| Product Name: |
Norton Presentation Maker - Organic Chemsitry |
| Level: |
First Year Tertiary / Second Year Tertiary / Third Year Tertiary |
| Platform: |
Macintosh® / PC - Windows® |
| Supplied Information: |
Norton Presentation Maker is a practical easy-to-use software program fro macintosh and Windows environments that enables instructors to create dynaic multimedia presentations quickly and easily. With NPM, instructors can assemble electronic illustrations, photographs, maps, animations, simulations, digital movies, and videodisc clips, organize them to their liking, and display them to their class. With the enormous selection of media available with the program combined with the instructor's own media collections, NPM serves as a virtual storehouse of multimedia material - it is all that's needed to make your lectures come alive. |
| Possible Use: |
This product is suitable for First Year Tertiary / Second Year Tertiary / Third Year Tertiary courses. |
| Developer/s: |
W. W. Norton & Company |
| Review: |
Norton Presentation Maker: Organic Chemistry (NPM) is aimed at the lecturer, of an Organic Chemistry course which uses Maitland Jones Jr.'s textbook and replaces the folder of slides often provided as supplementary material with other similar texts. Essentially Norton Presentation Maker: Organic Chemistry is a package consisting of a simple presentation maker, the full collection of illustrations from "Organic Chemistry" by Maitland Jones Jr. and approximately 50 animated reaction mechanisms. The illustrations and animations are ordered within the presentation manager as a series of "lectures". However, in reality, the illustrations are grouped according to the relevant chapter and each illustration corresponds with its position in the textbook. The animations are then added at the end of the appropriate chapter(s).
The package itself is quite small consisting of a CD box and two small booklets. The first 23-page booklet provides the instructions on installation and use of Norton Presentation Maker. The second is a printed list of the captions to go with all of the illustrations and animations, though apart from the animations the text would serve equally well.
While the product is obviously geared to courses based on Jones' book, portions can obviously be used in any organic chemistry but of course, copyright issues need to be considered. After speaking to a representative from the publisher, John Wiley & Co., the use of the product will be more liberal to institutions, which prescribe the use of the text.
Norton Presentation Maker
Having used Power Pointô, for the last four years, it is difficult to say many good things about Norton Presentation Maker. However, its simple, no frills approach may appeal to some users.
Norton Presentation Maker consists of two pieces of software, the presentation maker and the presentation viewer.
Presentation Maker
This component of the software allows you to edit the existing 'lectures', design new lectures, add slides from the various lectures and even create new slides. On average, each lecture consists of approximately 80 slides and it is important that the presenter carefully decides on which elements they will use in their course. It is also possible to augment the lectures with text slides and it is this element which is the weakest feature of the entire package. Those use to Power Point ô or similar software will find it particularly limiting.
To prepare a new slide you first go to any of the screens, which allow you to edit the content of the lecture, choose the new slide option, and then select text slide. Here is the largest shortfall of this software the editor for a new text slide is basic. There are no options for selecting the colour of the background or even the colour of the text. The text is only left adjusted and there are no options other than tabs or spaces for positioning the text. You can paste directly from IsisDraw ô and other drawing packages but again the image can only be positioned using the text controls.
The other major problem (though for copyright reasons it is understandable) is that the slides that have been prepared from the text are not easily annotated by the user. The user can get around this shortfall by copying the slide from a paint program to the clipboard first and then pasting it onto a text slide for annotation.
While I did not like the slide editor, primarily due to its limited controls, someone who has not used computer based video projection systems for lectures will be able to produce a lecture series quite rapidly. Provided they wish to use those illustrations directly lifted from the text.
Presentation Viewer
The presentation viewer is very straight forward as shown in this screen dump. The image covers most of the screen with several controls in the bottom left of the screen. The presentation viewer only supports a screen resolution of 640*480 so even if you have better display technology this is not supported.
The controls along the bottom allow you to perform the following operations: quit the presentation, call up an index of slides in the lecture, whiteout or blackout the screen, enter a free drawing page, remove the buttons from the bottom of the screen, move forwards and backwards in your presentation and finally call up any slide that you want.
Illustrations
The illustrations are identical in colour and format to those in the textbook. While these are excellent illustrations within the text, the colour scheme can appear washed out in video projection systems. The audience may also find the white background quite harsh. The animated reaction mechanisms are quite a mixed bag with some offering many ways to view a single reaction or series of reactions to others, which are no more than simple line diagrams with animated electron pushing. I found most of the animations very useful. It was good to see both the animated mechanism linked to an animated reaction coordinate in the lower left hand corner of the screen. The animations are fully controllable and can be paused at any point for discussion. The user is also able to click on the time bar to see the animation at any selected frame. It would have been nice for there to be a link between the reaction coordinate and the animation but this is not the case.
Conclusions
NPM has been designed for the person who wishes to have limited input in the production of a video presentation. It is definitely aimed at a new user who is willing to alter the order and number of slides presented. The limited control the user has in producing slides or annotating existing slides is a definite limitation. The strongest reason for having this package is not as a presentation manager but rather as a set of catalogued resources that can be imported into a more professional presentation package. All of the animations and individual slide contents can easily be incorporated into PowerPointô.
Note: When creating a text slide it is possible to change fonts, size of font and limited font styles. It is also possible to adjust the paragraph to left, right, centred or full justification, tabs can be set at any interval, line spacing can be adjusted and paragraphs can be indented. (Windows Version) |
|
Rodney Blanch, ADFA, June, 1998 |
| |
| Supplier: |
Jacaranda Wiley, PO Box 1226, Milton Qld 4064 |
|
headoffice@jacwiley.com.au |
|
http://www.wiley.com/products/worldwide/jacaranda/ |
|
phone: (07) 3859 9755 |
|
fax: (07) 3859 9715 |
| Date Record Last Modified: |
27/8/98 |
