Thanks to Oleg Krupnov for pointing us to StoryBoarder Pro, a tool for creating e-learning storyboards in MS Word.
“Storyboards are important to production of effective e-Learning for several reasons,” Oleg wrote in a post to the Yahoo eLearning Group. “First, the storyboard documents the e-Learning design completely. Also, the brainstorming that often accompanies work on a storyboard may assist the creative process and result in a better design. Storyboards provide an important basis for project management, control, and communication. A storyboard can facilitate training of e-Learning novices, provide support for standards, and make it possible to achieve consistent “look and feel” across an organization’s e-Learning products.”
According to Oleg, most folks use MS Word and PowerPoint to create storyboards. “Over time, when they find themselves writing a standard course introduction for what seems like the hundredth time,” Oleg says, “they go invent templates and employ advanced Word customizations (such as document templates and macros) to make their lives easier. However, these refined techniques still keep being out of reach for the broad masses, because they are complex, require experience and technical skills. The new tool – Storyboarder Pro – is to overcome this barrier.”
Storyboarder Pro features a rich collection of storyboard templates, which are easily customizable and extensible. There are also purely novel goodies, such as managing course structure and designing navigation flowchart, all with the mouse and all without going outside of the Word application. The resulting storyboards remain regular Word documents that can be opened and modified by clients and SMEs who don’t have Storyboarder Pro installed on their machines.
Useful? You decide. Check out the Product Tour.
