Workin' 9 to 5

Ok, ok, so it was over 3 days but that doesn't make for a witty title now does it? So 8 hours of work between my project and reading for the SSC this weekend. Although in the total number of free hours I had between Saturday and Monday I only worked for 8, I feel they were pretty solid working hours, no interruptions, no trips to Facebook and no stopping until I had done basically what I wanted to get done that day.

I started Saturday with one main goal: Solve my PowerPoint to Articulate problem. Turns out it wasn't as difficult as I thought it would have been.

Ok, so first I started with breakfast...

You see Articulate Storyline really hates my PowerPoint by the looks of things, however Articulate Presenter, only mildly dislikes it. Every time I went to play my presentation back through Storyline I just saw some mess of colours on the screen with randomly moving animations all over the place which I had absolutely no idea how to fix. Presenter on the other hand just messed up both the directions and the order of my animations. This was a nightmare as the animations took me the guts of about 3 or 4 hours to get the timings right, but also they are kind of key to the whole overhead game scenario that I have developed as part of this learning resource.

What to do, what to do?

As I mentioned in my previous post, I was planning to use PowerPoint in Kiosk mode to get around this issue with Articulate. Now Kiosk mode is basically where you have your PowerPoint presentation running automatically and people can not advance the slides or go back unless there are specific links within the presentation that will allow this.

This seemed like it was going to work out even better than Articulate. With our University accounts we all have access to Office 365 which includes Microsoft PowerPoint Online, So if I could get Kiosk mode to work then all I would need to do is 'save as' a Presentation file rather than an actual PowerPoint file, this way it would always only ever open in the slideshow.

"Why Michael, what a brilliant idea", well this is what I was thinking, although I'm sure anybody who is totally familiar with Kiosk mode is probably sniggering behind their computer screens at the sheer ignorance of myself.

As I mentioned above, animations are a key part of my resource and the ability for them to play is also key. It turns out in Kiosk mode, even if you have set animations to begin when the slide changes, they just don't seem to do it no matter how much you shout, scream or cry at your computer (take my word for it).

Ok so actually as I was typing this post to re-cap the whole weekend's work I decided to check up on this again, just to make sure it was actually the case before I published this and made a fool of myself. Boy am I glad I did that, turns out for some reason Kiosk mode just wasn't working the first few times I attempted to use it, and now it's working perfectly fine.

So this means I've now got two possible publishing methods. The tutorial can either be launched as a PowerPoint Slideshow file, or with Articulate.

I managed to get around my trouble with Articulate Presenter by changing some of the orders of my animations. It turns out it doesn't like it when an object has a 'motion path' before an 'entrance effect'. This meant I had to accurately place my characters at the best starting position so it looked like they were coming in as the fade entrance effect was happening. This was a relatively minor fix and seems to have helped my issues.

On top of solving my actual functionality issues I have added a lot more sections to the tutorial and have now reached 50 slides in total, with many more to go.

I visited clinical skills on Friday afternoon after our session to ask about setting up the scenario to take a picture of for the resource, however the first opportunity I have isn't until next week as final year OSCEs are taking place.

I've been wondering whether or not it would be easier/get it sorted sooner if I got permission from a patient in the transfusion suite who is receiving a blood transfusion?

Other than that I have just been flicking through all the slides as a slideshow to identify any links that don't seem to work or any that link back to the wrong page. Fortunately there weren't too many and I have managed to get all that are currently there working. I'm glad I sat down and did this, because I know it's the sort of thing that I would have left until the last minute normally as a touch up job not actually realising how much needed fixed, meaning I'd probably have missed something quite important.

Something I'm glad I noticed and fixed was a possible issue with the 'Whiteboard' and 'To-Do list buttons'. Now the function of these buttons was to open either the Whiteboard or To-Do list at any point during the tutorial just for reference, in light of this the hyperlink added to the 'Back Button' was 'Back to last viewed slide'. This meant you would always be taken back to the slide you were last viewing. The problem occurred if you were in the To-Do list and entered the Whiteboard, or vice versa. In this scenario you were trapped between the two slides as the last viewed slide was one that could only take you back to the last viewed slide.

Getting around this ended up being really quite simple, but took me a while to work out as I thought it was going to require quite a bit of thought. All I had to do was remove the ability to jump straight from the To-Do list to the Whiteboard or vice versa. This meant I had to change the layout of the slides a little. Previously I had a 'Go Back Button' when you were in either of these two extra slides. Now I have an X in the corner which has the exact same hyperlink, but makes it more obvious that you are opening and closing these documents rather than just seeing them as a slide in a sequence.

New layout for To-Do list

As you can see above I have included the new layout To-Do list, with the new 'X' button and the now removed 'Whiteboard' button.

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Author & Editor

Third Year Medical Student