Viewlet Builder

From the Qarbon.com website:

Four years ago, the founders of Qarbon had a simple yet profound idea: anyone should be able to create compelling multimedia presentations with ease. From this idea, the Viewlet concept was born: people are natural visual learners, so a quick animated Viewlet gets the point across much more effectively than words on a page.

With over three million presentations launched every month, Viewlets have become one of the most popular ways of sharing information, providing technical support, presenting products and training new employees.

Qarbon.com Inc., publisher of innovative support, training, and presentation software, is the originator of Viewlet technology. Viewlets are powerful, easily implemented, animated presentations that enhance the effectiveness of online marketing, employee training and customer support.

Qarbon has created a very unique application called Viewlet Builder3. This program lets you organize a series of computer screen captures into an interactive slide show. Viewlet Builder presentations:

  • are a great way to show a procedure for a computer software application or web resources
  • easy to create and edit
  • allows students to replay the presentation many times
  • requires no special plug-ins to view

The Qarbon.com site is very user friendly site, and contains information on how to download the ViewletBuilder3 software, samples of presentations developed with ViewletBuilder, and a Quickstart guide in pdf format.

My recommendation is to do the following:

  1. Check out the samples of presentations on the Qarbon site. There are some great examples of viewlets and how they are used by a variety of companies. This will give you a great idea of the potential and use of the viewlets.
  2. Click on the download the Viewlet Builder 4 software link to actually download the application to your computer. This is a demo version only, and does not cost anything. Follow the prompts for entering your name and email address. This free demo version will add a watermark to each screen that can't be removed. It's OK, just the price of using demo software.
  3. Once the file is downloaded, click on the viewletbuilder.exe file and the Installation Wizard will open. Just follow the instructions to complete the installation process.
  4. I also recommend you view and save the User Guide which is in pdf format. This is a very good guide in creating and using the ViewletBuilder.
  5. Create your own viewlet to go with your course and save it. (Actually, there will be a series of files that ViewletBuilder will generate. Just keep them all together in a folder)
  6. To link the viewlet application to a section of your lesson, set a link to the .html file with the _viewlet as part of the filename.

 

There is also an similar program called RoboDemo. It too is a great application that can demo computer based applications and information. If you are interested in looking at the RoboDemo, you can find information and their free 15 day download at http://www.ehelp.com/elearnkit

 

 

Related Sites:

Qarbon.com

RoboDemo

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

What do I do after this lesson?

Actually, this activity is optional for your online course. There are times when the Viewlet Builder would be perfect for showing applications or information on the computer screen. However, there is some content that would not work with Viewlet Builder. So, you may use Viewlet Builder if you like to present some content in your online course, but it is entirely optional.

Refer to the topics on your eLearning worksheet, and decide what type of viewlet you could create for your online lessons. If you are teaching about a software application, you can easily create a viewlet that demonstrates how to complete a certain task in the software. If your topic is not software or computer related, one idea is to create a viewlet presentation that shows some content related web sites and specific information on the web site. (Say for example your topic was bicycles, you could show some of the wonderful cycling websites and annotate the different links on the sites.)

Create a viewlet presentation with at least 10 screen captures. The first slide should be a title slide, and the last slide should be a "The End" slide. On each slide of the the presentation include:

  • "balloon" pop up notes
  • cursor animations
  • audio if appropriate

Save the files that are generated with the ViewletBuilder, and keep them together in a folder. You can then create a link to the Viewlet files from within Blackboard.

 

copyright 2003 Mary J. Nicholson
last revised November, 2003