One of the most amazing things about Adobe Captivate is that ultimately anything you can do in Adobe Flash, you can do in Adobe Captivate simply by adding a widget. Captivate’s architecture makes it ideal for extending functionality via interactive Flash Widgets and at this week’s eSeminar I got a walk through from one of the folks who create custom widgets for Adobe Captivate, Rod Ward of Infosemantics. Rod crawled out of bed at an alarmingly late hour in Australia in order to teach me how to work with Infosemantics new Drag and Drop Question Widget for Adobe Captivate 4 and Adobe Captivate 5.

I was literally wowed by how easy it is to use and how incredibly simple it is to integrate into an existing project. The widget once added creates a question slide – just like it were a multiple choice or any other kind of question. It automatically integrates with all the other question slides in a given project so its amazingly simple to add to an existing project. Rod also had amazing additional resources for folks at the seminar. He shared a chart he created and used that summarizes the objectives that most commonly align to creating drag and drop interactions and aligns those objectives to Bloom’s taxonomy. It’s an amazing resource, which is not suprising given how awesome the drag and drop widget itself is.

Note:Click the image thumbnail to view full size. The image / table was Created by Rod Ward of Infosemantics and uses Rod’s customized eLearning Hierarchical reference to Bloom’s Taxonomy and learning objectives. Rod cautions that his is his own interpretation and that users should consult the original Taxonomy if they are looking for Bloom’s take on it all.

You can view the entire eSeminar here: bit.ly/9yi0tc

You’ll see Rod explain as I implement my own drag and drop questions. First going over all the details of the usage and potential configurations, and then he teaches me to build a basic business process diagram using drag and drop to allow the learner to test themselves on the proper sequence of events in a process flow.

There are a host of these awesome widgets out there and they are growing every day. I’d encourage folks to check out these awesome widget developers to see other examples of widgets that are available to extend your Captivate authoring experience.

Captivate Widgets
Captivate Exchange: http://bit.ly/bA6HfN
CPGuru: http://bit.ly/9ftVBV
Flash Factor: http://bit.ly/dA1ZSL
InfoSemantics: http://www.infosemantics.com.au/
Leichliter: http://bit.ly/d9NesN
Pipworks: http://pipwerks.com/tag/adobe-captivate/
Wheat Blog: http://wheatblog.com/category/adobe-captivate/
Widget King: http://bit.ly/9Kxump

(If you are a widget developer with a blog or a site, please feel free to comment – and I’ll add you / your site to the list.)