Summer is nearly over… in fact I’m not completely sure it ever got started here in the South of England! It’s been a very wet, cold and rainy August.
Perhaps that’s why I decided to see Summer out with a holiday themed example for this week’s ELH Challenge, a drag and drop sorting activity. This was created in Storyline 2.
Click the image below to view:
Another week, another excellent Elearning Challenge, this time on tooltips, hyperlinks and explorable explanations.
The term “tooltip” originally comes from the early days of applications like Microsoft Word and Paint, where users were greeted by toolbars full of unfamiliar icons. Although the FUN way to work out what everything did was to try every button out, the quickest way was to hover your cursor over the item. A small hover box would appear giving you information about that item without you having to try it out.
(I’m using past tense, but of course tooltips are still everwhere! )
Tooltips in Photoshop, 2017
For this week’s challenge I decided to take a passage from an encyclopedia and add in tooltips to provide nuggets of additional information. With websites like Wikipedia I’ll often find myself getting lost as I branch down different pages. One moment I’m reading about the Royal Albert Hall, a few hyperlinks later and I’m reading about the island of Grenada (…it’s true!) With tooltips, it’s easy to get small nuggets of information which add to understanding without taking you too far away from the original topic.
If you’re interested in taking a peek at the Storyline 2 file and adapting it for your own purposes, I’ve created a template which you can download here.
The big problem with tooltips, of course, is that you classically need to be able to hover a cursor to use them – something you can’t really do if you are using a touch screen. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to tooltips and hovering interactions in general in the future. Are they on their way out?
If you’ve enjoyed this or found it useful, do let me know in the comments and find me on Twitter and LinkedIn!
A couple of weeks ago I took part in ELH Challenge #176, creating a course about cells which only used the 100 most frequently used words in the English language.
I liked it so much that I thought I should probably create a version which uses actual terminology, so here it is!
I’ve tried at aim it at an early secondary school age group, since that was when I remember having to learn about cells at this kind of level.
Want a fun way to let guests to your home use your wifi quickly, without having to type out long passwords? Try this neat trick with a QR code!
All you need is an old photo frame and a printer.
It’s late. The test is tomorrow. You have a stack of textbooks on your desk and 12 hours to somehow transfer the information within them into your brain. What could go wrong?
It’s an experience that too many of us can relate to from our days at school. Unfortunately, we probably also relate to the usual consequence – the information you gained from cramming quickly disappears. Best case scenario: after the test. Worst case scenario, you’ll forget as you walk in to take the test. The problem transfers to elearning, where learners often feel like they have retained information long enough to make it through the experience, before having it vanish into the ether of other things which preoccupy our minds. We might be able to tackle this problem with the concept of spaced learning.
learncraft.wordpress.com 