For the past week I have been trying new software and services to increase the usability of my test website at www.tericoutu.com/myindex. There were two main items I was looking for:
- A forum creator that I could easily add to each of the three mini-sites we will be offering for our tobacco programs
- An easy way to develop a PowerPoint-like presentation that could include quizzes, embedded video, and more.
As I mentioned, my goal is to provide three mini-sites relating to our tobacco program: one for our cessation participants, one for worksites interested in developing tobacco-free initiatives, and one for our cessation facilitators.
I hired someone to handle the one for the cessation participants as we needed something available fast and professional. We are currently reviewing it and working out the bugs but it is available at: www.quitsmokingnowfirstcoast.com
For my WGA class, I am creating the one for worksites. And the third one will have to wait! We decided to use Bravenet for their free webtools, and it looked like a great deal because we could get a free forum (with ads), or pay $40/yr and get up to 20 different forums. I only needed 3, one for each mini-site, so I figured we would be all set. Unfortunately, so far, I have not been able to figure out how to show each individual forum on each site. When using the code Bravenet provides, it pulls up the overview page of all of the forums we have. So, that's rather frustrating. I have the web designer looking into this so that the participants, worksites, and facilitators each get their own forum, without having access to the others.
I did a LOT of research on quiz creators, as I thought I would create some short quizzes for the worksite learning module. I downloaded a trial of Adobe's Presenter, which includes a quiz maker, and some options for including audio/video, and Flash. I tried the quiz maker on two different machines, using PPT 2003 and 2007, and could not get it to work right. I downloaded the two patches that were available, and still nothing. I pretty much wasted most of a day trying to get it to work. I consider myself pretty PPT-literate but no matter what I did (timings, custom automation, etc.) when I clicked on an answer EVERY conceivable pop-up result appeared: Correct. Incorrect. Type your answer here. So, that was not going to work, and I decided to go back to creating something in PPT, the way I was familiar with. Still, I could not believe that there wasn't something out there that would make it easier. I did MORE research and found iSpring products. (www.ispringsolutions.com) They looked good, so I downloaded a trial of their presentation software, which was also an add-in to PowerPoint, and not a separate presentation package. The quiz worked, but by this time I had already changed the plan for the module so that it was less of a quiz, and more of a review. Overall, the quiz maker in iSpring was easy to use, and had both photo and audio options, but they did not work as I had hoped. The photos did not appear on the question page, (I didn't take the time to figure out why and simply blamed it on the Trial version.) and participants had to start the audio - I would have preferred automatic audio/video options. What was really nice about iSpring is that you could publish your work as a Flash file. That made it really easy to insert into my web pages.
As an aside, I recently purchased a Mac PowerBook Pro and tried Keynote '09 presentation software. It has some REALLY cool transitions and templates, but is not nearly as customizable as PPT. I was really disappointed by that as I have always been a Mac at heart, and was sure Keynote was going to be "the bomb." Oh, well.
The end result for me is that I think I am going to learn how to work with Flash to create what I want, how I want it. So far, none of the programs work as easily as I think they should/could. I have a list of improvements that PowerPoint, Adobe, and iSpring could incorporate that would make their product incredible, but I am no designer, just a demanding user!
