Presenting In The Flow Gram

Though I haven’t blogged for some time again ……. and I have more than six drafts almost ready to publish, I just had to slip this one in before the others because it is sooo interesting. For some time now I and my wife, who works in another branch of education, have been playing around with tools for presenting training materials via the web. Vicki has been having quite a lot of success using Articulate Presenter which outputs in a neat Flash based player that can also accommodate attachments amongst other attributes. We have also used a number of other screen capture tools to capture with narration screen navigation.

It was interesting then to read about Flowgram which is in Beta now but promises great things methinks. The output is flash based and allows the presenter to use annotated live web pages. The pages are completely active however the presenter is able to direct the users attention to anywhere on the page through the use of highlights. In addition other content such as digital images and movie content via YouTube, or where schools are concerned TeacherTube or the like can be referenced. The whole presentation can be narrated and embedded into other webpages including Web 2.0 spaces. The embed file shows as a series of images in a slide show format which when clicked opens up the flash based player and the presentation. Very interesting indeed.

As WordPress.com doesn’t enable Flash without specific widgets an example of Flowgram from Joi Ito can be found here. At present the 1000 “tester” spots offered have been filled but you can register an interest or take in the Flowgram blog.