Another look at technology tools for distance education

Another post from the 572 blog.

I thought I would write about two of the tools I use for developing distance education. Where I work we use both Macromedia Breeze and Microsoft PowerPoint Producer for developing asynchronous presentations. These are both essentially plug-ins for PowerPoint. Breeze used to be called Presidia before Macromedia bought the company. Although Macromedia has added much functionality to the program, we still just use it to add audio to our Powerpoint presentations. After we sequence the slides to the audio we publish the presentation to the Breeze site. They provide us back a presentation in an easy to navigate interface that we can then publish on our intranet. For an example of a Breeze presentation for training and education visit the Macromedia web site. We have been using Microsoft Producer for a much shorter time. However, we actually use more features in Producer. It allows us to incorporate both audio and video into our PowerPoint presentations. So far we only offer the presentations we do in Producer via CD-ROM. Nevertheless, Producer seems an effective method to liven up an otherwise much less compelling PowerPoint presentation. See the Microsoft Producer overview web site for more information about Producer.