Audio

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.

Faces of the Ebola Response

October 12, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 30 Comments

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This week’s Articulate ELH Challenge is to design a learning interaction around the Ebola outbreak. Though I started with a branching scenario about patient triage, it wasn’t resonating with me because it wasn’t what I wanted to say.

The Idea

The Individuals

What I wanted to say is that there are people exactly like you and me on the ground who are calmly and quietly taking natural and positive action in response to the situation. This is easy to miss in an unending stream of panicky headlines.

I looked for information and lucked out by finding these profiles from the World Health Organization. Since I couldn’t possibly improve upon the content I simply worked to enhance it by framing it in a way that supports what they’re doing, helps educate people about what’s going on, and possibly motivates them to take action.

The Interaction

The Focus

I wanted simplicity, with complete focus on the individuals. It was tempting to have a more elaborate intro that involved maps and background information about the outbreak, but in the end the photographs and related personal stories tell the tale.

A Simple Intro

Slider Navigation

The Slider

From the start I envisioned a slider with a movable frame you could use to select a person’s image, and was very happy when I figured out how to do it.

It essentially involved making the slider track completely transparent and creating a frame image that I used as a picture fill for the thumb. That plus a whole lot of fine cropping and alignment work – and voilà! – the slider I had imagined. I also made liberal use of other Storyline features including motion paths, built-in animations, and advanced text control.

The Music

Finding music for this was initially quite tough. I could find lots of West African music, but very little of it evoked the mood I was after. Even when I found songs that did, I had no way of knowing if the message being conveyed – whether literally or culturally – would be appropriate, and the topic is simply too sensitive to risk a bad choice.

Fortunately I know a guy who knows his way around djembes and mbiras (that’s a picture from when we were shopping for instruments in Turkey), and he generously offered to let me use some music he wrote and recorded. Many thanks to him for that. I chose the song “Numbers” from a CD of kalimba music he did a few years back since I thought it conveyed a sense of calm, steady progress and it had an opening that worked well for this piece.

Dan Sweigert Getting Musical

See it in Action

If you’d like to see it, make sure you have audio and get ready to be inspired by some remarkable individuals right here.

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Create Your Own Pictogram Characters (With Free Character & Slider Files!)

October 6, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 16 Comments

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This challenge is to create your own characters in pictogram style. You simply take basic shapes (I used PowerPoint) and mold them until you have the custom characters you need.

The Idea

Inexplicably, the only characters I was motivated to pictogram were the Dapper Dans – a barbershop quartet at Disney. David Anderson was clear that these characters should be “aligned with an industry”, so apparently I opted for the entertainment industry’s thriving barbershop sector; strolling division.

The Approach

After finding an image of a Dapper Dan I brought it into PowerPoint and started slapping basic shapes on it to mimic the outlines. Then I added some color, smaller details, and used images of striped fabric as the fill for their vests.

Dan Before

Dan During

Dan After

Mike Taylor’s Helpful Video

Mike Taylor’s blog post explaining how he created his own pictograms – and especially this video he did to demonstrate – helped me a lot. Specifically, I’ve never been satisfied with the amount of control I’ve had over editing points on shapes in PowerPoint, but starting at 7:20 in the video he reveals finer points I never knew about, and that was a big help. Thanks, Mike!

State Change: The Dan’s Stance & Note Color Change When Selected

The Slider

I guess I didn’t get enough of a slider fix in last week’s challenge, and this one was just asking for it. The idea of having each stop be a different vocal that harmonizes with the others seemed like a good idea, so I roped Dan Sweigert into recording some quick audio and was off to the races.

I set it up so that when a Dan is selected (1) his audio plays, (2) he changes to a singing stance, and (3) the note on the musical notation below him changes to match his outfit. Those image changes are set up as states, and they’re triggered to revert to their normal states once the audio stops playing.

Have a Look & Listen

Here’s the finished product. Have your audio ready and enjoy the performance!

Download the Free Image and Slider Files!

In case these might help you in your own work, you can download the PowerPoint source file with the customizable pictogram characters and download the Storyline singing slider file, too. Have fun!

How I Dolled Up Storyline’s Sliders

September 28, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 20 Comments

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If you’re a Storyline fan you probably know its latest release features sliders, and this week’s challenge is to make things slide all over the place.

The Idea

I’d originally used the paper doll try-different-outfits inspiration in a drag and drop challenge at a time I was doing uniform and safety gear training. Revisiting it with sliders sounded like fun, but this time I chucked the serious gear so I could just play with dolls.

The Images

Visual Design

I went with vintage paper doll images I found, then got busy removing the background and cutting them apart in PowerPoint.

To set the scene I used a modern house with vintage style. The interior background is a girl’s bedroom. Vintage candy shapes (root beer barrels, peppermints, and lemon drops) on the sliders also set the tone.

Three Sliders

Slider Design Steps

I created three sliders – one each for hats, outfits, and toys – all engineered the same way. This is how I did it in 8 pretty simple steps:

1. Added the slider: Insert > Controls > Slider. I chose the slimmest track style.

2. Added candy images to the thumb: Right click on the thumb > Format Shape > Picture or Texture Fill, then choose your image. The images will come in very small, but before clicking on anything else select Format > Size and increase the height and width as needed.

3. Formatted the tracks: With the slider selected, go to Slider Tools > Format and choose colors for your track fill and track border, then adjust the colors on your slider track hover states, if needed.

4. Set up the controls: With the slider selected, go to Slider Tools > Design. Here I renamed the default variable to “outfit_slider” and selected my preferred Update style. I wanted 5 slider positions: 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4 – which is why my Start selection says 0 and End says 4. The candy thumb is at the default position of 0, outfit one is at position 1, etc., and you progress between them in increments of 1 as indicated in the Step field.

5. Added slider images, states, and animation: I gave each image a state called Chosen, and for that state added the additional images I wanted to appear on the right, such as a dress on the little girl. I also added entrance and exit animations for those images on the Chosen state.

Trigger One: Display Chosen State

Trigger Two: Return to Normal State

6. Added slider triggers: For each slider item I created two triggers. One to display the Chosen state at the position I wanted it to appear, and one to return it to its Normal state.

Trigger for Sliding Sound Effect

7. Added a sliding sound effect: I wanted a sliding sound as you move between each item on the slider, so I added the audio file and created one trigger per slider.

Trigger for Incidental Sound Effects

8. Added incidental sound effects: For the puppy sound, for example, I simply added a trigger that fires when the state of that image is Chosen.

Time to Play!

If you’d like to put together a few nice outfits, have your audio ready and try the demo right here.

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How I Record Audio for E-Learning

August 1, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 22 Comments

This week’s Articulate challenge is to share how you create audio for your e-learning projects. Here are David Anderson’s questions along with my answers.

1. Tell us about your recording setup.

I use an Audio-Technica AT2020 desktop USB mic (pictured here on my desk). I either record directly into Storyline or Audacity – just depends on what I need. I used to do elaborate things to try to deaden the room or block out noise, but I stopped all of that and now I record pretty much as you see here, including the low light. I like a nice, calm atmosphere with as few lawnmowers and barking dogs as possible.

2. Show us your audio setup.

See that photo? That’s my audio setup. It’s my USB mic plugged directly into my PC or iMac. This is basically the setup I used to record this podcast; though in that case I was recording into Garage Band rather than Audacity.

3. Share your three favorite audio recording tips.

A. PRE-READ:

One of the first things they teach you in radio is to pre-read your copy. I started in public radio, so I learned this reading PSAs and other announcements. The key is not to read silently; you have to read aloud. Seems silly, right? Fact is, whenever I skip this step I end up doing more takes and more editing. If you invest your time up front by reading the script aloud, and with fluidity, before you record that one piece of it – you’ll save time on the back end by eliminating multiple takes and fixes.

B. LISTEN TO EVERY TAKE BEFORE YOU MOVE ON:

Normally I’m recording for individual screens in Storyline. As tempting as it is to say “Got it!” and move on to the next slide, I always stop and listen very carefully and at full volume to the take I just did. That may be the first time you hear the plane or the sneeze or the pencil drop that snuck in while you were focusing on your script.

C. CARE:

That’s it. Just care about what you’re saying. Anyone can read a line of text, but that’s not going to lead to a compelling voiceover any more than slapping images and text into an e-learning development tool is going to lead to a compelling learning experience. Understand what you’re saying and why you’re saying it, think about who you’re talking to, and put your best energy, focus, and intention into it. It matters, and it shines through in the end result.