Education

Introducing Palm Breeze Cafe Free!
by Kim Cavanaugh - 22-Oct-09
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I wear a lot of different hats in my day job. As a member of the Educational Technology Team for Palm Beach County schools—one of the largest public school districts in the U.S.—I do all sorts of things from manage programs to conducting workshops and even doing the occasional web and graphic design work. But the most unusual aspect of my job is that I also get to be a television star.

OK, star might be a bit of a stretch, but I am the co-host of a weekly television show that is filmed in our school district's television studio. Each and every week during the school year we record Palm Breeze Cafe for broadcast to all 165 schools in our district as well as send the show out to local cable viewers.

But as cool as it is to serve our local community this way, from the start we've always published our show online through YouTube and other video sharing sites. This allows us to share with you (for free!) the great things we do on the show and the many ways that computers can be used for learning.

CMX JumpStart: Berlin
by Adrian Senior - 23-Sep-09
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Berlin is, of course, renowned as a city of great culture and diversity, and the Berlin JumpStart mirrors those traits. Berlin provides a powerful and flexible interface on which you could base just about any design you could imagine. From the inverted sliding door navigation and the accompanying sub navigation system, and the srolling image menu Berlin is equipped to cope with the largest of websites while remaining attractive and interesting to your users and functional to your clients.

The main construction of Berlin consists of liquid outer divs, while maintaining a fixed inner content width to ensure that the design fills out the user's browser width, while still maintaining a good line reading length. The content, as always, is created with accessibility in mind. Berlin comes complete with an extension to install the design into Dreamweaver, making the creation of new pages a breeze. It also comes complete with a series of tutorials that explain in-depth how the design elements have been put together.

Introducing CMX JumpStart Siberia Free!
by Sheri German - 11-Jun-09
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It's almost summer, so don't make me think. You may have read the book by Steve Krug, a book about web usability, that uses this phrase as its title. If "don't make me think" is your philosophy, then you're going to love the latest JumpStart, CMX JumpStart Siberia. From its completely neutral color scheme that will easily adapt to any color choices you make, to its ready-made inclusion of the Spry Accordion Widget, to its brain dead method for switching from two to three column layouts, Siberia won't make you think, or certainly not much.

Community MX as a Course Textbook Free!
by Sheri German - 05-Mar-09
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If you are an instructor, you probably spend a lot of time deciding what textbooks to use for classes. You probably get literature from textbook companies, and if you're lucky, get desk copies for free so that you're not spending your own funds to try out books. Still, the perfect textbook seems to be an elusive dream that never materializes. There just are too many problems with books:

Books, usually written months in advance of their publication, are always a bit out-of-date.
Books never have everything you want and need in order to teach your curriculum.
Books are usually one size fits all, and students are always at varying levels of development.
Books are usually very expensive, especially in relation to their "shelf-life".
Students have different learning styles, and the traditional textbook may not work well for many of them.

I'd always supplemented my class materials with articles from Community MX, but I had never actually used CMX as the textbook for a course. When I was asked to teach the Montgomery College GD218 Graphic Design for the Web class - an online class taught in real time through the Elluminate virtual classroom software - I realized that CMX as textbook would be the perfect solution to what I needed to accomplish.

The Art of the Interactive Storyteller - Part 5 Free!
by Tom Green - 17-Apr-08
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We all tell stories. Every night my wife and I sit down and, over dinner, tell stories about our frantic lives that day. What my wife and I do is no different from what web developers do every day. The only difference is web developers tell stories to a global audience. In fact did I tell you the one about being mugged by a werewolf on a site I was surfing.....

The Interactive Storyteller Series:
The Art of the Interactive Storyteller - Part 1
The Art of the Interactive Storyteller - Part 2
The Art of the Interactive Storyteller - Part 3
The Art of the Interactive Storyteller - Part 4
The Art of the Interactive Storyteller - Part 5

The Art of the Interactive Storyteller - Part 4 Free!
by Tom Green - 07-Apr-08
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We all tell stories. Every night my wife and I sit down and, over dinner, tell stories about our frantic lives that day. What my wife and I do is no different from what web developers do every day. The only difference is web developers tell stories to a global audience. In fact did I tell you the one about being mugged by a werewolf on a site I was surfing.....

The Interactive Storyteller Series:
The Art of the Interactive Storyteller - Part 1
The Art of the Interactive Storyteller - Part 2
The Art of the Interactive Storyteller - Part 3
The Art of the Interactive Storyteller - Part 4
The Art of the Interactive Storyteller - Part 5

The Art of the Interactive Storyteller - Part 3 Free!
by Tom Green - 03-Apr-08
Reader Level:

We all tell stories. Every night my wife and I sit down and, over dinner, tell stories about our frantic lives that day. What my wife and I do is no different from what web developers do every day. The only difference is web developers tell stories to a global audience. In fact did I tell you the one about being mugged by a werewolf on a site I was surfing.....

The Interactive Storyteller Series:
The Art of the Interactive Storyteller - Part 1
The Art of the Interactive Storyteller - Part 2
The Art of the Interactive Storyteller - Part 3
The Art of the Interactive Storyteller - Part 4
The Art of the Interactive Storyteller - Part 5

The Art of the Interactive Storyteller - Part 2 Free!
by Tom Green - 28-Mar-08
Reader Level:

We all tell stories. Every night my wife and I sit down and, over dinner, tell stories about our frantic lives that day. What my wife and I do is no different from what web developers do every day. The only difference is web developers tell stories to a global audience. In fact did I tell you the one about being mugged by a werewolf on a site I was surfing.....

The Interactive Storyteller Series:
The Art of the Interactive Storyteller - Part 1
The Art of the Interactive Storyteller - Part 2
The Art of the Interactive Storyteller - Part 3
The Art of the Interactive Storyteller - Part 4
The Art of the Interactive Storyteller - Part 5

The Art of the Interactive Storyteller - Part 1 Free!
by Tom Green - 25-Mar-08
Reader Level:

We all tell stories. Every night my wife and I sit down and, over dinner, tell stories about our frantic lives that day. What my wife and I do is no different from what web developers do every day. The only difference is web developers tell stories to a global audience. In fact did I tell you the one about being mugged by a werewolf on a site I was surfing.....

The Interactive Storyteller Series:
The Art of the Interactive Storyteller - Part 1
The Art of the Interactive Storyteller - Part 2
The Art of the Interactive Storyteller - Part 3
The Art of the Interactive Storyteller - Part 4
The Art of the Interactive Storyteller - Part 5

The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part Thirteen
by Sheri German - 29-Aug-07
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After you learn to create layouts using CSS techniques, you may think that you no longer need to use tables. Tables are still a very important tool, though. They are still appropriate for their original intended purpose, that is, for tabular data.

In the last part of this series, you dealt with Word documents and their tendency to break valid code. Now you'll turn to Excel and learn the best way to convert its documents into spreadsheets on the web. You'll take an Excel document that contains a spreadsheet of the plays of Shakespeare, convert it to clean (X)HTML, add accessibility and usability features, and then style it to match the design of the Shakespeare site. You can download the support files, as well as a completed version of the page, in the download link so that you can "play along at home".

Approximate download size: 687k

The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series:
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 1
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 2
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 3
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 4
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 5
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 6
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 7
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 8
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 9
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 10
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 11
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 12
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 13
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 14 Coming Soon

The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part Ten
by Sheri German - 20-Jul-07
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In Part Ten of the Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan series, you will complete the bug squashing work you started in part nine, as well as learn some "best practices" for feeding Internet Explorer the unique styles it needs. Here is what you will do in this tutorial:

Identify the 3-pixel text jog bug
Use the CSS Advisor to find solutions to fix the bug
Create an Internet Explorer specific style sheet for all IE bugs from lessons nine and ten
Use Conditional Comments to feed the style sheet to Internet Explorer only

The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series Part Eight
by Sheri German - 07-Jun-07
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If you have been following along with the Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan series, by now you should have a good start on a working site. There is a very important step to take before going any further, however: you should validate the site for (X)HTML, CSS, and 508/WAI accessibility. Based on these tests, you can make the necessary corrections to ensure that your pages are error free, as well as accessible to users with disabilities. In the process, you'll create a more usable and reliable experience for everyone who visits your site.

In part eight of the series, you will learn how to do the following:

Validate pages
Explore options for validating pages
Look at Dreamweaver's markup and accessibility validation tools
Use the Firefox or Internet Explorer web developer toolbars
Add the language attribute to the page
Create a snippet for storing the language attribute code for easy reuse

The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series Part Seven
by Sheri German - 23-May-07
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You may remember way back in the second part of this series that you explored two common methods for creating the look of two columns with CSS. First you used absolute positioning to create a left column that could never be longer than the content column or it would drape over a footer or any other content beneath it. Then you used a left float to create a side column that does have the potential to be longest. This latter method is what you used in the Shakespeare site, and in this seventh part of the series you'll get to make use of its flexibility. You'll create an editable region for secondary content pods, which when applied to pages that have a short amount of main content, will allow for a left column that can be longer without covering content beneath it.

In this part of the series, you will learn to do thefollowing:

Modify the structure of the layout
Add a div in code view using Code Hints
Use nested divs with editable regions
Use the code indenting feature
Modify the style sheet in code view
Use Fireworks/Dreamweaver roundtrip image editing
Roughly balance the columns of the layout into thirds
Use the Properties for panel for direct CSS editing

Approximate download size: 1MB

Introducing CMX JumpStart Tahoe Free!
by Sheri German - 18-May-07
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If you've been around a while, you may remember the CMX JumpStart Vegas that was released in the summer of 2005 by Stephanie Sullivan and Linda Rathgeber. As one of our most popular JumpStarts, it inspired some CMX subscribers to request a fluid version of this fixed-width design. Zoe Gillenwater, one of our great CSS gurus, happily complied with our newest CMX JumpStart Tahoe, a JumpStart modification. Tahoe, like Vegas, is located in Nevada, and because it shares many of the same kinds of entertainment centers, seems like a fitting city for a permutation of the Vegas design. And Tahoe has one thing that Vegas doesn't - the beautiful Lake Tahoe that gives literal meaning to the tagline in the Tahoe JumpStart: "Like Vegas, only fluid."

Tahoe uses valid XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.1 markup and follows WAI and Section 508 accessibility guidelines to provide you with a solid foundation for any design you may wish to use it for. Tahoe is a two column elastic layout, which means it expands in width based on the user's font size. This allows the overall proportions of the page to stay intact regardless of the visitor's window or font size. The design also features a subhead area, skip link, a styled list as a navigation menu, and floated images.

The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part Five
by Sheri German - 09-Apr-07
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In the fifth part of the Dreamweaver Web Standards series, you'll create a graphical representation, or prototype, of the XHTML/CSS page. You'll enhance the layout and export images that will serve as backgrounds for various page regions. You'll learn to create background images that survive the potential increase of text size from some of your visitors.

Now what do you know! You already have your XHTML and CSS documents. Now you'll add an organized, well structured Fireworks PNG to your site files. By the time we get to the end of this part of the series, you'll have essentially created your own JumpStart. Stratford-on-Avon anyone?

The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series:
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 1
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 2
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 3
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 4
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 5
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 6
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 7
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 8
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 9
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 10
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 11
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 12
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 13
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 14 Coming Soon

The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part Four
by Sheri German - 01-Mar-07
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In Part Four of the Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan series, you will extend your skills by learning how to do the following:

Center the layout
Fix the double float margin bug in the left column
Export the style sheet
Create a site template
Add pages based on the site template

Design Your Own Custom CMX Fireworks Course Free!
by Jim Babbage - 09-Feb-07
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Note: This article has been updated on 3/10/2009. Check out the updated article

The Basics
You gotta walk before you can run, as they say. The articles in this section go over the basics of the Fireworks interface and standard workflow/best practices concepts. These articles should help you get comfortable working with the program if you're new to it, or may remind you of features you'd forgotten about if you are an expereienced user.

Production and Workflow
Batch processing, Symbols and Instances, advanced articles on slicing, optimizing and exporting, Fireworks extensions

Design and Layout
Articles on creating layouts within FW, or graphics for use in web page designs,

Retouching and Photo Manipulation Fireworks has a pretty solid set of bitmap tools. While not as extensive as Photoshop's tool set, these creative and corrective tools can do quite a lot and may be all you need for screen based graphics.

Vectors
Vectors are one of Fireworks key strengths. articles on creating and editing vector paths and shapes will be in this section

Masking
Vector and bitmap masking are two other major strengths of Fireworks. Both types of masking give you the flexibility to show or hide parts of your image or design, without permanently damaging anything.

Projects
Image collages, conceptual pieces and just plain old fun things to do in Fireworks, from creating an e-card deisgn for your Mom, to desigining holiday ornaments and bringing scary monsters to sceen life.

Fireworks Related
Many of our JumpStart articles include some Fireworks related tips and techniques. Flash and Fireworks also integrate well. Photoshop and Fireworks also talk to each other fairly well (although some things are lost in the translation). In this section, look for articles where Fireworks ties in with other software or where Fireworks techniques are covered as part of a larger article.

You can bookmark the page on CMX making it easy to use this article as a Fireworks reference. And by the way: if you're not a CMX subscriber, you can still glean a lot from our free (80 and counting in the Fireworks category) articles. Those are identified so that you'll be able to easily access them.

The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part One Free!
by Sheri German - 01-Feb-07
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There is a concern among educators that web design is often being taught poorly - even at the college level - and without regard for standards. In some cases it is because the instructor has not updated her skills since the turn of the century. In other cases it is because there is a perception that it is too hard to teach and learn CSS. Yes, it is true that one must go slowly, start simple, and build skills in a systematic way. Still, after some experimentation and a few of my own lessons learned the hard way, I came up with some beginning exercises that seem to instill the essential concepts without overwhelming the students. In this series I would like to share some of these lesson plans with my fellow educators who, like me, would like to start their students out with "best practices". Each lesson plan includes step-by-step exercises along with the starter and completed example files for each.

In this first tutorial in the series, the students will construct a simple page, learn to wrap text around an image, and learn how to divide the page into a series of divs that will later provide the hooks for positioning page areas with CSS.

The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series:
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 1
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 2
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 3
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 4
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 5
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 6
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 7
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 8
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 9
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 10
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 11
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 12
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 13
The Dreamweaver Web Standards Lesson Plan Series - Part 14 <

Technology in Music Education Free!
by Sheri German - 20-Oct-06
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This article will look at some of the ways that the music department of Howard County, MD is integrating computers and technology into music education. Software programs, the Web, Flash video, and other technologies team up with teachers, kids, and parents to form a perfect partnership.

Google for Students (and Anyone)
by Sheri German - 18-Sep-06
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No matter how many other search tools I teach my students about, they always seem to return to Google. In order to help them get beyond the lonely search field on the Google home page, I introduce them to some of the many ways to use Google for better results.

Podcasting for Teachers Free!
by Sheri German - 19-Jul-06
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Trinity University teamed up with Teach for America to provide a Masters in Education program for some of its teachers in Washington, D.C. Throughout the month of June, I taught 28 young, eager K-12 teachers - mostly of special education students - how to better utilize technology in the classroom. One of our projects was the podcast. This article will tell you all about how we built our podcasts from completely free resources.

CMX JumpStart San Francisco for Students (and Anyone)
by Sheri German,John Gallant - 01-Jun-06
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We are pleased to introduce CMX JumpStart San Francisco, a great first CSS layout for students and experienced developers alike. Structured to be as hack free and straightforward as possible, this may be just the JumpStart for you if you have been holding back on CSS layouts so far. Like all JumpStarts, it uses valid XHTML and CSS as its foundation and is 508 and WAI compliant. This two-column, fixed-width layout, described rule by rule in the documentation article, makes a great learning tool.

Approximate download size: 4MB

Podcasting With Breeze Presenter
by Kim Cavanaugh - 24-Feb-06
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With the introduction of Breeze 5 an important new feature was added to the capabilities of Breeze Presenter—the ability to publish a Breeze presentation directly to your computer. In previous versions of Breeze all presentations were published to a Breeze server which could be your own server or a hosted service where you stored your files. While this was a perfectly good way to publish your presentation for online viewing, you were limited if you did not have a Breeze server or if you wanted to make your presentation available for offline viewing by a download or on a CD. Breeze 5 changed this dynamic by making it possible to save your files directly to your computer with all the associated support files that made the presentation possible.

After playing with this capability a little bit I also discovered a very important hidden feature. When you publish a Breeze presentation to your local computer Breeze produces a series of audio files to go along with each slide in your presentation. Since these files are created in an MP3 format they can be played back as you would any audio file. And of course, that fact got me to thinking that those files could be repurposed and published with an entirely different publishing format, the now ubiquitous podcast.

Approximate download size: 18MB

Teaching Dreamweaver Part 2 Free!
by Sheri German - 11-Oct-05
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Part two of my Dreamweaver course series is devoted to how I teach students to create database-driven web pages and web applications. During the course of the semester we put together a form that is processed by a script, a login system based on access level that uses Dreamweaver's Authentication Server Behaviors, and a blog as introduced in a tutorial by Tom Muck. In the process, the students learn the basics of the various skills they'll use: form construction, SQL, database and web application design, and server model concepts.

Teaching Dreamweaver the Web Standards Way Free!
by Sheri German - 23-Sep-05
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I have been teaching Dreamweaver in various training venues since version 2. Each new upgrade adds more features and makes my job more complex. How does a teacher help beginners make sense of an increasingly overwhelming interface that includes seemingly endless choices? My syllabus has changed a lot over the years, and this is what I have learned: pare the syllabus to the absolute essentials. Subtract, do not add. Aim for elegant simplicity. Focus on Web Standards. This article gives teachers a syllabus they can use to help their beginning students learn Dreamweaver within the framework of Web Standards.

Text in Captivate Free!
by Tom Green - 13-Sep-05
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Why, oh why, oh why do people not format their text in Captivate? Here's a quick overview of some the options available to you for formatting your text in Captivate.

Breeze Gets an Update: Breeze Presenter
by Tom Green - 19-May-05
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Though all of the buzz may be around Breeze Meeting, Breeze Presenter is the engine that makes it happen and it is a hit.

Breezin' Through Breeze: Taking it Live!
by Tom Green - 22-Apr-05
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When the School of Media Studies at Humber Institute of Technology and Learning in Toronto decided to "take it to the students", the platform chosen was BreezeLive. As the faculty guy charged with making it happen, I will have to admit that turning me loose with this technology was like handing a 10 year-old a Wal-Mart shopping cart and giving the child 20 minutes in a Candy Bar factory to fill the cart. I could hardly wait to get going.

Breezin' with Breeze - Part 3: The Captivate Connection
by Tom Green - 25-Mar-05
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It isn't only PowerPoint that can be used to create Breeze content. A direct upload to Breeze from Captivate is dead simple to accomplish and adds a whole new level of interactivity to your Breeze efforts.

Breezin' Through Breeze: Part 2 - The PowerPoint to Breeze Connection
by Tom Green - 14-Mar-05
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In Part 1 of this series I introduced you to Breeze. In this second installment we explore the nuances of how a PowerPoint Presentation is converted to a Breeze presentation.

Captivate and eLearning: Branching and Reporting - Part 5
by Tom Green - 24-Jan-05
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Branching, in many respects, is no different from the non-linear navigation systems we create in New Media. Depending on the object clicked, the user is taken to another area on the page, another page or even other web site. In terms of elearning, non-linear navigation is called "contingency branching". In this case, depending upon the answer given or choices made by the student, the Captivate presentation can "branch" to another slide or presentation.

The Preparing Captivate for eLearning Series:
Part 1: Creating eLearning Applications in Captivate
Part 2: Preparing Captivate For eLearning
Part 3: Captivate and eLearning: Providing Feedback
Part 4: Captivate and eLearning: Creating Question Slides
Part 5: Captivate and eLearning: Branching and Reporting

Captivate and eLearning: Creating Question Slides - Part 4
by Tom Green - 17-Jan-05
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In the previous article, I showed you how many of the eLearning features of Captivate can be used to provide immediate student feedback. In this article I go to the next level of feedback and present how to test student knowledge. This is accomplished through a feature that is new to Captivate: Question Slides. This feature allows you to test a student's knowledge of the concepts presented.

The Preparing Captivate for eLearning Series:
Part 1: Creating eLearning Applications in Captivate
Part 2: Preparing Captivate For eLearning
Part 3: Captivate and eLearning: Providing Feedback
Part 4: Captivate and eLearning: Creating Question Slides
Part 5: Captivate and eLearning: Branching and Reporting

Captivate and eLearning: Providing Feedback - Part 3
by Tom Green - 10-Jan-05
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Feedback is an important eLearning element. The very nature of digital media is such that the student should be able to respond to questions and then receive an immediate response that either reinforces the decision or suggests alternatives.

As you saw in the previous article, you have the option of providing the student with his or her test results almost immediately, and you can even show where the student made mistakes or provided wrong answers. This aricle shows you how to provide this feedback.

The Preparing Captivate for eLearning Series:
Part 1: Creating eLearning Applications in Captivate
Part 2: Preparing Captivate For eLearning
Part 3: Captivate and eLearning: Providing Feedback
Part 4: Captivate and eLearning: Creating Question Slides
Part 5: Captivate and eLearning: Branching and Reporting

Preparing Captivate For eLearning - Part 2
by Tom Green - 03-Jan-05
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In the first part of this series, I made it quite clear that Captivate is more than a screen capture application. The fact that you can add interactivity and student feedback puts it in a class all of its own. Another distinguishing characteristic of this application is the ability to integrate your Captivate movie with a Learning Management System, or LMS, which is the subject of this tutorial.

The Preparing Captivate for eLearning Series:
Part 1: Creating eLearning Applications in Captivate
Part 2: Preparing Captivate For eLearning
Part 3: Captivate and eLearning: Providing Feedback
Part 4: Captivate and eLearning: Creating Question Slides
Part 5: Captivate and eLearning: Branching and Reporting

Creating eLearning Applications in Captivate - Part 1 Free!
by Tom Green - 27-Dec-04
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To consider Captivate nothing more than an "industrial strength" screen capture utility would be, to use a computing term, a "fatal Error". The simple fact that you can add interactivity through the use of click boxes and add Question slides that integrate with a Learning Management System (LMS) moves Captivate into a software category of its own.

The Preparing Captivate for eLearning Series:
Part 1: Creating eLearning Applications in Captivate
Part 2: Preparing Captivate For eLearning
Part 3: Captivate and eLearning: Providing Feedback
Part 4: Captivate and eLearning: Creating Question Slides
Part 5: Captivate and eLearning: Branching and Reporting

Validate that Grammar Free!
by Sheri German - 03-Dec-04
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You carefully construct your code, direct your attention to the details of accessibility, and applaud when your pages validate for XHTML, WAI, and 508. But are you paying as much attention to writing style, valid grammar, and proper spelling? Chances are that you've let a few common errors creep into your Web prose. This series will examine the nuts and bolts of good writing, which is, after all, the heart of the content of our pages.

In this first article, we'll look at the proofing process, the development of an effective Web writing style, forumlas for measuring reading levels, and a list of standard style manuals.

Creating a Captivate Movie - Part 3 Free!
by Tom Green - 15-Nov-04
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Creating Captivate movies is much more than simply doing a screen capture and "adding stuff here and there". Whether it is demonstrating a software technique, a product demonstration, executing a quiz, or developing a tutorial, the key to success is that old business adage: "Plan your work. Work your plan".

This 3-part series is an exerpt from Tom Green's "Captivate Visual QuickStart Guide". Published by PeachPit Press, it will be available in mid November.

In Part 1, we looked at the movie creation process. The process starts with planning — which, in many respects, is the most time time-consuming aspect of creating a Captivate movie.

In Part 2, we looked at using Captivate templates, how to change the movie properties and resize your Captivate movie.

In Part 3, the final installment, we will cover adding some "jazz" to your Captivate movie. I will show you how to add audio to a movie, change the pointers used by the mouse and how to change mouse movement. I will also show you how to add a playback controller to a Captivate movie and create your own custom controller. Captivate can also be used to create slide shows and I'll show you how to do that as well as explain the importance of a movie contaning no content.

Creating a Captivate Movie - Part 2 Free!
by Tom Green - 12-Nov-04
Reader Level:

Creating Captivate movies is much more than simply doing a screen capture and "adding stuff here and there". Whether it is demonstrating a software technique, a product demonstration, executing a quiz, or developing a tutorial, the key to success is that old business adage: "Plan your work. Work your plan".

This 3-part series, is an exerpt from Tom Green's "Captivate Visual QuickStart Guide". Published by PeachPit Press, it will be available in mid November.

In Part 1, we looked at the movie creation process. The process starts with planning — which, in many respects, is the most time time-consuming aspect of creating a Captivate movie.

In this article, Part 2, we will focus on using Captivate templates, how to change the movie properties and resize your Captivate movie.

In Part 3 will cover adding some "jazz" to you Captivate movie. We will look at how to add audio to a movie, change the pointers used by the mouse and how to change mouse movement. We will also show you how to add a playback controller to a Captivate movie and create your own custom controller. Captivate can also be used to create slide shows and we'll show you how to do that as well as explain the importance of a movie containing no content.

Creating a Captivate Movie - Part 1 Free!
by Tom Green - 10-Nov-04
Reader Level:

Creating Captivate movies is much more than simply doing a screen capture and "adding stuff here and there". Whether it is demonstrating a software technique, a product demonstration, executing a quiz, or developing a tutorial, the key to success is that old business adage: Plan your work. Work your plan. ”

This article is an exerpt from Tom Green's "Captivate Visual QuickStart Guide". Published by peachPit Press it will be available in mid November. In Part 1, the first of three parts, we will focus on the movie creation process. The process starts with planning — which, in many respects, is the most time time-consuming aspect of creating a Captivate movie.

Part 2 will focus on using Captivate templates, how to change the movie properties and resize your Captivate movie.

Part 3 will cover adding some "jazz" to you Captivate movie. I will show you how to add audio to a movie, change the pointers used by the mouse and how to change mouse movement. I will also show you how to add a playback controller to a Captivate movie and create your own custom controller. Captivate can also be used to create slide shows and I'll show you how to do that as well as explain the importance of a movie containing no content.

This 3-part series is an excerpt from Tom Green's Captivate Visual QuickStart Guide. Published by peachPit Press it will be available in mid November.

WebQuests for Teachers - Part 3 - Creating an Original WebQuest Free!
by Sheri German - 07-Oct-04
Reader Level:

In the first part of this series, we introduced the WebQuest and a bit of its history. We learned that this lesson in a Web page allows students to make safe use of Internet resources and discussed the six sections that make up a traditional WebQuest. In the second part of the series, we reconstructed the "Time Machine MTV" WebQuest from scratch. Now, in the third and final part of the series, we'll look at strategies for developing your WebQuest content, where to find images on the web, how to evaluate the web pages where information is found, common student errors to be aware of and finally, how to share your Web Quest on the information super highway.

The WebQuest Series:

Part 1: WebQuests for Teachers
Part 2: WebQuests for Teachers - Reconstructing
Part 3: WebQuests for Teachers - Creating an Original WebQuest

WebQuests for Teachers - Part 2 - Reconstructing Free!
by Sheri German - 27-Sep-04
Reader Level:

In the first part of this series, we introduced the WebQuest and a bit of its history. We learned that this lesson in a Web page allows students to make safe use of Internet resources. We also discussed the six sections that make up a traditional WebQuest, and how the WebQuest should be more than mere fact-finding. Finally, we looked at the completed version of the "Time Machine MTV" WebQuest that we're going to reconstruct from scratch. The moment to do that is now upon us, so let's get started.

The WebQuest Series:

Part 1: WebQuests for Teachers
Part 2: WebQuests for Teachers - Reconstructing
Part 3: WebQuests for Teachers - Creating an Original WebQuest

WebQuests for Teachers - Part 1 Free!
by Sheri German - 07-Sep-04
Reader Level:

The World Wide Web has been an important part of our lives for a decade or more. Many things about the Internet have changed dramatically during this time, but one thing hasn't. Parents and teachers want children to participate in all the Web has to offer, but they don't want to expose them to danger in the process. Back in 1995, Bernie Dodge and Tom March of San Diego State University thought of a way to accomplish the seemingly contradictory goals of safety and access. They created the WebQuest.

The WebQuest Series:

Part 1: WebQuests for Teachers
Part 2: WebQuests for Teachers - Reconstructing
Part 3: WebQuests for Teachers - Creating an Original WebQuest

Web Typography - Part 1
by Tom Green - 16-Jan-04
Reader Level:

The first principle of Typography is "Typography exists to honor content." When it comes to the web, sometimes it's as though this principle never existed. This series starts with a discussion of how this can actually be achieved simply by "giving words a voice". Read more...

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