In Impatica Tips Volume 01-04, we offered a free OnCue audio-only template to existing OnCue users. We were pleased to get feedback immediately from Darelle Thomson at Massey University in New Zealand. She provided us with a presentation by Sam Richardson on the use of Chat Rooms in WebCT for 100-level Economics courses. We would like to thank them both very much for their enthusiasm and courtesy in providing a copy of their presentation to share. We are planning a client samples area of our Website and invite anyone to submit samples of their content for inclusion on this page. Volume 01-06 May 31, 2005 Want to review our previous editions of Impatica Tips? Please visit our archive.   Receive Impatica Tips in your Inbox! You can subscribe and get Impatica Tips twice a month.   Are you up to date? The latest version of Impatica products is currently 3.3.3 for Windows and 3.0.0 for Mac OS X. Version 2 users: Version 3 of Impatica for PowerPoint requires new registration information. If you would like to upgrade your software, please contact the Impatica Sales Team Version 3 Users: - Click here to download the latest version of Impatica for PowerPoint. - Click here to download the latest version of Impatica for PowerPoint for Mac OS X. - Click here to download the latest version of Impatica OnCue.   Your feedback is very important to us! Send your ideas for future editions of Impatica Tips to Impatica Customer Support Getting Creative With Interactivity Interactivity can be used to stall the playback of the presentation while keeping the viewer engaged. The pause in the presentation will allow the stream of information received to get ahead of the demand for data. For example, a presentation may begin with a slide that requires the user to click before advancing. The slide may remind users to turn up their speakers or it may pose a question. While the user is reading and responding to the slide, information such as sounds, graphics and text required for future slides is being collected. When the user progresses to future slides, the necessary data has likely already arrived, thereby reducing the amount of time the user will have to wait. Narration Tips Narration is a critical component of Internet or e-mail delivered presentations. Here are some suggestions to make your narration more engaging and effective: Be brief and to the point. Online viewers have a very short attention span and they are only a single click away from leaving. The narration for each slide should be no longer than one minute and preferably less than 30 seconds. Use a script. Even though you may be highly effective as a stand-up or impromptu presenter, your online presentation does not benefit from your presence and charisma. More importantly, you do not have the benefit of watching and gauging your audience’s reaction and perhaps modifying your delivery accordingly. Edit and re-edit the script to produce the shortest possible way of delivering a clear, concise and focused message. Consider using a professional narrator and sound recording studio. This really depends on the objective of your presentation and on the intended audience. If, for example, you are using professionally prepared graphics, your presentation probably warrants professional narration. Try it yourself, review the results, and judge for yourself. Identify the author of the presentation. Often viewers like to know who is speaking to them. Consider including a picture of the author, even if it is not the narrator, of the presentation. OnCue Edit Window: Placing Cues in the Slide Drawer If a paragraph or animation cue is set to a time beyond the end time of that element’s slide, the element will be moved into the slide’s drawer. Elements in the slide drawer will not appear during playback of the impaticized OnCue show. Drag a paragraph or animation cue to the right until the drawer symbol appears. When a slide has items in its drawer, an icon appears on the slide, allowing the drawer to be opened and providing access to paragraphs and animations that would have otherwise been hidden. To remove items from the drawer either drag them to the left into the viewable portion of the slide, or move the slide that follows to the right, extending the first slide’s play time. Using Automatic URL Links Sometimes, there is a need in a presentation to access elements not contained directly in the presentation itself. For example, you may wish to: Give access to an external example, such as a software simulation, or Administer a separate quiz on the material contained in the presentation. In order to allow this sort of supplemental information access, it is possible to simply provide a hyperlink within the slides of the presentation. In addition, Impatica OnCue supports the inclusion of automatic external URL links within an OnCue presentation. This is done by using a <url> tag in your script file. The URL tag is used after a time tag and will cause the following behavior to automatically occur at the time given in the time tag: The presentation will pause. A browser window will open, pointing to the URL specified in the URL tag in the script file. The user may navigate at will in the new browser. When the user has finished with the resource, the new browser window should be closed. To restart the presentation at the point that it was left off the user must open the browser window containing the OnCue presentation and press the play button. Playback will then continue normally. Note: The order in which tags must occur is very specific. The URL tag must occur after a time tag. If there are other tags associated with that time tag, such as a slideID and/or a video tag, then the URL tag must occur after these tags as well. The following is an excerpt from a typical script file. The URL tag MUST occur last in any sequence of tags associated with a time tag. <s> <t=> <slideID="1"> <video="video1.avi"> <url="www.example.com"> The behavior of the URL tag is very distinct from that of a link that is placed in the PowerPoint presentation itself. The actions associated with this tag occur automatically at the prescribed point in the presentation, whereas the link in the PowerPoint presentation will only trigger if the user clicks on that link.