Things to take note on your slides

Things to take note while doing your slides on Microsoft Office Powerpoint

While you are doing your powerpoint slides for the users, you must remember some of these rules. These rules are very important in helping your users in their learning.

· Keep it clean

· Keep it lean

· Keep it easy

· Sometimes less is more

· Rule of 5 x 5 / Rule of 6 x 6 / Rule of 7 x 7

For the powerpoint slides, the type of font used is very important too. Some types of font (such as Arial) are more legible for screen presentation, whereas some types of font (such as Times New Roman) are more appropriate for printed text. Therefore, it is advisable to use Arial if you are coming up powerpoint slides for the users.

The lettering of the words must take note too. Normally, lower case of words is easier to read than upper case of words. Moreover, upper case of words implies yelling. So, you should use lower case when you are typing out the words in powerpoint slides. Next, the size of the words should never go below 24 when creating a presentation. If the size is below 24, some users might find it too small and hard to read. They then would not absorb any information from the powerpoint slides.

Windows Movie Maker and Microsoft Office Powerpoint

Windows Movie Maker

In the modern world, the teachers make use of videos to teach the students regarding a topic. This is to help the students to understand the topic even better when they are in a given situation. In order to produce your own good video for education purposes, you could make use of Windows Movie Maker, Ulead Videostudio Pro or even more! Since there are a few programs to make videos, we are concentrating on Windows Movie Maker itself.

Windows Movie Maker comes with the Windows OS package. Therefore, those users using the Windows computers are able to use this program. The main purpose for this program is to let you create your own video in the simplest way! Most of the basic features are found in this program such as the transition effects, effects of the video, titles and credits and more! Therefore, basic users do not need to worry when they use this program. In order to make a good video, lots of effort must be put in. So, do not expect the video to be completed in just 30 minutes! However if you are those type of users who find that you need some advanced features to produce your very good and awesome video, then Windows Movie Maker is not your choice. Ulead Videostudio Pro or Corel Videostudio 12 are some alternatives that have advanced editing features in it.

Microsoft Office Powerpoint

Next, we are going to discuss another useful program which people normally used it for presentations. This program is known as Microsoft Office Powerpoint. This program does not come with the Windows OS package but must be bought with the Microsoft Office package in order to obtain it. Nowadays, many instructors are using this program to come up with presentation slides relating to the topic to educate the users about the topic. This program is easy to use and has many features to it. You could insert any pictures or charts to enhance the content of that particular topic. The design of the slide template can be changed so as to improve the overall design of the slides. Also, custom animations can be added to the slides but if you add too much of it, it can be irritating for the users too. This program is very useful if you are using the Adobe Presenter. Without any one of it, the final product (presentation slides) would not be the best.

Gagne’s Events of Instructions

What are some of the necessary things that should be included in the e-learning slides to grab hold of the learners’ attention?

1) Gain the attention of the learners throughout the whole process
- Pictures
- Videos
- Interesting quotes
2) Informing learners regarding the objectives of the particular topic
- State what they should learn by the end of these slides
- Make sure that they have learnt these objectives after the end of the slides
3) Stimulating recall of prior learning
- Some questions can be asked regarding the previous slides to see whether the learners can recall what they have learnt previously
- Also can act as a form of revision for the learners
4) Presenting the stimulus
- Make sure that the content is understandable and user-friendly
- Try not to insert too many words in one slide as the learners would tend to get bored easily
5) Provide guidance to the learners
- Provide some relevant examples to the learners to help them better understand the topic they are learning
- A simple scenario regarding the topic can also be included to help them understand how this topic can be applied to their everyday life.
- Audio can be included in the presentation to guide the learners throughout the slides
6) Eliciting performance
- A short quiz (consisting of MCQs) can be given at the end of the topic to test them on their understanding towards the particular topic. However, they will not be graded as this is to provide opportunity for them to perform
- Other than a short quiz, there could be some online exercises for the learners to do after the topic. These online exercises can act as homework to the learners for them to perform
7) Providing feedback
- Learners must have the opportunity to give valuable feedbacks to the instructor to see what the instructor can improve on to make the e-learning more interactive and enjoyable to the learners
- From here, the instructor must make use of the feedbacks and review its e-learning package
8) Assessing performance
- Instructor can do this by giving a test regarding some topics that have been taught to the learners. From here, the marks reveal whether the learners got learnt anything from the online e-learning or not.
- Can be given through MCQs, Open-ended questions, Case-study questions, discussion questions etc
9) Enhancing retention and transfer
- Instructor is recommended to provide review after the learners have completed the test so as to see where they went wrong and learn their mistakes
- Additional exercises can be given to learners to complete so that as they practice more, they understand more regarding the topic. Thus, they will not commit the same mistakes again in the test
To conclude, it is the best to include all of these in your e-learning package. If there is anything missing, things might not go your own way...

Hot Potatoes

Review of Hot Potatoes

Many people think that this application is associated with food. However, this is not so. This application is specialized in creating assessments to test the learners what they have learnt during their e-learning, as well as to interact with the learners too. These include cloze passages, quizzes, crossword puzzles, matching exercises and jumbled-sentence exercises. Learners are also able to learn their own mistakes after the completion of their assessment as the correct answers are always shown after they complete the respective assessment.

For cloze passages, learners are given a passage related to their learning with blanks in it. The task for the learners is to read the passage carefully and fill up the blanks with the correct answer to obtain the allocated marks.

For quizzes, it is somehow similar to the MCQ (Multiple-Choice Questions) test. Only MCQ are given in the quiz and the learners are expected to read the MCQ carefully to select the correct option for it. This then enables them to obtain the marks allocated for each MCQ.

For crossword puzzles, the learners are given a puzzle with blanks to fill in the correct letters to form different words. How would the learners know what to fill into the blanks? They are given a hint to each word and the number of blanks corresponds to the number of letters that form that word. Therefore, 1 of the criteria to obtain the correct answer is to see whether the word fills up the blanks given or not. If the blanks are filled up, you are most probably getting the correct answer.

For matching exercises, the learners are tested to match the correct sequence when given “The process of distillation” for example. This is to test their understanding on the process of distillation to see which comes first and which comes last. If the learners have the correct sequence of “The process of distillation”, then they are able to obtain the allocated marks.

Lastly for jumbled-sentence exercises, the learners are expected to re-arrange the jumbled words to form the correct sentence. There might be more than 1 correct answer to it. Therefore, the learners must read the jumbled-sentence question carefully so as to understand it and correct the sentence to obtain the marks given.

To conclude the review of Hot Potatoes, this application is free for download and easy to use. Therefore, this application is mostly recommended for the instructor who creates the respective e-learning website to test the understanding of the learners.

Audacity

Review of Audacity

Audacity is a useful application for users to record and edit audio files. Many people would think that Audacity is complicated to use and required some training before they could use them. However, they are wrong. Audacity is a quick and easy application to be used for. Since it allows the individual user to record his voice, he must have a microphone attached to the computer to complete this step. Moreover, he must be in a quiet environment so as to record high-quality and non-distorted voice. The user could also import the audio file to Audacity to edit the audio file such as cutting the length of the audio file to make it short and sweet, adding effects to the imported audio file, adjust the volume of the audio file and more! After creating your own audio file or editing your current audio file, the user is able to export the file in these 3 common formats. They are MP3, WAV and Ogg Vorbis. One special feature about MP3 is that the user gets to add the track info on the audio file, which gives the user a satisfaction that he has created his own audio file. There are still many features awaiting you to try in Audacity. So, why wait now? Go and get one today by downloading it from the official Audacity website!

Macromedia Breeze Presenter a.k.a Adobe Presenter

Basic Review of Macromedia Breeze Presenter (Currently known as Adobe Presenter)


Adobe Presenter is always associated with Microsoft Powerpoint as it allows you to create online presentation slides for your learners so that your learners would learn the content presented in the slides. One of the features that Adobe Presenter has is to allow you to have audio in the online presentation slides. The producer of the online presentation slides (one of the components in the e-learning package) is able to import its personal audio created using Audacity or Sound Recorder. However, the producer must bear in mind that the audio files imported must either be in MP3 or WAV format. Other types of audio files are not entertained. Another method for the producer to have audio in its online presentation slides is to record audio using Adobe Presenter, with the use of microphone. The presenter must have the script with him so that he knows what to say when recording the audio. Next, this interesting feature allows the producer to add a quiz mostly at the end of the online presentation slides. The purpose is to see whether the learners have learned anything from the slides so as to complete the quiz accurately. The quiz also reflects how many people have done it. If many people do it, it means that the e-learning content is interesting. However if not many people do it, it means that they are not interested in the e-learning content, not to say the quiz. Attachments could also be added to the online presentation slides to show information in spreadsheets, which cannot be created in Adobe Presenter. It is important to create themes for the online presentation slides so that the slides look appealing and interest the learners to learn the content from the slides. That’s all the basic review of Adobe Presenter.

Summary of the Design process of ADDIE

Summarise what must you do in the Design process


The design is important in the making of the e-learning package. During the design process, lesson maps must be out so as to view the topics available for the users to learn. Learning objectives cannot be forgotten as well as it shows the users what they will learn at the end of the day. Activities could also be designed to incorporate interactivity in learning such as designing a SIMS related game so as to incorporate the importance of saving money and not spending every bits of it. In order to view what the users would be learning in an ordinary order, the lesson structure must be created to show the order of the available topics. Thus, users would be able to understand the basic of the e-learning content before proceeding to the next. Example is that they would learn the concept of savings first, followed by the ways of savings. The layout of the e-learning website should be user-friendly and convenient so that the users would be comfortable with the website. Last but not least, instructional strategies are also found in the design process. For the users to comprehend the knowledge they learned, tutorial questions could be set to see whether they learned fully from the content. Problem-Based learning situations could also be given to check whether the users are able to apply what they have learnt in the situations or not.