Jackie Van Nice

Build & Share Your Own Image Library!

March 2, 2015 By Jackie Van Nice 9 Comments

I Took This Photo, Added Some Text, and Voilà! My Title Image

This week’s challenge is to create a set of e-learning images to share with other course designers. Recently I’ve been contributing images to MorgueFile via their daily challenges (which I wrote about here), but was excited to put together a full set of related images.

The Setting

I was headed to a nearby island with a friend on Saturday anyway, so I grabbed my camera and spent a chilly afternoon snapping away. This location is often used for group retreats, and I tried to capture as many types of usable images as possible.

Simple Backgrounds

It’s easy to make simple background images. Below left you can see my pictures of wine glasses and some dry plants. On the right are the same pictures after I applied a couple of PowerPoint effects. It’s simple and I love the result.

Left: My Unretouched Images. Right: The Same Images With Simple PowerPoint Effects

Left: My Unretouched Photos. Right: The Same Images With Simple PowerPoint Effects

Scenario Backgrounds

When I create e-learning scenarios, I try to treat them like a movie. I go for the wide establishing shot, the group shot, the two-person shot, the one-person shot, and all sorts of close-ups. I took lots of pics with that approach in mind, where you can easily add in characters. These images are also HUGE, so they’re easy to crop to focus on any area you’d like.

Here Are a Few of My Scenario Backgrounds: Just Add Characters!

Objects & Themes

Recycling? Home? Nature? Recreation? Food Service? I found lots of image subgroups to play with. With a little creativity, they can be used in endless ways.

I Love These Images For Their Great Colors and Shapes

This is a Cottage Where I Focused on Photographing Everyday Objects & Scenario Backgrounds

I Just Love These Recycling Bins – They’re Fantastic Images to Work With

These are Just a Few of the Objects I Found at a Community Dining Hall

Download Them for Free!

Update: I’m not seeing these up on MorgueFile anymore – but if you can find ’em, you can use ’em!

Hey! You Got Your Math in My Football!

February 27, 2015 By Jackie Van Nice 29 Comments

Select Image to Launch Demo

This week’s challenge is to teach a little something about math, and another recent challenge was to present a concept about football. I decided to tackle them simultaneously, hoping they’d add up to something I could use.

Place Value Presentation

The Idea

Football Trivia Masquerading as a Place Value Example

A Place Value Example Masquerading as Football Trivia

As I perused ways to connect math and football in a way I had any chance of enjoying, I stumbled across a concept in each that I liked: The position of the place kicker in football, and the concept of place value in math. I imagined a little game involving both, and set out to make it happen.

The Design

My Place Value/Place Kicker Game

I wanted this to be very, very simple. I created the place kicker in PowerPoint, and most other images in Storyline 2. Each concept is presented quickly and simply, and the demo’s focus is on allowing place value practice with ample opportunity to see hints and try again.

The Result

In the end, I’m pretty happy with it. If you’d like to try, feel free to place kick a few place values right here!

Play to Find Your Valentine!

February 15, 2015 By Jackie Van Nice 9 Comments

Select Image to Launch Demo

This week’s challenge is to create an interaction for Valentine’s Day. What could be more fun than that?

The Idea

I had an elaborate story/game design in mind, but needed something I could knock out far more quickly. I kept coming back to the whimsical appeal of vintage valentines and eventually found one I could imagine using.

The Original Valentine

Valentine Roulette

The problem with the spinning valentine was figuring out how to engineer it. Lucky for me, generous community member Geert De Rycke shared his javascript-powered, randomized spinning wheel and I happened to find it. Woo-hoo!

So Who Are the Hidden Valentines?

Every time someone tweets out my Dapper Dan pictograms I always say “I love those guys!” – because I do – so that’s what got me started. Using characters from past challenge entries just seemed like way to go.

The Result

Feel free to take the wheel for a spin right here and see if you find a valentine you like! There’s an excellent chance that at least one of these choices will make you happy.

Taking the Sting Out of Medical Training

February 10, 2015 By Jackie Van Nice 4 Comments

Select Image to Launch Demo

This week David Anderson challenged us to present a bit of medical training. Good thing this e-learning doctor is “in”.

A Quick-Reference App

I liked the idea of addressing something relatively simple – like a bee sting – and if you need that kind of info you want it quickly and on-the-go.

I kept picturing something app-like that would work well on my iPhone, so that’s where the screen size, orientation, and much of the navigation came from.

Speeding Things Up

I’d originally pictured more animations and transitions, but chose to let you get to the information more quickly rather than waste time waiting for extras like that. You’ll notice there’s even a “Skip Intro” option so you can go straight to the remedies.

The Content

All of the how-to images and written information came from Wiki How’s How to Treat a Bee Sting. In my demo I give credit and link to their post in the main menu.

I made all of the pictographs for the intro by creating shapes in PowerPoint and saving them as PNGs that I brought into Storyline as pictures, with a few added shapes I created right in Storyline.

My Bee

The Result

You’re welcome to try it out and enjoy my pictogram bee, too! He didn’t mean to do anything wrong. He’s just an innocent guy putting in a hard day’s work among the flowers.

This works great on my iPhone, by the way. I’m very happy (appy?) with it. I hope you like it, too!

Podcast: How I Get Things Done As an Instructional Designer

January 28, 2015 By Jackie Van Nice 4 Comments

Pencil-Sketch Version of My Recording Set-Up. See The Original Below.

This week’s challenge is to do a podcast to answer David Anderson’s questions about how we work as instructional designers. Here’s mine, and I explain how I created it at the end of this post.

If you’d rather listen to all of the tracks on autoplay, listen here: Podcast: How I Get Things Done as an Instructional Designer.

1. What’s your job title?

2. What software tools do you love?

3. What’s your workspace setup?

4. What is your creative or design philosophy?

5. How do you stay fresh and keep building your skills?

6. How do you avoid burnout?

7. How do you save time and boost your efficiency day to day?

8. How do you manage your workflow?

9. What books or blogs have been influential to you?

10. What kinds of tasks do you love to do? What gets you excited to sit down at your desk?

11. What do you like to do least? How do you keep yourself motivated to do that stuff?

The Process

My Recording Set-Up

This is how I did it:

Wrote down some thoughts the day before I recorded them, and probably used about 20% of that. The rest I winged.
Used my trusty Audio-Technica AT2020 desktop USB mic to record in Audacity on iMac. If you’d like to see a photo of my setup, along with some of my favorite recording tips, they’re right here.
Added some noise removal to get rid of ambient noise, then exported individual tracks as mp3s.
Headed over to SoundCloud where I uploaded them as a playlist.
Headed here to my WordPress blog to write this up. To embed these tracks I referred to the SoundCloud instructions which work well; though rather than doing a link-type post I simply pasted each of the track links into the body of a standard post.