Captivate
Resources and Examples
Overview
What Is It?
Macromedia’s Captivate is an application for creating interactive simulations and demonstrations. Captivate can automatically record all onscreen actions and instantly create an interactive Flash simulation. One can point and click to add text captions, narration, and e-learning interactions without any programming knowledge. Captivate-generated files are small size even with high resolution; therefore, the program is ideal for online learning.
A free 30-day trial version of Captivate is available. A single-user license includes the two years of maintenance on the license, which covers new versions but not support.
How Does It Work?
- Capture and record a single or a sequence of images, mouse movement, and on-screen activity.
- Add text caption, animations, audio, and interactivity.
- Display a visual timeline to control and arrange the timing and order of objects
- Create quizzes
- Import PowerPoint presentations
- Publish a recorded movie in a variety of formats including Flash (SWF), EXE, MS Word (for handout), and publish to a Macromedia Breeze server.
Uses as an Instructional Technology
- Create online demos for distance learning activities
- Develop tutorials for students on how to use key course resources, like applications or databases
- Make interactive simulations or learning exercises
Things to consider
- Captivate is not well suited for creating a comprehensive quiz and survey, because of its design of a branching logic tree. Check out our information on Assessments for tools that might be more suitable for this use.
- Preview, editing, and testing a movie and slides could be time-consuming.
- To use Captivate-generated movie in Blackboard, you must publish it in Flash and HTML formats, package them in a zip file, and then upload the zip file to Blackboard using Blackboard’s “Special Action—Unpackage this file” feature. You may consider uploading both Flash and HTML to a web server and then add a link in Blackboard.
Last modified August 14, 2007 10:33:22 AM EDT
