PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

PowerPoint Features in SumTotal ToolBook 10: Conversation with Brad Crain

As Vice President and General Manager of ToolBook at SumTotal Systems, Brad Crain is responsible for ToolBook products, including strategy, research and development, and product management. Brad previously held various positions at Click2learn/Asymetrix including Director of Learning Management Systems Engineering and Directorof Enterprise Products. In this conversation, Brad discusses how the new ToolBook 10 from SumTotal makes conversion of PowerPoint content into interactive learning even easier and faster than before.

Geetesh: How does ToolBook help PowerPoint users effectively use their existing PowerPoint content?

Brad: With the ability to import Microsoft PowerPoint files into ToolBook, you have even more choices when developing content. For example, you can quickly re-use existing PowerPoint content to cut development time—simply import the PowerPoint file into ToolBook as described in the picture below. Then, add assessments, interactivity, media, and rich effects using ToolBook. For deployment, publish the content to the SCORM format using ToolBook Web publishing feature.

You can also increase the involvement of your Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) in content authoring. After instructional designers create a PowerPoint-based storyboard, SMEs can populate the storyboard using the familiar PowerPoint interface. Next, these PowerPoint files are imported into ToolBook. For deployment, just publish the content out to SCORM format using ToolBook Web publishing feature.

Geetesh: Tell us more about the new PowerPoint import enhancements in ToolBook 10.

Brad: With the new features of SumTotal ToolBook 10, superior content creation has never been so fast and easy. Now you can create new learning materials with more speed and expertise, and then enhance those materials easily with assessments, interactivity, media, and rich effects.

Import more from your Microsoft PowerPoint presentations. With the ability to import Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, the previous ToolBook release helped you get your Subject Matter Experts more involved in content authoring projects, and you gained the ability to quickly reuse legacy content. Now with ToolBook 10, PowerPoint speaker notes and audio files can also be imported, giving you even more options when reusing PowerPoint content.

To learn more visit us here.

See Also: An Interview with Brad Crain

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Add-in, eLearning, Interviews, Online Presentations, PowerPoint

iSpring Online: Conversation with Yury Uskov

Yury Uskov is a founder and CEO of iSpring Solutions Inc., an innovative software company with the development center in Russia. Yury has a Master’s degree in Software Engineering and since 2001 has been working in the rich media industry inspired by the idea of making the best solution for online presentation sharing. iSpring Solutions has already launched several Flash technology projects including iSpring, a PowerPoint to Flash converter, and SlideBoom, an online service for presentation sharing. In this conversation, Yury discusses the new iSpring Online service.

Geetesh: Tell us more about iSpring Online. What exactly is this service, and what need does it fulfill?

Yury: iSpring Online is a new flexible Learning Management System (LMS) that works as an online platform to deliver and manage e-learning content, get detailed reports on e-learning activity, manage users and organize classes. With iSpring Online you can manage your audience: create new users and groups, assign rights and control access to your content.

iSpring Online allows inviting people to access the files you upload by registering at your private virtual portal. Alternatively, you can make your presentations public and send out the links to the files you want to share. That’s a great way to market the learning content you create. This way no registration will be required to view your content. iSpring Online gives you unrestricted traffic flow, so any file can have an unlimited number of views.

Additionally, iSpring Online gives detailed data on how your presentation is viewed and how your users answer quiz questions. Both individual and overall group tracking is available.

I’m glad to share a brief demo presentation (the link no longer exists) on iSpring Online features and appearance overview. Learn more about iSpring Online and sign up for a free 30-day trial account.

Geetesh: Can you share some scenarios in which a user can benefit from iSpring Online?

Yury: Here are three different user scenarios for people of certain occupations.

1. If you are a school, college or university teacher and you would like to track how your students go through the online materials you offer them and grade them accordingly, iSpring Online can be of great help. It is an easy-to-use tool for tracking your students’ progress without having to need any additional software.
2. If you are an instructional designer in a corporation and would like to arrange advanced professional training for employees and check their qualifications for positions they take.
3. If you work as an independent instructional designer and you would like to sell you courses online through a website. In this case you need a system that would not just host your materials securely, it should also provide detailed statistics and can guarantee protection from illegal distribution and gets easily integrated into your website.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Delivery, Interviews, Online Presentations, PowerPoint

Distinction’s 2009 Annual Presentation Impact Survey: Conversation with Jim Endicott

Jim Endicott is an internationally-recognized consultant, designer, speaker specializing in professional presentation messaging, design and delivery. Jim has been a Jesse H. Neal award-winning columnist for Presentations magazine with his contributions to the magazine’s Creative Techniques column. Jim has also contributed presentation-related content in magazines like Business Week, Consulting, and Selling Power as well as being a paid contributor for a number of industry-related websites.

In this conversation, Jim discusses the just concluded 2009 Annual Presentation Impact Survey conducted by his company, Distinction Communication, Inc.

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Interviews, Jim Endicott, Opinion, PowerPoint

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ZoomIt: Conversation with Vijay Raj

Vijay Raj is a a Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) in Setup-Deploy, and a Springboard Series (STEP) Member for Windows 7. He is passionate about technology evangelism, and blogs at msigeek.com. He is also a regular speaker at the user group communities and events.

In this conversation, Vijay talks about ZoomIt, a convenient tool that allows presenters to zoom into a part of their presentation, application, or the desktop.

Geetesh: Tell us more about ZoomIt, and how you discovered this tool.

Vijay: Like many others, I do presentations at offices and user group meets. While doing so, I tend to show programing codes or configurations (or a section of the desktop or even a zoomed in portion of a slide) during some demos. Now, when you have a large audience or a large venue, the audience may not be able to see the little fonts or the small detail that appears on your screen! That’s when you need to zoom in and show them exactly what you are talking about. ZoomIt helps you in doing just that, and it provides options to annotate as well.

Sysinternals, who create ZoomIt provide some amazing tools as a part of their Sysinternals Suite — and ZoomIt is definitely one among them. You have keyboard hotkeys to control the zoom and annotations. ZoomIt runs quietly in the system tray until summoned, and it gets activated whenever you use these hotkeys. Once you zoom into an area, you can move around, draw annotations, and even draw images to showcase a particular section. The best thing I like about this tool is that it is a small download and it can work in almost any machine that runs Microsoft Windows.

I first saw ZoomIt while watching a session by Mark Russinovich (incidentally Mark created ZoomIt), where he used it in one of his demos. That was a wow moment for me — I have been using ZoomIt ever since.

With ZoomIt, I can easily emphasize and showcase some section of my presentation, or the desktop without using a pointing device. I always end up using this tool during my presentations, no matter what size the audience is!

Geetesh: Can you share scenarios in which ZoomIt can be helpful for presenters within PowerPoint, and beyond.

Vijay: ZoomIt can be used anywhere while presenting. I recollect an incident — I was once traveling back from office by public transport and a few of the passengers were discussing whether Windows 7 would be a hit. After some intense discussions, I thought it was time to pull my laptop out, and show them what this OS is really about! I moved to the last row and several passengers flocked around. ZoomIt was really handy in showing my laptop screen to the people who were sitting 2 seats away from me! That’s so powerful.

You can use ZoomIt in many scenarios wherever you want to zoom, draw, or annotate on the screen. Let me explain more.

Zoom: In this screenshot below, you will see that I have zoomed into my desktop to show the ‘progress status’, which is one of the Aero features of Windows 7. I have also drawn an arrow to showcase this to the audience. This is so much clearer to the audience, rather than asking them to see the bottom of the screen!

Draw Sections and Annotate: As an IT Professional, some of my demos evolve around the command prompt. In the default command prompt window, the text might not be clear and the audience would hardly see any difference when you show them multiple lines of output. As you can see in the screenshot below, I have actually showcased a schema file and explained that each DLL contains references to their respective virtual DLLs. If you observe, I have created 2 boxes in different colors to show the Virtual DLL groups. This keeps the presentation and demo more lively and interactive, and the audience knows what they are seeing!

Also, if you are a developer who needs to do presentations, you’ll have plenty of programing scripts and code snippets to show during a demo. This annotation feature in Zoomit will really be handy.

I have more info on ZoomIt on my site.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Delivery, Interviews, PowerPoint, Presentation Skills