Summary: Use Quizmaker ‘09 to build your own non-assessment slide templates
Difficulty: Easy/Medium

Quizmaker ‘09 is bad!

We normally talk about Engage interactions and Quizmaker quizzes. Engage allows us to add up to 13 predefined templates to a presentation and Quizmaker gives us assessments. But with the remarkable enhancements to Quizmaker ‘09, we can also use Quizmaker to add our own templates to a presentation without them necessarily being assessments. In other words, we can use Quizmaker ‘09 like Engage but with our own custom built templates.

Building A Blank Slide Template

To make your Quizmaker Interaction fit nicely into your presentation, you might want to remove all the lines and borders that you can see so that it looks just like a blank slide. You can even remove the Next or Submit button so that the user needs to click on the Articulate player controls to move onto the next slide. Here’s what you need to do to create a completely blank slide template:

Create The Quiz

1. Create a new quiz and save it under Blankpage.
2. Click on Blank Slide in the Quizmaker ribbon to add a new blank slide.
3. Click on Slide View
4. Right-click on the slide and choose Format Background
5. Choose Solid Fill (white will be the default) and then close.
6. Click Save and Close to save the blank slide in your quiz

Edit The Results Slides

1. Click on Pass Result and uncheck Display Passing Result Slide
2. Click on Fail Result and uncheck Display Failing Result Slide

Edit the Template Settings

1. Click on Player Templates
2. Edit “Quiz – Submit one at a time”
3. Uncheck all of the settings in the Layout tab
4. In the Navigation tab, uncheck all the options and leave the quiz at Submit one question at a time
5. In the Colors and Effects tab, uncheck Use rounded corners and Display likert scale tooltip tools.

Edit The Colors Of The Template

1. In the Colors and Effects tab, Edit the white Color Scheme
2. Make the following areas white and transparent where possible.
1. Frame >> Background (both settings)
2. Frame >> Outer Slide Borde
3. Frame >> Panel Outer Border
4. Frame >> Inner Border
5. Text >> Hover
6. Text >> Text1
7. Text >> Text2
8. Buttons >> Background
9. Buttons >> Border
10. Buttons >> Inner Border

Note: Sometimes there will be two settings per area to allow a gradient effect. Make sure you make both white and transparent.

3. Click OK and then give the new color scheme a name, like Blank white
4. Select the Other tab and make sure that the Background Color > Page Background is white.
5. Click OK and save your template under a new name like Blank Slide Template.
6. Click Close.

Your blank slide template is now ready for you to add some content in the slide before you publish to Articulate Presenter.

Make sure you save your template as a .quiztemplate so you can select it next time you want to create a blank slide. In Quizmaker, choose Save as -> Type -> Quiztemplate type (and not quiz when you create a regular quiz)

Publish

1. When you have added your content to the blank slides in Quizmaker ‘09, just publish to Articulate Presenter.
2. Then, in PowerPoint, click on Articulate -> Presentations Options -> Publish and check Include Slide master behind quizzes and interactions (this allows your master slide to appear behind your published blank quiz. You can leave this unchecked if you prefer).
3. Publish your quiz in Presenter.

View this article to see how to have your master slide appear behind your quiz interaction.

Let us look at a few of the things you can do. You’ll probably want to edit your content in the blank slide in Slide View.

1) Add multiple videos to a single slide

Presenter ‘09 allows you to embed a single Flash video in the slide, a second Flash video in the Presenter panel, a third in the logo panel and a fourth in a new window. You could also add a video in a web object. That’s pretty good. But what if you wanted to add three videos in the slide, one next to each other?

Well, without creating a special SWF outside Presenter which housed those three videos, this would not be possible in Presenter ‘09. But if you have Studio ‘09, you can turn to Quizmaker ‘09 to do the honours.

There is nothing easier than importing three SWF or FLV videos onto your quiz slide and then embedding that slide into PowerPoint.



View Demo

2) Add player controls to a video

A number of people have regretted the inability to add player controls to an imported video in Presenter ‘09. You can control the video with the Articulate player controls but if you want to control the video independently of the Articulate player controls, you are stuck.

Again, with Studio ‘09, look to Quizmaker ‘09 to help you here. Simply add your video to the slide and select the option to add a playbar and then export to Articulate Presenter. You could use Engage too, for example the Media Tour interaction, but you have less say on how large you want the video to play, plus you need to accept the Media Tour interaction template. If you don’t want the bar at the top of the Engage interaction, then turn to Quizmaker.



View Demo

3) Annotate videos

Flash movies play on the top level in Presenter ‘09 which means that you cannot put graphics on top of them to label them or describe them. The magical annotation tools let you work around this a little but if you want to annotate your Flash movie/interaction with greater flexibility, turn again to Quizmaker ‘09. Quizmaker ‘09 is now so advanced that you can put a graphic on top of a Flash movie and then play another movie on top of that graphic! I put this demo quickly together but of course I am sure you can do something much cleaner with a bit of time and thought. It could be a screen recording where you just want to point something out to your student while it plays. Or flash up some key words as the speaker makes their presentation.


View Demo



This post is tagged