An Early Christmas Present From TipGuy.

In the spirit of the holiday gift giving season I thought it appropriate to provide you with a free early holiday gift. As I develop e-Learning I tend to amass (is that the right word?) a collection of images, some purchased, but some I created myself in either PowerPoint or PhotoShop. I can't share the purchased one's due to obvious copyright restrictions, however I can share some of my own creations.



Just a sample, there's more on the attachment.



Just click the link below to download a PowerPoint where I have attached several images for your e-Learning usage pleasure. Some are pretty elementary and some more complex, but perhaps you can find something you can use and save yourself a little development time.

DOWNLOAD THE IMAGES POWERPOINT.

In addition to the images, following are some additional resources I sometimes use in my development efforts, so perhaps you might find a use for these too. If you're at all curious about the various tools I use to develop e-Learning you can check out this previous post listing my arsenal of tools.

• Don't have PhotoShop or the know-how to create your own images, check out this Glassy Button Wizard, which makes it a snap to create your own custom glassy buttons.

• Need a Caricature Headshot, check out this interesting little head maker. I don't remember how or when I stumbled across this one, but I've used it a few times when I needed the same character with several different expressions. As an FYI I usually open my final product in PhotoShop and add a little color.

• You might already be aware of ffiles.com as a Flash Resource Site, but it's a great site loaded with a ton of free user-contributed Flash files. I love this site and use it quite frequently to not only snag great Flash menus and such, but also sometimes as a source to get inspiration and ideas. You'll need to have Flash if you plan on editing any of the files.

• If you're not familiar with iStockPhoto, you should be. Not only does it contain a ton of great stock images, but it surprisingly has some pretty cool Flash stuff available too. From a Flash perspective I've primarily used the menus and image gallery stuff. You will need to have Flash if you plan on editing anything. The catch here is that it's not free, you purchase credits and then use these credits to buy stuff. The images and Flash stuff is somewhat fairly priced and if your company will pay for it then I definitely recommend looking into it.

Enjoy the goodies and a very happy holiday season to everybody!

My Arsenal of e-Learning Tools.

I'm always curious what other developers have in their 'tools' portfolio so in the spirit of not being selfish, here is my e-Learning arsenal of tools.

Lectora - Up until recently this was my primary development tool. A simple-as-pie WYSIWYG editor that makes it a snap to do the basics (Mouse-over, show & hides, etc.). It has a built-in assessment/quiz tool but with the exception of the Multiple Choice and True/False it sorta bites. Image import is as easy and drag-and-drop and you can import flash files, videos, etc. The biggest compliment to Lectora is it's ease of use. I like it as the primary tool that I embed content into. Also a nice tool for building websites.

Articulate - I have most of the suite of Articulate products (Presenter, Engage, QuizMaker) and after some trepidation at first, I have really warmed up to this PowerPoint to e-Learning tool. If anything it has forced me to improve my PowerPoint skills three-fold. Although it lacks some of the most basic of e-Learning functionality like having a button change color on mouse-over, or easily doing show & hides on one page, it makes up for it's deficiencies in other avenues. Unleash the beast, learn PowerPoint and make some cool stuff with this bad-boy. Two words; Animations and Annotations!

Adobe Captivate - My tool of choice for system simulations. Open an application, click record and your output is a very cool simulation. Think of it as a screen recording tool on steroids. You can even create stand-alone courses in Captivate, although I've never done this because I'm not comfortable with the SCORM output or incorporation into my LMS. I usually take my Captivate output and embed it into Lectora or Articulate. Both Lectora and Artciulate make SCORM/LMS publishing very easy.

Adobe Flash - Although I have used this tool less when the newer version forced you to learn Actionscript, I still like it to create simple text and image animations, plus I like to snag free flash animations (there's a ton of them out there) and then manipulate them to my liking.

Adobe Photoshop - The industry standard for image creation and manipulation. I use it to create buttons, text, and edit images I might purchase from a service like iStock Photo. Although I have recently been able to create some very cool things in PowerPoint using Clipart, I still rely on Photoshop for the heavy lifting.

Audacity - This is a free audio editing software and I just love it for recording and editing audio. A must have for your portfolio, especially considering it's free.