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Welcome to the funtastic world of the Fabulous Learning Nerds! Scott Schuette and Daniel Coonrod and Zeta Gardner are Learning Executives with over 50 yearsโ experience between them. Together they share new ideas, learning tools, approaches and technology that increase learner engagement and impact. All while having FUN! To participate in the show and community please contact them at learningnerdscast@gmail.comย
The nerds are all about creating a community of learning, innovation and growth amongst educational professionals: Instructors, facilitators, instructional designers, learning and development professionals, trainers, leadership development professionals, learning metric gurus, sales enablement wizards and more. So, if you want to learn, connect, grow and have a good time doing it, The Fabulous Learning Nerds Podcast is for YOU!ย ย
Welcome to another fantastic episode of Your Fabulous Learning Nerds. I'm Scott Chu, your host, and with us as always, you love him. Dan Coonrod. Dan the Man. Oh yeah. Dan, what is up Scott, how you doing, man? Um, I'm, I'm, I'm knee deep. I have, I have a problem, but that's okay. I mean, um, oh. Yeah, I do. Well, no, no, it's really not the, it's a first world problem.
We, we talked about submarine, we talked about spending too much money and, and I continue to, I continue to spend more money on, on, on. Now, listen, I have a hat, I have a problem. It's a, it's a problem. It's a moral obligation to spend as much money on Halloween as possible. I don't know. I don't know about that.
I, I do, I do. I want Halloween to become the shopping holiday of the year. It already is. Like that would just, that would make me so, okay. I mean, okay. For you and I It is. Yeah. Okay. Here's the, here's what I heard today. Hold on. Alright. This is true. This is true. Halloween is the most nostalgia holiday. Ever.
And I think people are picking up on it and people that have additional income at my age are our age. It's like, oh yeah, this is great. Like, uh, this reminds me of being a kid. This is fantastic. I'm, I'm going to, uh, invest money in that. Like, I, I, maybe Christmas is close, but I think Christmas is its own thing.
'cause Christmas kind of evolves. Like I just feel like Halloween is this like, nostalgic thing. I dunno. What do you think? I a hundred percent. I think, uh, first off, Halloween is my favorite holiday, so like, oh, yes. Just so everyone knows my level of bias coming into this conversation, I have so many awesome and great memories of Halloween, uh, and like, and like, sad, sad memories.
Um, my grandfather passed away like the day before Halloween. Oh, no. That's sad. And just It is, it is. But just to give you, and like all the listeners a sense of like, What my family is like. We're sitting there, it is Halloween night, we're we're at his funeral, and everyone's just like, well, you know. He really did pick the right time to go out.
Like can't think of a better place to spend Halloween than, you know, at a funeral and like morbid, but like super on brand for my family.
Yeah. Kind of creepy. Kind of creepy. Yeah. How are you doing, sir? Well, Fear too. No. Oh, you're not. I'm gonna psych you out. I'm pretty good actually. Like all things considered. I'm, I'm, I'm pretty, pretty fantastic. Oh man. It's the old psych out. A Duke jet Duked me. Woo. There you go. Got one in on me. That's fantastic.
Yeah. That's cool. Oh my goodness. Alrighty. Well, hey listen, we also have with us, um, um, our Duchess of Design. Zeta is in the house.
Ze Sayta. Scott, how you doing? I am doing pretty good. I've uh, I've got a joke for you. It's horribly funny. Oh, you had a, a joke for me. I do. Alright, here we go. Did you know what Monster is Actually a pyramid scheme?
No vampires. It's multilevel monstering. You know, you, you make some vampires, they do your bidding, they make some vampires and they do their bidding. Yeah. All right. Very, very funny. That was good. Um, yeah, no, I think that's awesome.
So would that make each of them then all of the vampires underneath the, the top of the vampire pyramid? A millionaire? Yeah. Okay. While we're ahead. Hey, it's just us everybody. Just us everybody. We're gonna have, um, a.
Talk about some groovy tools that can help you do and add value to your instructional design work, whatever that work might be. You gotta, you got, you got a storyline you're putting together. We got stuff for you. You got a video you're putting together, we got stuff for you. You got a, you got a webinar you're putting together?
We got stuff. For you. So let's go ahead and we'll dive into our very special topic of the week.
Alright. This week we're talking Ruby Instructional Design Tools. Groovy.
Yes. This show is overloaded with drops. We're gonna be talking some groovy. That drop is fantastic. I love it. I know. All right. Hey, well listen, we've got some groovy tools that can, that are gonna be able to help you out, do the job that you need to do. 'cause I mean, a lot of times it's like people ask you to do stuff and you, you go to the well and you.
And you grab what, what, you know. Um, but one of the things that I love about learning is we have the opportunity to learn new things all the time and get better and make people around us better. And so that's what we're gonna do tonight. And we're gonna start with my good friend Dan. Hit me with something groovy you would like to chat about.
You bet. I gotcha. So, I wanna give some background. So I've, I've picked out a, a couple of things that have just been like super, super. Helpful in my career that have like helped me to like quickly and easily produce great content. And, uh, just some of the background. When I was first, beginning as an instructional designer, the place where I first worked, um, when I was told, when I, when I asked for like Photoshop, they, they're like, ah, what about, what about gimp?
And for those of you don't know, gimp is a, is a, is a. Photo editing tool, and it's good. It's really good, but it, it's not Photoshop. It's different to use. There's some things that excels at some things that it doesn't, but like when I, when I would ask for tools, like, I'd always be pushed to like the, the open source versions just because, you know, authoring tools, they're expensive.
I was looking today, I think like Photoshop, a li a license for show Photoshop is like 20, 30 bucks a month. I was looking at articulate, they're like $1,100 a year. And so a lot of the focus I'm gonna talk about are the tools I wanna talk about are tools that are cheaper and I think better than some of the more costly alternatives.
And I wanna start with a tool that just changed its name, and I've mentioned it here on the show before, but, uh, have I ever told you about screen castomatic? Uh, I'm not familiar. Okay. It is not a great name. I'm just gonna be super real and honest. It's a name that every time I, I say it, people go what? Um, they're now called Screen Pal.
And, uh, Scott, I'm sure we'll get a link to who we're talking about in the show notes. We will have links to everything in the show notes. Yeah. Um, uh, but Screencast Amatic screen pal, I cannot tell you how many times has like saved my bacon when I have been working on content or leading a team building content and some stakeholder goes.
Do you have, but is there any way to like get like, like a video of like the tool doing its thing? Or like, can we get like a short video in here? Screencast Matic is a screen capturing tool. I mean, that's pretty much it. It's got the added bonus of like, like a lot of the screen capturing tools of letting you like put your webcam in so you can get your little face in there.
What sets it apart is it's cost one. I think when I last checked, it was like 20 bucks a year for the license. Not a month, not a quarter. Not a season. 20 bucks a year. And the editing tool that comes with it, Is like super, super great for building content with the ability to quickly drop over, like, and fade in like text bars, popups, windows, the uh, ease of use to do cuts and splices.
It's amazing, like for what you get for the 20 bucks a month, it's probably. Of all the tools I'm gonna talk about, it's like my best kept like secret that I is not a secret. 'cause I tell everybody about it because I love it. It's amazing. And if you haven't checked it out, I highly recommend it. I think they've got a free tier, so by all means go check it out.
Uh, and I, again, just, just for the editing, the screen capturing tool is great. It captures the screen, it does its job. You can capture your presentations, yada, yada, blah, blah, blah. It's editing, built-in editing tool is one of the best. It's super, super lightweight and surprisingly powerful. Yeah, it's got lots of really good stuff here.
We've got, uh, um, storyboards and scripting and video quizzes. Oh yeah. Analytics. Um, that's pretty cool. That's really great. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you don't, like the other program that I use does not create little storyboards. I pay a lot of money for that other program, but we're gonna talk about that program later, so that's cool.
So screen pal, everybody go check that out. That's really cool. Um, what else did you wanna chat about? Let's talk about two and then we'll go around the room. Yeah, sure. Uh, so I wanna talk, the next one I wanna talk about is an authoring tool. Um, it is not what you would call traditionally cheap. I, I think it's like $700 a.
But when compared to some of the other names out there, it is, it is an e-learning content authoring tool. Uh, it's called iSpring. Uh, folks who know me are probably rolling their eyes because I've been an I springing, uh, fan for a long, long time. I think just shortly after they launched. Um, and the big thing here is that.
If you know how to use pho, uh, PowerPoint, if you know how to use PowerPoint, you already know how to use ipr. It's just a plugin. It sits on top of of PowerPoint. And oftentimes when I was teaching a new instructional designer, I would be like, have you ever built anything in PowerPoint? And because a lot of us have gone to school and college and like building PowerPoints is part of the curriculum, building presentations is something you have to do and learn, or even that you pick it up along the way.
You, can you go? Yeah. Okay. I can build a basic thing in PowerPoint, like, great. We're gonna start there. We're gonna start with PowerPoint, and then I want you to install this license. It's gonna plug in on top. We're gonna build PowerPoints, and then we're gonna convert 'em into e-learnings, and then we're gonna see what that, how that works from there.
Uh, over the years they've added all kinds of great features. They really, I think, are, are feature comparable to a lot of the content authoring tools that are, that are out there. Just that like ease of use and like ability just to like build in PowerPoint because there's so many free resources for PowerPoint out there is, is unparalleled.
It's, it's one of those things I know recently that Articulate added it to their storyline suite. Mm-hmm. And I've used theirs and it's super great. But I still think back to that like I. Hey, like, open up my, my ice license, build something super quick, get it done. Ta-da. I have used it several times. Um, I support a large organization that a lot of times will come to me with.
Not the best requests. Right? And so, um, in that regard, like, I want to take this PowerPoint. I wanna make an l m s out of it. Or I want, I want to turn this into scor, I wanna wanna put it on a mobile pla, all that good stuff. Ipr, push of a button. I've got a, I've got a Squirm file built off a PowerPoint, which is great.
It takes 30 seconds, right? Here you go. Right here's your folder. Give it to the admin. Your admin, you're good, you're done, you're ready to go. And, um, you know, teaching people how to fish with ice spring is just like giving candy to baby. They'll appreciate you. They'll think that you're weighted smart. Um, and they'll talk about how great it is.
And best of all, they won't come you with the, to you with the not so great requests, right? You could focus your time and your energy on the things that matter, the big stuff. Um, by helping people get the smaller stuff done with, with ice springing, which I think is fantastic. So, not to say that it's not a great tool, but it's a, so it's just so easy.
I just hit the button and, and I'm done like that. That is fantastic. It's a great place to start. So thanks for bringing that up. Say, what do you got for us? All right. Uh, what do I got for you guys? Uh, let's start with Adobe's Photoshop. First and foremost, I. It is great. Um, you can resize recolor, um, like any kind of photo, photo elements that you have.
You can make graphics. They've got shaping tools that you can make like icons with. It's, you know, it's kind of covers all the bases. It's really, really nice. Um, and another thing is if you don't have photos, and I wanted to kind of plug this, uh, we're talking about, of course Adobe Photoshop is something you have to pay for.
Um, If you're looking for photo assets and you don't wanna like go through a search and find like creative commons and you know, having something that you can use and not have to worry about licensing, um, one of the good places to go to is Unsplash. And Unsplash has a great repository of lots of different kinds of professional, beautiful photographs.
You name it, they, they have most of it there. Um, and also if you want to use those same assets, there's a place called Duotone and it's by Shape Factory. It's duotone dot shape factory.co. And it's also a great place 'cause it sources the photos from Unsplash and it's perfect. They do two colors, which is duo tone.
Uh, one of 'em is, is a half tone of one color. The other is a half tone of the other color. And it makes these beautiful, very striking high contrast, of course, if you choose the right colors, but high contrast, um, elements that you can then incorporate in whatever course you're designing. And, uh, I've, I, it's coming real handy with me when I'm like, oh, well this has, uh, I don't know, like a, a strong deep cobalt blue and like a very, uh, brushed amber orange.
And if you wanna take those two colors, You can plug those hex codes, like say they're a brand, you can plug those hex codes into duo tone and it applies to all the different photos from Unsplash that they source from. It's, it's a pretty good, um, tool to have, and especially if you're pressed for time.
'cause usually if you're gonna be doing that in Photoshop, You've gotta go, go gray scale or desaturate, you're gonna have to then use a gradient map. It's very, very, um, time consuming. So I figured that would be a really good, uh, kind of a cheat sheet for anybody out there who's using photo assets. I figured that would be Yeah.
Kind of helpful. So just so I wanna be clear, the photo assets you get on Unsplash are royalty free. They're, they're free. Yeah. Like, I don't have to pay for any of this. Like, gimme the free stuff. Just gimme, gimme, gimme free. So I think that's cool. And then if I wanna, so can I like do that really cool art house thing where I grab a photo, make it black and white, but only one thing is red.
Like, like Dan's hat. Uh, no, with duo tone, it's, it applies to the whole thing, like a gradient map does. Oh, okay. Um, yeah, you would have to because That'd be sweet. It really would. If I find one of those, I'll definitely tell you. Okay. That'd be cool. So I, I actually, I love the idea of duo tone. I, I, just to give you guys just a great use case and something to think about.
I can't tell you how many times I've been working and building material, and a client has been like really, really specific on like, meeting their brand. And like everything, the document's gotta meet like their in-house, like color choices, their brand colors. And to like, have something that'll just like, be like, cool.
I know that the brand colors for this are like yellow and black. Mm-hmm. Cool. I'm gonna use yellow and black. I'm gonna duotone this image in yellow and black. And just so that way it, it feels right. It feels like it fits, it feels like this image was always part of this piece. That's awesome. I love that.
Yeah, and all you gotta do is just plug in those two hex colors and boom, it applies it to all the different Unsplash assets. It's really nice. Very, very cool. Yeah. I know Photoshop has like a new feature that's like in beta, is it? It's, what's it called? The, the neural filters? Is that what you're talking about?
Is that the one that lets you like, do like the generative fill stuff? Oh, oh you were, it generates, no, the generative fill yes, is in the beta. There's something very, um, and in the normal Photoshop, it's the auto fill or, um, But when, and it's, when it's in beta, like say you have a photo, you need it to be an aspect ratio of like two, three, but it doesn't quite have that edge to it.
You can go ahead and, and make the, the canvas two, three. Use a selection tool over the area that's missing. And then yeah, you generate, which is only something in Adobe Beta right now, it's in beta testing. It's a generative fill. Um, and then if it generates, it gives you a couple different slices of that place that you selected with your selection tool.
And you can flip through them and go, oh, well this one looks the best. And. You can resize, reshape, add on to photos that you typically wouldn't be able to unless you like spliced it with something else. Saves a lot of time too. Versus that copy paste smear technique that I've been using, uh, the healing eyes years.
It doesn't really, yeah. Doesn't really work too well. I mean, that's a, that's a staple in there. Almost everybody's tool bucket to have Photoshop and there's so many ruby things that you can do. 90% of them, I don't know. So that's very cool that you shared that with us, that that is a fantastic thing. So, yeah, no problem.
Yeah, no, they really, really cool. I wanted to chat real quick and we'll go around the horn again. You talked about Unsplash, which is great, great place to get, um, royalty free imaging. Um, but what if I wanna create an icon, right? I. Which can take a lot of time. Or where do I find the right icon? Um, again, royalty free icon.
The Noun project, it's like the Google of Love icons. Mm-hmm. Now you can either get the free version or the paid version. Pay versions isn't that expensive. Um, I like to use the free version. If I need to change anything. I'll go into Photoshop. Basically I'll type in a, you know, a search for money and I'll get a whole bunch of.
Oh God. Literally hundreds of different icons that all represent money. And I'll, I'll find the one that kind of matches the flavor of what I'm looking for, which is so, so cool. Um, the non PO project is great and then you can invert 'em, you can get a transparent background, all that other groovy stuff. Um, but the pay version, you can change the color.
If you're already paying for Photoshop may, it all depends on what your time's worth. For me, it's like I'm gonna dump this into Photoshop and I'll just change the color that way. But I mean, it's super, super groovy. Uh, um, the noun project, dude, I, I just wanna chime in on the noun project. It's 20 bucks a year or 24 bucks a year, and I gladly pay that even though it's all free and like all you have to do to use it is do attribution in the document.
You're, you're using the, the icons in, it's like 4 million icons in the library. It's awesome. I cannot tell you how many times it, uh, a friend of mine was like, oh yeah, check this out. I was, I was at work and I looked at it and I literally like, was like, cool. I'm just, I'm, we're just gonna get this, I'm just gonna get us a, a team license for this right now.
Yeah. Very, very cool. And I'll tell my boss later, I'll look. This is awesome. It's a great investment. Yeah. To round out this whole idea of talking imagery and all of that good stuff. So let's say. You don't have Photoshop or you're like me and you're just dangerous in Photoshop. Like I'm dangerous in Photoshop.
Right. Um, I am, and uh, that's okay. That's great. I'll get there eventually, but that's cool. Um, or you don't have the resources or whatever, um, like and you need to take the background. Out of a picture now that there's some phones that'll do that for you, automatically take, take your boyfriend out of the picture or whatever.
You know, you could, you could do that if you wanted with your phone, but otherwise you go to remove bg, remove, do bg, like remove background. So take that picture that you've got that would be perfect, but you just need a nice little alpha channel on it, right? You just want a white background. I don't want the, I don't want the carnival behind this.
Beautiful person that I wanna use, uh, in my e-learning. Like it's just great. Remove bg, upload your picture, click on the background, and bam, it's gone. And then you need to download it. Um, fantastic. Like, I think there's a paid version that allows you to, you know, get higher res versions of that. But it is absolutely amazing.
And again, that's using AI to go ahead and identify like, yeah, I don't need this. And it, I mean, it. Like 99.9% perfect every time. Like way better than my lasso tool that I use when I'm on pho Photoshop to kind of go grab, I know you're all laughing at me, but that's what I do. I lasso all the way around.
I've head the, my is flat. I've done my head's, my person's head is flat on the top. 'cause I'm lazy and I shouldn't. Yeah. Nope. Bam, it's out. So remove bg. Um, yeah. And cool. Any other image stuff that you wanted to add onto that before we switch? I got one. Gears got one. Dan's got one. I got one. Uh, dude, we've talked about this already.
Uh, mid journey. It's an AI gen tool, but dude, uh, so like, you want to build like cool art and just be like, yay. Uh, it's awesome. I think it's like, I think for like the 200 image a month plan, it's like 10 bucks. Um, I have found myself using it when I need very specific like pictures for like corporate training now, just to like be super clear like the images that you make right now and at least in the United States, uh, there, you can't copyright 'em.
So anybody could look that image, be like, oh, I really like that and, and could use it. Um, But again, in, in a business setting, in a legal setting, as long as you're not using it for Brandon, you're just using it for like training, like that's a pretty good thing actually. Like, hey, nobody can come back and, and claim it later on.
Nobody can be like, oh, hey, like, that's my picture. And like, you guys used it in this and now you owe me money. Like I, I needed a very, very specific picture just a couple of weeks ago. Uh, and I was searching through, I searched through Unsplash. I searched through Pexels. There's another free one. I think it's Pexels.
Yeah, I think so. Yeah. Uh, super, super awesome. Uh, I searched through Envato elements. That's where I'm gonna go back to. So put a pin in that one. Um, and I, I couldn't find it. And so literally I just was like, Corporate training picture of, and the thing that I needed to generate, and it probably took me like 15 minutes till I found one that I was like, oh, that's it.
I'm good. That's what I needed. And that was it. I grabbed that picture off to the races. Uh, if, if you guys, I, I know that right now AI is like one of those supercharged buzzwords. There's a lot of stuff going on, but like, man, like when you're needing, like, as long as it's not like brand specific assets, you just need like, Corporate picture of, you know, whatever.
For like a training, like by all means, check out. Check out the generative AI space. Generative like photos. Now my understanding is you need to be, that you have to use discord for that mid journey. Does live in discord. Yeah. Yeah, there's a couple other versions out there. I think. Uh, I think you can use their, you about one website too.
Um, or is that where just the case was? Um, yeah, there's leonardo.ai, which is where I. Um, yeah, I, I get 150 credits per day. It replenishes, but you have to be whitelisted. That's leonardo.ai. I'm gonna double check. Yeah. And, um, that one's pretty neat. Uh, depending on the ask of what you're generating, it uses anywhere from like four to 20 credits per gen, and of course, it, it's still kind of in beta, so right now it's just you, you only have to be, I think you have to be white listed.
Yeah. Order to, so what you would do is you go to leonardo.ai, ask to be whitelisted, put your email in there, and then they'll write you when there's a space available, and that's free. Yeah. Dan, what else you got? Yeah, man, I, I kind of already gave, uh, where I was heading, uh, I, it is, it's like 200 bucks a year, but I wanna talk about invato elements.
Oh. Ooh, I, hold on. Yes. Okay. Go ahead. Yeah, yeah. Listen, um, the name of the game in, in everything is How Fast is, how Good, how Fast. And Inva Elements is one of those places where you can trade time for good. Mm-hmm. You can trade dollars for time. For 200 bucks a a year, you get access to their entire library.
It's a great photo library, a great library of like graphic assets, motion graphics, stock videos. The big thing for me though, is like their presentation library is amazing. I did a search to, uh, yesterday for, uh, corporate infographics, and I think it came up with like 14,000 PowerPoint templates returned, and I was just like, Awesome.
I just gotta find the one that I want to use, and that's a much better place than being like, ah, I know what I gotta build, but I just don't know like what I want it to look like. Oh, I'm gonna have to start from scratch. Like, Nope, I'm gonna grab that. I'm gonna grab a template. I'm gonna look at this. Be like, oh, that's how they did it.
Okay, cool. I'm either gonna just rebuild it for what I need now that I've got something to work from, or like, you know, because of the way the license works, I'm just gonna grab it and use it, what I'm working on. Yeah. Um, there's, they've got sound effects. Music. I mean, you could, it's basically a, basically a design department.
Ready to rock and roll at your fingertips. It'll make you look great. Like I had True story. I had somebody, well, uh, two true stories within vital elements. One was had some on my team that was really struggling with design and PowerPoint. Really understood how to tell stories, really understood structure of learning.
Fantastic, great manager, all that good stuff. But when it came to her PowerPoint, they kind of milk toast, right? And I was getting feedback where PowerPoints are kind of milk toast. I. I need you to go to veto elements. I need you to find a PowerPoint template that's kind of modern. It kind of matches what we need to produce and then use it and like immediately, like what happened?
Well, nothing, nothing, nothing happened, but overnight. Overnight, I. The projects were simply amazing, right? Um, and then, you know, a lot of times people just kind of skimp out and like, I'm, I wanna make sure, like, no, no, no, no. The medium is the message, everybody. So how good it looks is just as important as the content that's in it.
You have to, you have to, I've seen many people get up and present great content in a very sloppy way, and I just don't, I just don't relate to that. Second from my own personal use again. So experience, oh. So, um, actually got an energetic opener for a friend of mine for her business, and she goes, can you help me with this?
I need a, a video opener for my video podcast. And within a matter of, I'd say about an hour, I put together something using in veto elements and, and that opener and, and the free stock music I got there. That blew her and her audience away. Like, this is so perfect. Like, how did you do that? And I'm like, you know, I, I just used Envato and she's forever grateful for, for my work, right?
So you wanna look like a rockstar? I mean, go to Envato. It's worth every penny. It's worth, I'm serious that it's worth every penny. I've got one more and it's on the opposite end. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna talk about this tool and it's a tool. I've already mentioned this tool. I think everybody here, and probably most people listen, they already know, but I wanna talk about using this tool in a unique way, and that's PowerPoint.
So I think like getting PowerPoint through Microsoft, I think is like a hundred bucks a year. That gets you the full suite. I don't think you can get it separate. Not anymore at least. And you know, PowerPoint is that thing I talked about, like when. Teaching new instructional designers, like, this is where we start.
This is why. And like everybody has some experience. Everybody's like used it before. It's uh, I wouldn't say it has an intuitive interface, but I feel like we have, as, as a corporate culture, have like caught up to the interface of, of PowerPoint and just it, it speaks a language that, you know, I find most people quickly and easily understand.
I love to use PowerPoint to build quick and dirty. Dirty is maybe the wrong word, but quick and fast Motion graphics.
Uh, the animation tools inside of PowerPoint and using layer controls and, and fade in and fade outs and, and motion pathing are nine times outta 10. Super cheesy and awful. You can build some surprisingly complex motion graphics that you can just screen grab and then drop in whatever presentation or whatever else, a video that you're working on to help like, reinforce a point and like hammer stuff home.
Like, listen, uh, there is no replacement for After Effects. Uh, I love After Effects. It's a tool, uh, that will make me. Uh, insanely angry. And then when I finally finish something I'm working on, and it'd be like, check this out to everybody I know, but being able to build stuff in PowerPoint, uh, just today, just today I used it because I wanted a picture to smoothly slide in and get that little bounce effect that's built into the, uh, the motion pathing animation in PowerPoint.
And I wanted that in articulate. All I wanted to do is I wanted basically just a character to slide up onto the frame, and I wanted this background to slide back in behind and just do this little bounce. And so I literally went to PowerPoint. I built a shape, built another shape that I knew was gonna be my frame, merged in together with the subtractive element, and just slid that image in between those two layers.
So it just kind of did the bump. And the little bit of, the little bit of the, the bump stop. So it kind of did a little shake and dropped that in and I was showing it to somebody else and they were like, oh, go back, go back, go back. And I'm like, oh, what? What's up? How, how'd you get, how'd you get articulate to do that?
Oh, the, the little bump thing? Yeah. How'd you get to do that? Nope, that's a video. That's a video. Yeah, that's a video. I've just got it. It's seamless in the thing. I just used PowerPoint. I just screen grabbed, it's just a video. I just got it all matched up and lined up and they're like, that's awesome. Can you do that for all the slides with the character?
Yeah, man. Yeah, I can do that. But again, like it's a tool that everybody's using that like has like I think, I think these, these. Extra things that not everybody is using. Yeah, yeah, for sure. It amazes me like all you gotta do is go to Save As and PowerPoint. You get that laundry list of all the things you could save it as.
Right? Yeah. So, hey, I, I, I just, the other day I'm like, oh, why don't we just take this PowerPoint slide and save it as a video? You can do that. Yeah. Yeah. I could totally do that. Do you want it to loop? You can do that. Yeah. Yeah, I can totally do that. Yeah. It'll take me, mm, five minutes, like three and a half minutes later it's done like it.
It's so, so cool. Just check it out. There's so many things you could do with PowerPoint and I think it from a design tool, a lot of people don't give it as much love. I. You should. Why not? It's every bit as powerful as a lot of the other design softwares that are out there, and it's something you already know.
It's a great place to start. I think it's fantastic. Go ahead, Dan. I'm, I'm gonna say, I'm gonna say a super, super nerdy thing. Um, years ago, I, I, uh, I wrote, uh, a gaming book, a tabletop role playing book. 'cause I'm a giant nerd. This was years and years ago, and I used PowerPoint rather than. Like in design to build that first draft?
Just to do all my layouts and stuff. Uh, mostly 'cause PowerPoint was cheap and, uh, InDesign even early then was expensive. But also just because, like, it's a tool that I knew and it was super easy just to do like document layouts and like make like one sheeters posters, stuff like that. Yeah. Dude, I love PowerPoint.
There's, there's my nerdy thing. I think that, I think that's nerdy enough to cover me till the end of the month. I love comedy and that's the bottom line.
That's right. Ada, what else do you got? Um, one thing that also I wanted to bring up, and I know this is, I don't know if this would, uh, this would be something helpful for others, but it was helpful for me, uh, but it's called image color picker.com. And it's basically if you have any kind of image, rather than like opening up Photoshop and trying to figure out what color it is, you can take that image, drop it in image color picker.com, and then just pick wherever you want and it gives you your, your hex code.
It gives your R G b. It's awesome. It also has pallets of that picture that you drop in. So that way if you have like a little bit of guesswork of what kind of colors should go with this, you can also click on the color and it opens to a different page and it gives you all the breakdowns. Which is so helpful.
So I really like that it comes in handy image color picker.com. Mm-hmm. That's fantastic. Anything else, ADA? One thing that I thought was really neat, and I just kind of found out last week and I wanted to share was the snipping tool that comes with, uh, your Microsoft. If you're, if you're, of course, you know, using Microsoft as your OSS and using Windows, um, if you use your snipping tool, There is a button to click at the top to where you can do video captures.
And so like if you're wanting to give a step by step to somebody of like, oh, hey, you go to this, then you click that and then you select this from the dropdown, you can instead of like typing all that out, I mean you could, but you can also show 'em. It's really good for like troubleshooting. I know I haven't used the, the sniper, the sniffing tool for, um, for video capturing, but that's a really great idea.
Are you finished with your stuff? Um, I can talk about Da Vinci Resolve, if you guys wanna hear about that. What is that? It's a video. It's by Blackmagic Da Vinci. Resolve is a free program where you can do video, audio effects, you name it. It's kind of like, um, Hollywood on a small scale. And, uh, it's free.
They also have a paid for version, but the free version is actually really, um, It has everything that you really need. Um, it has a light room to where you can change lighting and color. It has the, uh, places where you can put in audio voiceover music if you want. Uh, fade in, fade out. You can add effects to both audio as well as the imagery.
You can put text over it. It's a little bit, it has a bit of a learning curve, but once you start getting the basics, It, you can make videos with it and it's free. I didn't know if, um, people out there had that like in their tool belt yet. We're gonna kinda round out today talking about video and, and snipping and video capturing and that's great.
I'll have to try the snippet tool if you're gonna go into Premier Pro, and that is my software editing of choice. It's where I go. It's where I have fun. Creating stuff. I actually do all the audio, uh, recordings that we do for our show. I actually clean those up in, um, premier Pro. I use, uh, their audio features because it's what I'm familiar with.
I know that Audacity is really great. You should try Audacity Scott. No, I'm gonna use Premier Pro 'cause what I'm familiar with, you can go ahead and do that too. But I love Premier Pro because there's some groovy stuff that you can do in it. Um, the first tool that I use, um, I, I, if let's say you're recording, let's say you're recording a podcast, you got a whole bunch of guests and some of them are louder than others, right?
I know that we can go ahead and drop all that stuff in and then I can, um, I. Take that audio and play with the audio and sometimes it's right and sometimes it's wrong and all the other good stuff. Here's a little free tool that you wanna get. Lator, L E V E L A T O R, kinda like elevator with an L in front of.
It's totally free. What does level later do for you? Well, let me tell you, it's super awesome. You take your wave track, it's gotta be a wave file, so make sure, export whatever you've, you're working on into a Wave file or take your MP three. Convert it into a wave file, whatever you wanna do, and then you drop it into level later.
Here's what level's gonna do for you. It's gonna take, it's gonna do some, uh, it's gonna clean up some of the sound, right? It's gonna take out some of the some, but not all. It's gonna take out some of the, the yucky stuff that you don't like, but he, most importantly, it's gonna take all your audio and it's gonna level it so you don't get the, um, Dan is super excited.
He's super hot, and he's super high and super loud, right? And Zeda is like kind of shy today, and she's kind really quiet. They're gonna make everything sound equal, which is so great. So whenever I edit my show, I always kind of like make sure everybody sounds good on a baseline level. I try to take out all the.
All the other stuff that I don't like and then I run it through level later and that way everything sounds really nice so you guys can enjoy listening to what's going on. Same thing can work with your videos too. Take take all your audio tracks, level 'em out of scrape. Last thing, this is, um, Not cheap.
And by not cheap, I'm thinking like it's maybe 180 to $200 a year. Um, but it, it saves, we, we have talked over and over about AI and how it's like, ooh, it's scary. But I'm gonna tell you, I'm in love with AI because AI can do things that I cannot do. So if you've ever edited audio or if you've. In in anything.
You got a video like I, this happened, like I'm, we're doing a man on a street video and a video and someone recorded on their iPhone and they didn't use a microphone. They used the iPhone and they're on a far, they're on a busy street and someone gave me this video and they're like, oh my God, they're on a busy street.
This sounds terrible. Um, this is unusable. No, it's not because I have crumble, pop. That's right. Crumble, pop. It is amazing. What does it do? You pay for crumble? Pop. It has things like echo remover ever to try to remove an echo from an audio file. Yeah. Nearly impossible. Not with an not with crumble pop.
Nope, nope. All you gotta do is drop that in, um, and then you put it in the effects folder and you drop that over onto your, um, on your audio track. You can adjust it here and there. Is it perfect? No. Does it? Sound like remotely listenable, a thousand percent. Like, oh my God, it's so great. You can take away traffic noises.
You can level out stuff, get rid of wind and everything. So what would normally take me like. Hours to try to figure out, and it would still sound like crap. It will do in milliseconds. You have to have that tool if you're doing any video or audio editing. Um, they have, they have it for Premier Pro and that I believe, I have to double check this.
I can always edit it out, but I think they also have it for, for final cut as well. So that's crumple, pop, and, uh, all these tools we will have in the, um, Yes. All, all of these tools will have, uh, links to them in, uh, in the show notes. And you wanna take a look at that. Anything else before we, uh, close this, uh, this out?
I've got, I've got something. I've got an unfair question for us. Okay. If you were on a desert island mm-hmm. And you had to do content production, you had to make learning content, it's a common scenario. Mm-hmm. I think we're all aware. You could only have one of these tools, Scott, which one would you take?
Which one would you have? You only get one crumple pop, boom, Zeta, whichever has water.
Oh wait, can I take that pack back? Can I have Envato elements instead? Because they've got water. They got pictures of water in there. That's fine. That's fine. You can have Envato elements. Alright. Okay, cool. Zeta. Um, other, I I think water does come with the Adobe. Oh, does it, does it subscription? I think No, no.
I'll probably have to go with a grill. Like you get one. I get one. Um, I would probably go with PowerPoint just because it's the authoring tool. It has everything in it. It has a very good extensive, um, icons, assets, plus you can put ice springing on it. Mm-hmm. I just wanna say, you guys stole my number one and number two pick.
I was like, I'm gonna say PowerPoint. You should have asked yourself first. First. And there's like PowerPoint. And I was like, I was like, that's fine because I, I've got my backup and my backups in Vato elements. I should've, I should've started first, but now here I am. No, you know what I'm gonna say? I'm gonna say Photoshop.
Because it would suck. But I could manually build training one image at a time. Make, in Photoshop you could, you could make gifts in Photoshop if I had to. Wow. For our audience right now, this, the face that Scott is making is a look of dread and horror. Like, it's, it's, it's, it's beautiful. That's amazing.
It's beautiful. It was. I would never wanna do that. I would like pull my eyelashes out one at a time. Versus, well, it's not my fault, you guys. It would hurt less. Took my number one and number two pick. Fine. I had two picks in bottle. I'll go back with my crumple pop. No, it's too late. It's too late. It's too late.
It is too late. If the three of us are trapped on the desert island together, we'll be great. We'll make plenty of good content. Great stuff, everybody. Totally, totally love it. That's great. Daniel son. Yes. Scott, could you do us a favor and let us let our audience know how they could connect with us?
Absolutely. Alright. Party people, you know the drill. Email us at nerds@thelearningnerds.com. I would love to know if you were trapped on a desert island and had to make learning content, which tool would you take with you? I just wanna say it seems weird. But it's better to be prepared. Uh, if you're on Facebook, you can find us at Learning nerds.
Our Instagram peeps can find us fab learning nerds. And lastly, for more information about us, what we do, and updates www.thelearningnerds.com Scott. Thanks, Dan. Hey, everybody. Could you do me a favor? Could you go ahead and hit that like button, hit that subscribe button, please share, share, share this post.
Share this podcast with your friends. It's a great way to get the, the information out. Give 'em these great tools. That's fantastic. Please do me a favor. Leave a review either on iTunes or Stitch, or let us know how we're doing, how we can improve, but that also improves this thing called the algorithm, right?
People can find this stuff, make people's lives better. That's what we're. All here for. And with that, I'm Scott. I'm Dan. I'm Zeta, and we're your fabulous learning nerd, and we are out.