Technology & Instruction for UNEX

One of the easiest ways to add instructor-produced multimedia to an online class is to create a narrated presentation. Adding narration in Powerpoint is relatively easy (though not necessarily easy to do well). The tricky part is creating output that will playback online and does not require the student to download the entire file and open it in Powerpoint. I have a license for the Mac version of Adobe Captivate 5 and used that for a couple of years to convert Powerpoint presentations with audio narration into videos. That version only produced Flash video, but it is easy enough to convert that to another format for students who are not using Flash (primarily iOS users). The problem with Adobe Captivate is that it never did a very good job converting the Powerpoint files and it is one of the least Mac-like applications I've used. I never enjoyed using it and until I did a search a few weeks ago, I didn't realize that it was supposed to be able to automatically convert a PP...

Most of our online instructors use Powerpoint to create presentations, but it doesn't have a great solution for adding narration. You can record your voice on each slide, but there is no built-in way to export that as something that plays back by itself  online. You can upload the PPT file with audio to authorstream.com and it will produce an online presentation where students can click on each slide to hear the audio. That is an acceptable solution, although I think the ability to create a self-running video of the presentation with narration is nicer. SonicPics is a $2.99 iPhone/iPad app that allows you to add narration to images and export them as a slideshow. If you can export your Powerpoint or Keynote slides as .jpg files and get them onto your iPhone, this looks like an easy way to create a narrated presentation.  I haven't tried it, but it appears to be easier to use than some of the other options and much less expensive.