Adobe Presenter, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Blackboard Vista
Kathryn Fletcher · 2009
Adobe Presenter is a tool that works with Microsoft PowerPoint to create online content presentations and SCORM modules, originally developed for use with Adobe Connect web conferencing software. It allows you to publish a PowerPoint presentation with narration, embedded Flash files, and interactive quiz questions as a Flash movie or as a PDF file that can be viewed with Adobe Reader version 9. At West Virginia University, we have already established Wimba Classroom as our web conference solution but we're always looking for additional ways for faculty members to optimally present recorded lectures for their online courses. Native PowerPoint files with recorded narration can be quite large. Blackboard Vista, our course management system, requires a lot of disk space for its database so we also look for ways to reduce disk space needs for individual courses. By using a tool such as Adobe Presenter, faculty members could alternatively choose to upload the resulting Flash movie or PDF file to their own web space instead of into our course management system. This paper will describe our experiences at West Virginia University as we learn to master a new tool to create online media-rich lectures and interactive SCORM quizzes from PowerPoint presentations and incorporate them into Blackboard Vista course sections.