A Rapid E-Learning Tip That’ll Save You a Ton of Time
This guest blog entry was written by Articulate Community Manager Jeanette Brooks
Here’s a tip that’s going to simplify your e-learning development process.
If your courses contain animations like the moving hands effect we shared last week, you know that techniques like this are a great way to create visual interest. But if your project has lots of animations, the time involved in building and tweaking them can bloat your workload in a hurry.
Get more mileage out of your work by re-using animations
The good news is, if you’re using Presenter with PowerPoint 2007, or if you’re building a quiz in Quizmaker ’09, you don’t have to create all your animations from scratch. There’s a better way!
When you create a cool animation, you can easily re-use it, and it only takes a few seconds:
- Copy your animated objects and paste them into a different place in your course — or into a different course altogether.
- Right-click on any image you want to change, and choose Change Picture.
- Swap in a new image that suits your content.
And you’re done! All your animations stay intact.
Following are some quick tutorials that show the steps for both PowerPoint 2007 and Quizmaker. And speaking of PowerPoint 2007, you should definitely check out this blog post, where Tom Kuhlmann gives even more tips for using PowerPoint 2007 to build great e-learning.
Re-using animations in PowerPoint 2007
View this screencast at Screenr
Re-using animations in Quizmaker ’09
View this screencast at Screenr
Want some source files for practice?
Check out this thread in the Community Forums, where you can find PowerPoint and Quizmaker files containing the animated hands effect. Download them and experiment with swapping out the images! In fact, feel free to use the thread to post your own examples, or to share your ideas about using this or other animation effects. It’s a great way to inspire your fellow e-learning developers!
