drew.burrett

I found this by accident whilst mindlessly surfing -

SUPER HERO QUIZ

I’m not at all sure of its accuracy, but do try it - apparently this is me….

You are - Iron Man

Iron Man 85% Spider-Man 80% Green Lantern 70% Batman 65% Hulk 60% The Flash 60% Catwoman 50% Supergirl 50% Superman 45% Robin 35% Wonder Woman 30%

Inventor. Businessman. Genius.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

Having dipped my toe into producing quizzes for my subject using Captivate 2 (thanks to Andrew Brown for his tutorials), I recently received details allowing me access to the authority’s Breeze server.

I’ve now made a couple of quizzes using the Breeze plug-in (for which Andrew has promised tutorials in the near future), and it seems to work in a very similar way to Captivate 2 in terms of its quiz making facility at least.

If I had to express a preference, all be it after only limited use, it would be for Captivate 2 over Breeze.

I’m sure that the majority of my colleagues would prefer the familiarity of the PowerPoint front end, and therefore prefer Breeze, but I found it very frustrating not to be able to format the slides as easily as with Captivate. Any attempt to adjust the formatting of a slide in Breeze seemed to make it fail to function entirely once the quiz was published to  an .swf file.

Captivate 2 allows much more flexiblity, it’s easy to place images into, other than as background, has a much simpler branching facitity and seems to publish quizzes with significantly fewer associated files.

These are only first impressions of using the two packages, and I’m sure that many of these issues can be over come.  However, it seems likely to me that less confident users  might be put off using Breeze if their end results are not as desired, or cannot be rejigged easily to make them so.

A bug-bear with both packages is the way quizzes are scored. Each question can be allocated a number of points - e.g a matching task with four options might be given four points. If the answer is correct, obviously all four points are scored, but only one error results in the entire answer being treated as being wrong, and consequently no points are awarded.

Pupils getting a bit of every question slide wrong, but getting the majority correct would, by this arrangement, be awarded no points for the entire quiz. A little demotivating surely?

Having said all of this, I’m quite prepared that in all likelihood this has transpired due to my lack of knowledge and ability in setting up the quizzes correctly, and that there is a way to overcome this.

As usual, any advice, comments or criticism will be gratefully received.

I posted this already yesterday, but it wasn’t there tonight when I looked. On checking my posts it had become ‘Private’, and therfore not visible.

I have no idea how this happened, nor do I know how to restore the original post, so here is yesterday’s post again…… 

Bob, talented man that he is, has now come through with the installer for the Physics Illustrator toy software.

I tried several times to put it on my public bit of box.net and finally got there.

Click Here for the installer exe file

There were a few wee problems with the installation - mainly to do with Microsoft Journal Viewer not being installed on my system, but it seems to work just fine now.

Bob has added a few instructions concerning the fiddly bits into the installer, but if you have any problems let me know through the comments below and I’ll pass them on to Bob.

All hail Bob! The man’s a genius.

He sorted out all the fiddly bits with the Physics Illustrator and I’ve had a wee hour playing around with it.

It is brilliant! (Screenshots to follow - might try and grab some video with captivate)

Bob, who is a star by the way, is also working on making a .msi installer file for it which will be available from this blog soon.

Having done a bit of Googling over the weekend, I found that the new toy I so eagerly crave is available as a free download from Microsoft for TabletPC. Unfortunately it will not work with a non-tablet PC.

Or so I thought…..

Further Googling revealed that the source code is apparently freely available and that with a wee bit of jiggery-pokery it can be made to work with a non-tablet PC. I’m no programmer, but one of the school IT technicians (Bob) loves a challenge, so I’ve delegated him the task (or should that be derelicted my duty) to find a way to make it work.

Watch this space!

Or, if you too relish a challenge, follow these links -

Download(s)

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=56347faf-a639-4f3b-9b87-1487fd4b5a53&displaylang=en

or

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/tabletpc.mspx

(First download needs validation, second doesn’t, not sure if they’re different.)

Source Code

http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/Details/aeee3085-a219-47d6-88fc-a2501f00800d/Details.aspx

Instructions

http://blog.hypercubed.com/archives/2006/02/05/how-to-use-physics-illistrator-on-non-tablet-pc/

If anyone reading this does make it work, please let me know how you get on. Good luck!

Saw this on youtube and was completely blown away.

I must have this, I don’t care how much it costs (the authority).

[thanks to Lynne for the 'how to' on embedding video]