Summary: Adding Raptivity interactivies to Articulate Presenter is relatively easy and straightforward provided you follow some basic guidelines.
Difficulty: Easy
Adding another tool to Articulate Presenter
Well we have already looked at other E Learning tools which we can incorporate with Articulate software. This article looks at a relative newcomer to the E learning scene, Raptivity . Essentially an interaction builder, or in Raptivity terms, an interactivity builder, Articulate Presenter allows you to incorporate it with relative ease and with sometimes great effect, again showing us how great Presenter can be as a way of pulling all our learning resources together. Let’s look at a few examples first of what we can do:
View Demo
How do you do it?
There are a few things that are worth noting when using Raptivity with Articulate Presenter:
Size and position of the interactivity in the slide
First the Raptivity interactivity is made to fit into the slide. In fact, the default size for interactivities is 715 x 500 pixels which is pretty much ideal for importing into Articulate Presenter. (Originally Raptivity interactivities were a different size and fitted badly.)
- Unlike Quizmaker quizzes, or Engage interactions or indeed Articulate Presenter Learning Games, it is NOT possible to link direct from Raptivity interactivities to other parts of your PowerPoint project.
- However, because the movie does not fill the complete slide, it is possible to add navigation on the slide or a title beside the interactivity.
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The user will either click on the navigation controls you have added to the slide (like in the demo) or they will click on the Articulate controls. Just move the slide up or down in the slide in PowerPoint.
Blending Raptivity with the rest of your project
Second, as you can see from the demo above, it is possible to blend your Raptivity interactivities with the rest of your PowerPoint project, by hiding the background image given in Raptivity.
- By making the background image blank in Raptivity, it essentially becomes transparent, allowing you to place the interactivities on top of your existing slide backgrounds.
- This makes for a much more consistent look to your presentation.
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To do this, look for the “Input parameters” and then the “Background image” and clear the value that is already there:
Publishing parameters in Articulate Presenter
- Simply import it as a Flash Movie (Articulate -> Insert Flash Movie..) and choose to insert in the slide.
- Make sure in step 3 of the wizard you set the movie to begin AFTER the slide has begun, or your Raptivity interactivity WILL NOT work.
- Finally publish as normal.
When it comes to publishing your interactivity in Raptivity, make sure that you choose to publish in a single SWF. Doing that vastly simplifies the importing of the movie into Articulate Presenter.
Once you have published your Raptivity interactivity into a single SWF file, then it is dead easy to import it into Articulate Presenter.
TIPS
Extra points to note when using Raptivity with Articulate Presenter
Dave,
Do you know if it is possible to embed a Raptivity stand-alone .swf file into an Engage interaction? I have tried the Media Tour, but did not work.
Thanks.
[...] have already seen, you can add Raptivity to a slide and place your hyperlink below the activity. ( see this article). I am not able to import Raptivity into Engage. As you say, this is probably due to conflicts in [...]
Hi there, apparently not. Why would you want to do this?
Thanks for the response (both here and the articulate forum). I have an instance where the SME would like the user to have multiple ways in which to reinforce the terms and defintions with various learning activities without necessarily clicking through 5 or 6 slides to “decide” which game/interactivity would be the most interesting to a particular user. Having multiple Raptivity interactions within an Engage activity, especially steps, would meet this requirement – and keep the activity similar to other ones within the online course (we’ve used several other stand-alone Engage activities). A workaround would be to create a slide with a menu system, much like some of your demos and tutorials, that would then point to an individual/particular slide with a Raptivity activity on it, then program the “next slide” hyperlink to the end of the activities . . which is what I’ll probably do . . I was having problems getting AP to recognize my hyperlinks in PP2007, so I found Tom’s suggestion to save the buttons as images and then re-insert them and assign the hyperlinks . . .
Right. Thanks for the explanation. I tried inserting Raptivity in Engage and the only way to get it work is to have it open in a new window which is not very satisfactory. So your idea of creating a menu in PowerPoint might be the best way of doing this. Regarding hyperlinks in PPT 2007, some objects, like 3D objects, will not work when converted with Presenter, so you can either save them as images and hyperlink to images, or just remove the 3D effects.
HI,
you mentioned: “(Originally Raptivity interactivities were a different size and fitted badly.)” I have an older version of raptivity and am trying to fit it in the slide as a web object, but it ends up using the scroll bars (when the browser window is not full size….and I don’t want that, and I need to have it centered. I cannot change the layout, it has to have the menu on the left, and the navigation on the bottom.
What are the dimensions when you cannot have it to be a full slide size?
Hi Mindy, I don’t have the old version of Raptivity so I can’t test but from what I understand, Raptivity was defaulting to a size of 780 x 500 which would be too large for the 720 x 540 size of the Articulate slide. You could do a few things.
1) Use the No Sidebar view in Articulate and import the SWF as a Flash movie. This should display fine but you will not see the navigation bar or controls as you say you need.
2) Contact Raptivity to see if they can give you a deal on getting the new version.
3) Use the web object feature although this is not as neat as importing the Flash file. I imported the SWF file into an HTML file, centered the SWF file on that page and set the SWF file to appear at a size of 700 x 500 pixels in the HTML file. I then imported the web object into Presenter, making sure to lock the size at optimum size (to avoid issues of scroll bars with some browser settings) and it seemed to work fine. http://mediaenglishonline.com/daveperso/blogdemos/raptivity/raptivitytest/player.html
I use an application called Namo Webeditor to do this sort of work with HTML but you can use Dreamweaver or Frontpage etc as I am sure you know.
I just wanted to add something i discovered about blending Raptivity into Presenter. For some reason, a lot of Raptivity interactions do not become transparent if the background of PowerPoint slide is from the slide master. If you build the background directly on the PowerPoint slide, the Raptivity will then become transparent. Not sure if Wheel of Fortune falls into this category, but others seem to.
Hi Joe, Thanks for your comment. It seems that the Wheel of Fortune does not fit into that category as the transparency worked with both the slide background and the slide master in my own testing just now. However, thanks for pointing this issue out. If you find that the slide master is not giving you transparency, try using the slide background instead.
How do you get a title to fit in Articulate Engage using the process template?
If I shrink the copy size it only affects the body copy. I also tried moving the picture down
but it didn’t increase the title copy area.
Thank you
Hi David, It is not possible to change the font size of a title in Engage so there is a limit to the number of characters you can enter before it simply stops and put … to mark the end. Interestingly, even if you change the font type (in Interaction Properties -> Process), and choose a smaller font, the character number limit remains the same. Regards
A question about Raptivity interactions. I am working version six so the screens are a bit different. When I import, nothing displays after I preview or publish the Articulate file. I am publishing from Raptivity as a single file and am able to run the swf file in the flash player. When I import the file into presenter, I am selecting, Display In Slide, When User Clicks Next, and Movie Plays independently of the slide. A white box appears that says “loading” but the interaction does not load when the presenter file is played. Is there anything that I should try differently.
Hi Stephanie,
I don’t have version 6. In fact, I can only find reference to version 5.5. Am I missing something? Either way, it sounds like you are doing things right. Do you have a sample Raptivity SWF to show me? Dave
Dave,
We want to use two Raptivity interactions in an Articulate file. Easy enough, but the last one is a Raptivity Quiz that we want to track to our LMS. I created two slides. I inserted the first raptivity file on the first slide and the quiz on the second slide. When I go to publish articulate and choose LMS and try to set up the tracking, Articulate only gives me the option of tracking by number of slides viewed. It doesn’t give me the option of tracking the quiz results.
Any workaround?
Hi Jim,
Thanks for your question. I can’t see a workaround though there might be one. Essentially Articulate is set up to track Articulate quizzes etc and not external quizzes. One workaround might be to exploit the web object feature in Presenter and insert the SCORM or AICC version of Raptivity into the web object. But you’d then need to be able to integrate that within your LMS. Dave Mozealous suggested there was a way to do this with Captivate and AICC.