Articulate Storyline: A Brand New eLearning Development Tool

Check out the review of the brand new eLearning tool, Articulate Storyline.  It was released May 2nd 2012 and has already received rave reviews.  After reading this article and seeing some of the features I am convinced.  I need it, want it and can't wait to have it!  I love that one push of the publish button makes it available in 3 different formats: Flash, HTML5, and iOS.  The format is made available automatically according to the user's device.

Do you already have Articulate Storyline?  Lucky you!  Here are some free templates for you to use.
Also I found some more links for you if you are wanting some more free tutorials on how to use the Storyline product.

Articulate Storyline Tutorials:

Getting Started with Articulate Storyline
Beginning a New Storyline Project
Inserting and Customizing Slide Content
Inserting and Customizing Media
Working with States, Triggers, and Layers
Inserting and Customizing Screen Recordings
Inserting and Customizing Interactivity
Applying Animations and Slide Transitions
Customizing Your Project Design
Working with Variables
Inserting and Customizing Quiz Slides
Importing Content from Other Sources
Customizing the Storyline Player
Previewing and Publishing Your Project
Helpful Storyline Tools and Options

Communication Tips

3 Secret Weapons For Better Communication, From Professional Actors | Fast Company

Of course the most important part of instructional design and online learning is the way lessons are communicated. Integrating the three fundamental principles of objective, intention, and delivery make communication more effective.  Before outlines are created and syllabi written objectives must be clearly understood in the context of WHY this information is important.  Giving an intention to the message is most important to the adult learner.  Androgogy centers on giving and communicating information in relevant and applicable ways for the adult student. 
Taking "cues" from performers is a wise decision for all educators.

Create a punch out in Photoshop Elements 9

The task of creating a punch out in Photoshop Elements 9 gave me such a headache today.  All I wanted to do was have a rainbow photo with cloud punch outs featuring another picture behind it.  Sometimes I wish Photoshop would just read my mind.  Why can't I just see it in the mind's eye and poof...transferred to digital format.  It would make design a million times faster!  I hope you find this quick tutorial before you pull out all of your hair trying to do the same thing. *smile

I would include steps with pictures, but I wanted to post this immediately before I forget.  Pictures later, I promise.

1. Create a new layer
2. Select the shape tool
3. Draw your shape
4. Simplify the shape layer
5. Select the shape using the quick selection tool
6. Once it is highlighted right-click inside the shape
7. Select "New Layer" and make sure to check the "use previous layer to create clipping mask"
8. Then move your photo into the shape and Viola!

* I like putting inverse shadows on the shapes to give them even more dimension.

Dr. Finn's Retirement Photo

Let me know if this tutorial helped you in the comment section below.

Digital Bloom's Taxonomy for Instructional Design

This is a digital version of Bloom's Taxonomy.  Have you seen this before?  If not check it out.  I like to reference it often when creating courses.  It was created by Mike Fisher.  The first Bloom's taxonomy was created in the 1950s and has radically advanced since then.

Mike Fisher then updated this graphic in 2010 here:

Here is another updated version of the digital taxonomy and it recently replaced Mike Fisher's on my desktop:

Here is the old 1950s version:

Click here if you would like to dive right in to find out all you can about Bloom's Taxonomy, past, present, and future.

Have you found great graphics and information to help you formulate better learning outcomes for your students?

58 Tips for eLearning and Instructional Design

If you aren't already a member of the eLearning Guild then you don't know about this free downloadable book!  The tips in this guide include research, design, development, and project management.  There are certainly advertisements for guild memberships and conferences upcoming, but who cares?!  The tips in the guide are worth the extra scroll to get past the ads.

Enjoy!  Here is the book: eLearning book

Newsletter Must

If you haven't already signed up for this you must and the newsletter is free. Awesome information for anyone working in the online environment.
Publications | The Sloan Consortium

Link Must-haves for Online Learning in Higher Education

Publications | The Sloan Consortium
If you haven't already signed up for this you must and the newsletter is free. Awesome information for anyone working in the online environment.




JOLT: Journal of Online Learning and Teaching
The MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT) is a peer-reviewed, open-access, online publication addressing the scholarly use of multimedia resources in online higher education. JOLT is published quarterly in March, June, September, and December. The objectives of JOLT are to:
Enable faculty to use technology effectively in online teaching and learning by learning from a community of researchers and scholars;

• Enable academic programs to design and deploy academic technology to optimize online teaching and learning;
• Build a community around the research and scholarly use of multimedia educational resources for online teaching and learning.

Distance Learning Newsletter

eLearning Guild
The eLearning Guild is the oldest and most trusted source of information, networking, and community for eLearning Professionals. As a member-driven organization, the Guild produces conferences, online events, e-books, research reports, and Learning Solutions Magazine—all devoted to the idea that the people who know the most about making eLearning successful are the people who produce eLearning every day in corporate, government, and academic settings. Our goal is to create a place where eLearning professionals can share their knowledge, expertise, and ideas to build a better industry—and better learning experiences—for everyone.

Higher Education Associations

Association for Telecommunications Professionals in Higher Education (ACUTA)
http://www.acuta.org/home.cfmACUTA is a nonprofit organization whose core purpose is to support higher education institutions in achieving optimal use of communications technologies.


Council For Higher Education Accreditation
http://www.chea.org/CHEA is a private, nonprofit national organization that coordinates accreditation activity in the United States for the purpose of quality assurance to the "U.S. Congress and Department of Education, general public, opinion leaders, students, and families."

Higher Education Resources

EarnMyDegree.com
http://www.earnmydegree.com/EarnMyDegree.com is an online repository of both online degree and college information with a particular focus on Associate and Undergraduate degree programs. Their stated goal is to match the education desires of working professionals, with the best available school or degree programs. The robust and user-friendly site features hundreds of schools and thousands of accredited online degree programs.


Education Resources Information Center (ERIC)
http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERIC is an online digital library that provides ready access to education research and information to support the use of educational research and information to improve practice in learning, teaching, educational decision-making, and research.

Higher Education Resource Hub
http://www.higher-ed.org/The goal of this evolving Web site is to provide a comprehensive collection of information resources in the field of higher education throughout the world.

Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching MIT OpenCourseWare
http://ocw.mit.edu/News and information on the project to make the course materials used in the teaching of virtually all of MIT's courses available on the Web, free of charge, to any user anywhere in the world.

World Lecture Hall
http://web.austin.utexas.edu/wlh/World Lecture Hall publishes links to pages created by faculty worldwide who are using the Web to deliver course materials in any language.

Growing an online program

In this article all the angles are considered when growing an online program. It is not just about getting students enrolled, but it is the processes which really drive sustainable growth.  If there are 500 students there needs to be all the staff and trained faculty needed to retain them. Including, trackers to watch the processes to make sure everyone has done exactly what they are supposed to.  Syllabi have to be loaded, courses have to be built/maintained/updated, teachers need to comply with policies and the mission of the school, and students have to be prepared for the rigors of online learning.

Here is the article with more specifics:

So you want to grow an online program? | On Teaching Online

What are your best practices for growing an online education program?

Free CSS Tutorials and Templates

CSS is the number one way to create the look of any website.  CSS is a wonderful tool for all website designers and developers.  With the style sheets separate from the rest of the HTML code you are able to freely update many pages at once in a myriad of creative varieties. I found a fabulous and clear example of how to use CSS, how to use it effectively and free CSS templates to use and manipulate.  Yes, you can thank me.  Also, please let me know your favorite source for CSS templates and other information.

Go Here to read free CSS Tutorials: CSS and web standards tutorials, info and help:

For the standards and rule book for CSS go here: http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/

Webmonkey: design: Death of the Websafe Color Palette?

In instructional design choosing colors which are safe for both the web, the printer, and software design is a constant juggling act.  My favorite part in the creation that goes into instructional design is choosing the color.  Many times out of a love for -- light coral -- I stick to STRATEGY 2 , in "Coping in an Unwebsafe World".  Yet, it is important to remember that even though we have an agenda to complete the most important  part is reaching everyone of our target audience, the students.

HTML name Hex code R   G   B Decimal code R   G   B Red colors IndianRed CD 5C 5C 205  92  92 LightCoral F0 80 80 240 128 128 Salmon FA 80 72 250 128 114

What are some of your favorite color palettes you like to use in your designs?

Webmonkey: design: Death of the Websafe Color Palette?:
My Favorite Part of the article:


Coping in an Unwebsafe World The first thing you need to do when choosing colors is, with as much precision as possible, the distribution of technologies of your audience. The most recent numbers we've seen from StatMarket put True Color (24- and 32-bit) at about 38 percent of users; High Color (16-bit) at about 56 percent; and 256-color users are at about 6 percent. You might feel relieved by these numbers, since so few are at 256 color depth, but don't be: Unless you work entirely in black and white, approximately half your general audience won't properly see the colors you select for your site.Once you've got the distribution of your audience identified, you have a basis to choose a strategy. Here's a handful of suggestions to get you started:


STRATEGY 1 -- Use the really safe palette.

We know it's not pretty, we know it's only 22 colors, but it does give you reliable control over the colors your users see.

STRATEGY 2 -- Don't sweat it.

You're always free to run roughshod over your audience as you indulge your hearty designer appetite. But we find this a slightly unsatisfying, not to mention unprofessional, approach.

STRATEGY 3 -- Ignore 16-bit users.

If you do this, you'll regain the use of most of the old websafe palette (minus the four colors that we discovered don't work in Internet Explorer on Windows). It's a solution you can live with, except that it favors the lowest-tech 6 percent slice over the higher-tech 56 percent slice. We don't usually agree with such an approach, but in this case you could argue that the colors an 8-bit user sees when fed an unsupported color (a hideous dither) is much worse than what a 16-bit user sees (a slight shift in the color).

STRATEGY 4 -- Ignore 8-bit users.

This approach favors the group that most likely constitutes the majority of your users, but it can give the 8-bit users a rough ride. You will get the same kinds of problems you got when looking at the old 216 websafe palette on a 16-bit system: GIFs and code-generated color will shift all too regularly to inconsistent values. So when you design a site, your chosen palette will have to be tested on a whole bunch of browsers and operating system environments (congratulations, you're now in the same boat as the developers who have to test their dHTML across myriad environments, only you can't even write an API).


The only consolation we can offer you here is this tool, which will at least make it a little easier to set up your color tests. Great! I'll take it.We should warn you, though, that you're unlikely to find a set of colors that works correctly across all the environments you're targeting. We tried a few dozen colors and weren't very successful at finding palettes that worked properly. You'll probably find that once you've chosen your palette and tested it in the relevant environments, you have to go through several ever-so-slight tweaks of a color before you get it to be consistent across the relevant environments. You might try to change the value of one root color by just 1 increment (e.g., change AC to AD, or 09 to 08). Unfortunately, some colors will never be satisfactory, so you'll either have to ax them altogether or opt to let the colors shift as they may for the users of the offending environments.


STRATEGY 5 -- Keep the GIFs and code-generated color separated.

Since the shifts in color performed by the browser on 16-bit systems are usually very subtle, they won't cause a drastic imbalance in your chosen palette for the most part. But if you place a GIF and code-generated color right next to each other, the browser's bad habit of shifting the two to different values gets highlighted, and the discontinuity suddenly gets thrown into relief. If you keep the two apart, however, users will be less likely to notice the problem. (Although you should still test your colors; some differences are too distinct to ignore, no matter how far apart they are).

STRATEGY 6 -- Use transparent backgrounds.

If you do have to have a GIF and code-generated color next to each other, try this: When you export your GIF, select the color that's going to be in the code next to it and make that transparent. Then set the BGCOLOR of both the cell in which you've placed the GIF and the adjacent cell to the same value. That color will now bleed through the GIF, and regardless of which color the browser shifts it to, it will be the same for both the GIF and the code-generated color, since really it's not in the GIF at all. good to know! I will have to try this. How about you??There is, however, at least one big limitation with this approach: You can only choose one color to be transparent in the GIF, which is a problem if the GIF has to be continuous with more than one color. To be sure, you can make more than one color in a GIF be transparent, but the color that will bleed through will have to be the BGCOLOR of an HTML container (such as a DIV, SPAN, or TD), and an image can't span these containers. Therefore, no matter how many colors you make transparent in your GIF, only one color can show through.

STRATEGY 7 -- Use Flash.

Flash's colors get drawn by its proprietary plug-in, not by the browser, so there's no "GIF versus code-generated color" issue here. The colors you select will still shift when viewed in a High Color system, but the discontinuity between the way GIFs and code-generated color shift will be eliminated. Of course, Flash has myriad problems of its own, which we'll leave to you to assess. no kidding! right?!

STRATEGY 8 -- Help us!

We certainly don't know all there is to know about hardware or software. We haven't managed to test all colors on all browsers and all platforms, so our results aren't exhaustive and complete. Most importantly, we don't have the power to make the browser flaws go away. You can help us with all these shortcomings. First, you can validate our results. Second, you can try to help us piece together a palette of colors that is stable (no discontinuous shifting) on High Color systems across all common browser and operating system environments. And third, if you work at Netscape, you might look into fixing this problem for the next and all subsequent releases of your browsers. We found Microsoft to be very responsive to our inquiries, and fixes for these bugs are forthcoming. Sadly (and not to slam anyone), we weren't as successful with Netscape. If you can offer us insight into current versions of Netscape to create a temporary fix, that's great. And if you can ensure that future releases of it avoid these problems altogether, that's even better. In any case, let us know what you discover.


STRATEGY 9 -- Go back to print design.