Why Articulate Presenter's Spotlight Annotation Rocks the House
Earlier this year I was at an e-learning conference doing some demos at our Articulate booth. I was showing someone how to use Presenter's spotlight annotation to call out particular areas of the slide, when another Articulate user interrupted (loudly) and said, "No flippin' way. That rocks the house."
This poor guy had never seen annotations in action. Hence, he had been toiling away on his courses, creating his own spotlights by adding all sorts of animated semi-transparent PowerPoint shapes to annotate his slides. Not only is that a lot more time-consuming, it also bloats the course's publishing time (because there are tons more shapes for Presenter to process). Even worse, it mucks up the slide thumbnails if you include them in the sidebar of your course.
So here's a better way. Check out the tutorial below for how to use the spotlight annotation, and some examples of cases where you might want to. And then rock on.
3 Comments
If only Presenter annotations could be edited.... having to re-record the entire annotation sequence for a slide everytime there is a minor shift in timing, or a need to adjust colors, etc (where the change only effects one of 20 annotations let's say) is quite painful and tedious -- this can be worse than the problem we're trying to solve here by not doing annotations in PPT. After reviewing the feature highlights of Studio 13, I see no mention of this being rectified, but here's hoping. I know there have been feature requests on this though, as it seems many people felt the same way, for years. It's kind of weird and sad that, of all the mainstream authoring tools out there, Camtasia has the best and most complete and flexible way of easily adding and editing annotations/high... Expand