E-Learning Heroes - Advice and ideas from the Articulate Community

Presenter ‘09 offers an easy way to record narration — which is great, because we know that learning and recall spike dramatically if learners see and hear your content, instead of just one or the other. Effective audio narration goes a long way to boost your presentation’s sticking power. Here’s a quick, painless way to add narration to your course:

STEP 1: Prepare your script, your mic, and your environment

1. Decide which slides you want to narrate, and plan what you're going to say for each one. A lot of Presenter users like to insert their script into PowerPoint's notes panel — a great idea, because the text there is viewable when you record in Presenter. No need to try to work from memory, or fumble with paper script pages!
2. Get a good microphone and connect it to your PC.
3. Choose a quiet, enclosed environment where background noise won't botch your audio quality. Though you might not have the luxury of using a sound studio, know that a carpeted conference room with a door that closes beats the pants off a noisy cubicle.

STEP 2: Record your narration

1. Open your presentation in PowerPoint.
2. To make sure your slide notes are viewable during recording, go to the Articulate menu and select Presentation Options > Other and mark  Show notes pane on narration window.
3. Click OK.
4. Go to a slide for which you want to record narration. On the Articulate menu, click Record Narration.
5. When the recording window opens, your slide notes pane will be at the right. Click Start Recording—and then start talking! Presenter will record till you click the pause or stop button. (If you pause, you can pick up where you left off by clicking Resume.)
6. If your slide contains on-click animations, the Start Recording button changes to Next Animation when you begin recording. If you want, you can click that to initiate the next animation in your sequence while you record. Or, if you prefer, just focus on recording narration for now, and do your syncing later. If there aren’t any animations left on a slide, or if there weren’t any to begin with, the button changes to Stop Recording.
7. Click the stop button or Stop Recording when you’re done.

STEP 3: Review and save your recording

1. Now you can click the play button to hear what you’ve captured so far. If you like it, great—you’re done! Use the slide selector to move to any other slide for which you’d like to add narration. Or, click Save & Close if you’re finished recording for now.
2. If you prefer to do a re-take, keep the recording window open and click Start Recording again. Presenter will replace the previous version of that slide’s narration with the new recording.

You might also want to explore:

Recording Narration and Syncing Animation

Creating a Backup of Your Presentation's Audio Narration

Syncing Animations with Existing Narration

Syncing Animations and Recording Narration at the Same Time

Recording Narration Across Multiple Slides