, and the rest is all PowerPoint slides.

Office Ergonomics Course

 Office Ergonomics: This example combines PowerPoint, Engage, and the older version of Quizmaker.  I like it because it shows how the rapid elearning tools can work together to create both an interactive and engaging course.

Frog Dissection Demo

Frog Dissection Demo: I built this in PowerPoint to show a person I met at a conference that you can create an interactive and engaging course. 

Beer Brewing Tour

Beer Brewing Tour: This was submitted for the Articulate Guru Awards.  I know the author.  He was a relatively new user and this was built in a couple of evenings…at a pub, of course.

Evernote Overview

 Evernote Overview:  This is a great example of nice visual design and effective use of the PowerPoint animations to teach people about Evernote’s features.  Check out the cool scroll animation in the iPhone section.

I think you’ll agree that these are excellent examples of what you can with PowerPoint.  Of course, no one’s suggesting that PowerPoint replaces sound instructional design or effective use of graphics.  But then again, PowerPoint’s just a blank screen like Flash or any other authoring environment.  If you have a beef, it’s not with PowerPoint.  Go talk to the person who’s using it to bore you to death.

Are you tired of the old standard PowerPoint templates?  Do you want to create your own, but don’t feel like you have the design skills?  Well, help is on the way.

Check out this post, The Secret to Creating Your Own PowerPoint Templates for E-Learning, from the Rapid E-Learning Blog.  It has a great tutorial on how to get design ideas for your next PowerPoint template.

Great Tips & Download 3 Free PowerPoint Templates

Not only will you get some great tips from the blog post, but you can also download three free PowerPoint templates that can be used for presentations or your rapid elearning courses.

Hope you’re inspired to create your own.  If you do, share them with us by via the comments section.

Custom vector images can cost quite a bit.  For example, you can buy a good stock photo for just a dollar or two.  But when you go to buy vector images from stock sites they tend to cost quite a bit more.

So you end us stuck with using the clip art that comes with Microsoft Office.  The good news is that you can easily customize the clip art that’s available to you.  All you need to do is ungroup it and then start to make your own edits.

Check out this tutorial to learn more.

Click here to view the clip art tutorial.

Here are some posts from the Rapid E-Learning Blog where you can learn more about how to do that:

• Little Known Ways to Create Your Own Graphics Using PowerPoint
• See How Easily You Can Design a Consistent Look for Your E-Learning Courses
• 3 Sure-Fire Ways to Make Your E-Learning Graphics Sizzle
• Create Custom Characters for Your E-Learning Scenarios

Check out the post on Understanding Multimedia for Rapid E-Learning.  While it’s about elearning, the core information is the same.

The post discusses:

• differences between vector and bitmap images
• recording audio
• use of video

There are also some good links to some free multimedia software.  Here are a couple that I use quite a bit:

• Paint.net: it’s free and it’s turned into a really nice graphics editor that does most of what people want.
• MovieMaker: Microsoft’s free video editing application.  You’re not going to make Hollywood videos with this, but it’s a very capable and easy to use editor.  Plus, most likely you already have it on your PC.  I see they even have some MovieMaker books for those who want to learn more.
• Audacity: it’s a free audio editor.  Most of the time it’s easier to record in PowerPoint or your elearning application.  But sometimes it’s good to keep the audio and other production separated.  
• Screenr: I find this to be one of the best and easiest to use screencasting tools.  It’s free and you don’t need to download any applications.  I also like that there’s no Screenr branding on the downloaded MP4 videos.