Essentials of RoboDemo 5

If you are an instructional designer or technical writer, you have no doubt spent years attempting to perfect the art of teaching programs using fewer and fewer words. If you are in the business of educating, you know how difficult this job can be.

These days, interactive lessons that can be viewed over the Internet or from a CD are all the rage.

There are many programs that can be used to capture a computer's screen, mouse action and audio. Unfortunately, the resulting movies can be huge--a five minute lesson could easily gobble up nearly 100mb of storage space on a hard drive. Downloading a file that large will take a lot of time, even if a user has a fast Internet connection. Large file sizes are just part of the problem. The movies may not be cross-platform (they may not work on both Macs and PCs). Interactivity is a feature most of the "mouse capture" applications do not support. And there are few of these programs that allow images to be imported.

In short, the technology for creating interactive lessons WAS bad. But not anymore. RoboDemo (from the folks at eHelp Software) is here. Using RoboDemo, you can capture screen shots on your computer and quickly turn them into interactive lessons (movies). The movies you create can be interactive--you can add images, captions, rollovers, clickable areas, typing areas and sound effects.

Note: RoboDemo does not come with this book. The software can be purchased directly from eHelp at www.ehelp.com. There are two different versions of RoboDemo 5: RoboDemo 5 eLearning Edition and RoboDemo 5. Both versions are essentially RoboDemo 5, but the eLearning Edition has tools for eLearning not found in the standard version of RoboDemo 5. You can view version comparisons at http://www.ehelp.com/products/robodemo/productcomparison.asp.

This book was written specifically for RoboDemo eLearning Edition. You can use this book if you own RoboDemo 5-but you will be instructed to skip lessons that utilize RoboDemo eLearning Edition features.

To complete the lessons presented in this book, you will need the following software and hardware: RoboDemo 5 eLearning Edition, Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, 2000 or XP; 32/64 MB of memory (64/128 MB recommended); 12.5 MB available disk space; Pentium II 200MHz or faster processor; Internet Explorer 5.5 or later; microphone; speakers and a sound card; and a mouse or other pointing device.

Featured activities on the following RoboDemo features: