| Sometimes you can do a lot with a very simple trick. There is one Page Button style called Transparent, and with that simple choice for button appearance, you can create a neat activity which would be easy for scanners and engaging for all students. If you are not familiar with using Page Buttons, work through the tip Using Page Buttons in IntelliPics Studio3 before continuing.
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| The power of an invisible button is that you can place it anywhere on a page background to create an active "hot spot". Insert a photo into the page background, position your buttons, and you are ready to create a non-linear activity where the user clicks on part of the picture to cause various actions. An obvious action would be for each button to go to another page. To see how this might work, go to the Halloween Goodie Byron came up with, a visit to a haunted house. Invisible buttons on the windows go off to other pages, each with a short IntelliMation. The tricky thing is that Byron then has an action on each of those other pages bringing the user back to Page 1, where the invisible buttons are located. |
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| Try this for yourself! With Classroom Suite running, click New and choose a blank IPS3 document. Be sure the Authoring Toolbar is showing (choose from View menu). |
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| 1. Control-click the page and load a background photo. A picture of a house is a good choice. |
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| 2. Decide where you will put the invisible buttons, and count how many you intend to place. You might put them on the windows and doors, like they were in the haunted house.
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| 3. Go to the Pages menu, and choose New page. Control-click the new page to get to its Properties, and click the Actions tab. |
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| 4. The default action will be Play IntelliMation and Page Sound. That's good, we need that. Add the action Pause (choose the "All" actions category, and scroll down). Key in a pause of 2-3 seconds, so students have a chance to look at the outcome of the animation. Next, under the "Pages" action category, choose Go to Page, and link to Page 1. Click Okay. |
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| 5. While on your new page, go to the Pages menu again and duplicate your page until you have one page for each button you intend to make. |
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What you have just done is create the basic skeleton (hey, that goes with the haunted house!) of any activity where you will branch off to other pages. In this case, we wanted to come right back after the animation, so we put in a page action to return. And since we want all the pages to play IntelliMation and then come right back, all the pages except Page 1 will have the same actions. That's why we were able to save ourselves a lot of time by duplicating the page we made.
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| 6. Go back to Page 1. Under the IntelliPics Studio menu, choose the Button Tool. Make a button and place it over one of the windows, or whatever other hot spot you have planned. It will not be invisible at first, of course. In Button Properties, add the action "Go to Page..." In this first case, it will be Page 2.
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