Can Moodle Do A Good Job In Importing PowerPoint

Originated from http://www.sameshow.com/blog/2009/02/20/can-moodle-do-a-good-job-in-importing-powerpoint.html

Discussions from Moodle

Jean-Marc Leblond said:I need some help, I am trying to import a Power Point into my lesson and I keep on getting the following error code:"PCLZIP_ERR_BAD_FORMAT (-10): Unable to find End of Central Dir Record signature". Can any one give me any direction?
James Chan said:I have installed Moodle 1.7 on my test server. I placed the SQL outside the public directory. Today, when I tried to import a PowerPoint into a lesson, it just gave me an error message "could not get data".

The two questions are only the tip of the iceberg about importing PowerPoint to Moodle. You can hear such and such discussions every day on Moolde.org. Can Moodle do a good job in importing PowerPoint courses? Maybe not.




There are many limitations about importing PowerPoint to Moodle

• 
  Complicated presentations with animations, transitions and graphic effects can not be imported
• 
  This feature does not work with PowerPoint 2003 and onward


• 
  Multimedia presentation with audios, videos and Flash movies cannot be imported normally

That is to say, you should keep your PowePoint course as simple as possible, and text only is the best. No image, no bullet, no audio, no animation and no...? However, such courses are none other than fatal points for effective course to catch the learners to performance.

Here is the way: Convert PowerPoint to SCORM compliant Flash courses

Why Flash?

• Seamless conversion. You multimedia PowerPoint course could be converted to Flash seamlessly, then the Flash course could be shown in Moodle as it is supposed to be.


• 
  Smaller file size. Flash files are highly compressed and therefore, the preferred streaming media for the internet, or for quick files distribution. Presentations, when converted to Flash will become very portable and can be easily shared on Moodle, and also do not take up much space.


• 
  Streaming technology. This enables you to play a movie file without waiting for the whole file to download. As the preferred streaming media, Flash can enhance your reach when you need to do big or lengthy presentations.


• 
  Playback control. Flash offers more flexible playback controls like stop, pause, replay and etc.

Why SCORM compliant?

Once your PowerPoint is converted to SCORM 2004 or compliant Flash SCORM 1.2 compliant Flash, your course becomes "track-able", meaning, you can track the presentation in your Moodle. Progress tracking features like, accessed time, number of viewed slides, presentation time and whether or not the presentation was completed by the user - are all available to you. It is ideal for instructional designers to focus on creating better e-learning content, in effect creating a force multiplier for e-learning effectiveness.

In summary, PowerPoint to Flash converter that allows you to "boost" your PowerPoint course presentations into and interactive and engaging, multimedia experience for your learners. The SCORM compliant feature will let your presentation be track-able.

Which tool to create Flash compliant course from PowerPoint?

There are several tools that can export Powerpoints or other presentations as SCORM compliant Flash movies, you could go to http://docs.moodle.org/en/Tools_for_creating_SCORM_content to get more. Take Wondershare PPT2Flash Professional for example, this tool can help you convert PowerPoint course to SCORM compliant Flash for high-impact Web presentations and eLearning Courses with rich media, quizzes and simulations. You could view the details about how to convert PowerPoint course to Flash and upload to Moodle at:
http://www.sameshow.com/powerpoint-to-flash/howto3.html#110

Get Exposure - Increase Your Business Sales

No doubt about that, the one thing that any company, corporation or business wants is exposure. Exposure shapes and molds a company or an idea to formulate a process in the potential customer’s mind. If you can get them to think it, perhaps you can get them to buy it. In other words, more exposure, more money. But how to get more exposure and make it work? A convictive demonstration of your product and service can be good.

Advertising on TV is a good way to get exposure. But the budget is not affordable for everyone. When the internet became available for business and consumer consumption, now the truth is that: no matter what the size of a company is, they can create visibility for themselves, especially online. Online demonstration can be more effective to spread your business and increase your business sales. A stunning demo is helpful to show the features and functions of your product and service. And it could be a way to attracting more people to learning about your business. Statistics shows that offering your potential customers a product or service they can actually see will help create a massive increase in your sales.

Here is a story from Marketing Your Business on YouTube.

Charles Smith, a pottery artist from Mobile, Ala., thinks about the tens of thousands of people worldwide who have clicked on his videos to watch him create works of art on his pottery wheel only to break them up at the end.

“You’ve got to have a gimmick, so I broke up the pots,” says Smith, who says about 90 percent of that traffic is students, but 10 percent is actually generating sales.

To make a compelling demonstration video, you don’t have to find a professional advertising company. There are plenty convenient devices for you to get it done, what you need is creativity.

Camcorders come to be prevalent in making personalized videos. If you don’t feel comfortable to speak in front of the machine, creating a PowerPoint presentation can be the way of your demonstration, but it is not the right format to share online. Converting the PowerPoint presentation file into a Flash movie or a video for wide distribution sounds flexible. For that, PPT2Flash Pro or PPT2Video is available. Another Screencasting tool like DemoCreator provides a highly effective way to guide people through a complicated operating task: it records the onscreen activity to generate the step by step videos for software and website system demonstration.

The video demonstration can better illustrate your business than text with pictures, not matter products or service, in an unconventional way. When the information of your business can be delivered clearly to people, they will respond very well. The video demonstration enhances their experience. They feel a connection because they can visually see and hear how the products and service work. This will help them to make the purchase decision.

The predominately used publishing media for online demonstration are Flash movie and video. This makes it easy to share on product websites, podcast websites, blogs, social sites and more. As far as you know, YouTube, Blogspot and Myspace are all popular all over the world. So, you are getting mass exposure advertising to reach out to the masses. And it may transform them to your future customers.

More benefit you can get from the step by step online demonstration videos…

The demonstration video reduces service costs with online customer self-service. It could be the solution when users meet the trouble using your service and products. If they can find the related solution demos on your websites, users can get the problems done by themselves most of times.

When you want to drive more traffic to your website, you can put your company logo with the site link in the movie. This will remind them to go immediately to your website for additional information. For example, you are making a video demonstrating a software product. You can add the URL at the downright corner of the Flash movie to direct the viewers to your product page and they may immediately buy.

What can you or your company do to create more visibility and exposure for your service or product? What creative ways can you find to share what you want to share?

Screencasts - Effective Technology Training in Enterprises

We had the rapid technology development of new mobile devices and platforms, virtualization, cloud computing, and more. But we also met the serious financial crisis in 2008. In enterprises, more and more people are upgrading their OA systems and products with new technologies. Nowadays high quality and low cost training of new technology is what enterprises looking
for.

When an enterprise is going to adopt the new software product or a new system to provide them higher productivity and greater functionality, training is the must-have item before the technology is widely used. The traditional way of sending your employees or users to a training center costs a mass of money and time, and it means that you lose productivity from your
employees. And the truth shows that, usually they don’t learn much in the training classes. When they start to use the new software application, they meet difficulties everywhere.

In this recession period, the inexpensive solutions which can achieve the effective result are the choices for most enterprises. As e-learning and knowledge management come to be popular in enterprise training, the task-oriented screencast presentation is a good solution for technology training in enterprise.

A screencast is a digital recording of computer screen output, also known as a video screen capture, often containing audio narration. It is a powerful tool to demonstrate technical tasks, or to illustrate technical concepts that are hard to explain in words with screen recording and slideshows.

There are two ways to do the training screencast: have someone done it or do it yourself with screencasting tool. There are some professional companies like AotoDemo that makes software demo and website demo for enterprise, but the cost is beyond some enterprises’ budget in this difficult time. To make it yourself, there are many software applications available to produce screencasts. What software you need depends on your computer platform and the content you want to make. The screencasting tool I suggest is DemoCreator for Windows. Some free solutions such as TipCam or Camstudio can also be your option. The main downside is that the free applications are almost with no editing features.

To make a screencast with DemoCreator, you have 4 steps to go: prepare your script, record screen activities, edit your recording, and publish your movie. Here we will take a look at some special features of DemoCreator:

Record the onscreen activity as slides for easy editing

DemoCreator record video tutorials with audio by screen capture, and show exactly how the application (such as PowerPoint, Photoshop and website) or system runs. The screen recording is saved as slides. This enables users to save the desired slides and discard the unwanted slides for their presentation.

Edit the recording tutorial with interactive objects for explicit illustration

There is a library of objects to decorate the recording, such as Flash animation, highlight boxes, and clickable buttons for directing users to another slide or a URL page. Users can enhance the
presentation by adding the objects to make the illustration explicit. And it allows users to rerecord the narration or import the audio for the training content. Furthermore, multiple tutorial projects can be integrated as one.

Publish the presentation for online training

To make interactive training presentations, the predominately used publishing output media type in DemoCreator is Flash movie and Html. Trainers can provide the video tutorials compliant with SCORM or AICC. The screencasts are available through both commercial and open source learning management systems for school education and enterprise training.

The screencast training is clearer and more engaging than traditional teaching; the training tutorials can be played as many times as needed; the tutorial videos are for "anytime/anywhere" learning… These advantages make screencast an outstanding training method, especially in this tough economic time. For enterprise, the training content can be put on the Knowledge Management System like SharePoint or Learning Management System like Moodle for knowledge sharing and technology training. Then the trainees and employees can learn the technology on Internet freely.

Related Links :
Get start with DemoCreator

Show website with Demos

How to Extract the Zip File in Windows

This sample is created by Wondershare DemoCreator.

It is easy to upzip a zip file if you have Win RAR software installed in your system. But without Win RAR, how to open a zip file in Windows. This demo shows that how to extract the Zip file step by step:

1. Right click on the file and select "extract all". This will open the extraction wizard.
   
2. Click "next" and then select the location to extract the files to.
   
3. Then click "ok".
   
4. Click "next" and the extraction process should begin.
   
5. Make sure that the "Show Extracted Files" option is checked.
   
6. When complete, hit "Finish" to view the extracted file.
   
   
   

Created by DemoCreator >>;