Instructional Technology
Conference 2007
Title: Creating Automated Software Tutorials with Freeware

Name: Jason Caudill

Audience Level: all

Audience: faculty, instructional technology specialists, general

Length: 1 hour

Abstract:
One of the best ways to teach software applications is by example, with an instructor demonstrating how to do something and then allowing students to try the same task themselves. Automated tutorials answer the challenge of providing students with examples on-demand and outside of class time. Participants in this session will install and create a tutorial with the freeware program Wink and create a web-accessible tutorial file.

Description:
As technology plays an ever-increasing role in education there are similarly increasing
demands to teach students how to use educational technology resources. Depending on
the background and experience of an individual student, they may be comfortable seeing
a demonstration only once, or they may need to see a particular operation demonstrated
several times. Compounding this issue is the need of students to sometimes see
demonstrations of procedures outside of regular class time, when the student is working
on their assignment and the instructor is not available. The answer to these problems is
the use of automated software tutorials.
Because most educational institutions today are operating with limited resources, it is
important to make technology as affordable as possible. Pursuant to that goal,
Debugmode’s Wink is a freeware program that will create automated software tutorials
with audio. Wink is free for anyone to download and use, and requires no license fee at
any time. It is comparable in performance to competing commercial software packages
that require a license fee.
What Wink does is provide the user the opportunity to capture activity on a computer
screen through a variety of different capture methods, either capturing the entire visible
screen of the computer or using any selected portion of the screen. These captures can
then be edited, text boxes can be added, and timing can be set for the best presentation to
students. If the file is exported in Flash format to play as an automated file, it can be
timed to run on its own, buttons can be placed in the file to give full navigational control
to the user, or a combination of the two can be used. Wink also supports static exports in
both HTML and PDF formats. In Flash format, Wink also allows the use of audio
recording, so that the file can verbally describe what is happening as the functions are
taking place on the screen.
The use of automated tutorials can provide a wonderful benefit to students, effectively
extending the instructor’s presence and ability to demonstrate software applications to an
anytime, anyplace environment. With the use of a freeware program for the creation of
the tutorials, it becomes highly cost-efficient to take advantage of the technology to
improve student interaction with educational technology resources.

Session Type: Pre-Conferecne Workshop

Contact information/affiliation:
Jason Caudill
PhD Student in Instructional Technology
University of Tennessee
790 N. Cedar Bluff Rd. Apt. 414
Knoxville, TN 37923
865-470-8535
jason@jasoncaudill.com
www.jasoncaudill.com

Equipment:
Windows computers with microphones and speakers, preferably headsets with
microphones