Content Tools & Resources for your eLearning Portal

Cheaper and Free Alternatives

Gimp does 80% of what Photoshop does for the best

price: free. Paint.NET is a capable and cheap bitmap

editor for Windows, while on the Mac, Pixelmator and

Acorn cover your bitmap needs, with Sketch handling

the vector side. Also, consider Aﬃnity Designer and

Aﬃnity Photo. If you’d rather use a web app, Canva is an

online graphic design platform. These tools can become

quite handy for creating unique course images, home

page image, custom certiﬁcate backgrounds as well

as custom badges for your gamiﬁcation engine!

4. VIDEO EDITING

Adobe Creative Suite (again!)

Adobe’s Premiere Pro and After Eﬀects are the most

widely used tools in the video industry. They are only

available as a subscription (which starts from $19.99

for just Premiere Pro) but the software suite really

is worth it.

Cheaper and Free Alternatives

For basic video work, you can do quite a lot with the

Windows Movie Maker and Apple’s iMovie, and there’s

also Adobe’s Premiere Elements, entry level video edi-

ting software. Final Cut Pro X, also used by many pros is

also worth a look - especially since Apple sells it for $299.

5. ANIMATION

Powtoon

To create fun, animated videos & presentations have a

look at Powtoon. You can either upload and edit your

own images, voice overs, and music or use Powtoon’s

pre-created ones. You can either export your video/

presentation to YouTube and stream it into TalentLMS

or download in MP4 format and re-upload in TalentLMS.

Go Animate

Go Animate is another do-it-yourself animated video

production tool that gives you great freedom over cre-

ating your own custom characters or uploading your

1. OFFICE APPLICATIONS

Word, PowerPoint, Excel

If you work in any kind of enterprise environment this

side of the Milky Way, you’ll need them. With the Oﬃce

365 subscription you can have them for as little as $6

per month. You can reuse Word and Powerpoint con-

tent directly within TalentLMS.

Cheaper and Free Alternatives

Libre Oﬃce is a mature and feature-rich free oﬃce suite

available for Windows, Linux, and Mac. Mac users can

also snatch Apple’s Pages, Numbers, and Keynote apps,

sold for as little as $20 a pop.

2. SCREEN CAPTURE

Snagit

A sister product of Camtasia, undoubtedly one of the

best screen capturing software on the market. Snagit

will help you get your message across with their vast

editing options. It will also help you keep all your snaps

organized and easily accessible. You can choose to ex-

port your snap in a PDF, PNG, JPEG, GIF or even an MP4

ﬁle, all of which are compatible with TalentLMS.

Cheaper and Free Alternatives

There are a number of good choices that are embed-

ded on browsers (e.g. Microsoft’s Edge, which includes

its own screen grabbing tool) or available as browser

plugins (e.g. Awesome Screenshot, available for both

Chrome and Firefox). Windows and OS X also include

some built-in screen grabbing functionality (OS X’s one

is aptly called “Grab”).

3. IMAGE EDITING

Adobe Creative Suite

For mangling bitmaps, drawing vector images, editing

video and doing post production work, the tools in this

suite are the undisputed kings. This is only available

as a subscription (which goes up to $69 for the whole

suite), but it is worth every penny.

Content Tools & Resources

for your eLearning Portal

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pular slide hosting service, especially after its LinkedIn

acquisition. Users can upload PowerPoint, PDF, Keynote

or OpenDocument ﬁles, and share them as online

presentations either privately or publicly. Slide decks

uploaded on Slideshare can be viewed on the site itself,

on mobile devices or even embedded on other sites.

Cheaper and Free Alternatives

The OpenOﬃce Impress presentation app, part of the

Open Oﬃce suite of Open Source applications, is a

mature and very credible PowerPoint competitor that’s

available for free. Only slightly more expensive (but Mac

only) is Apple’s Keynote, which goes for the price of

about 3 cups of coﬀee. It’s the presentation app with

which Apple does its keynote presentations, so you

know it’s good.

8. INTERACTIVE COURSES

Articulate Engage

If you want to create interactive courses we strongly

recommend Articulate Engage. With its easy to use

interface, Articulate Engage makes SCORM a little less

intimidating: you should be able to create interactions

without typing a single line of code. You can also pu-

blish your courses in HTML5, which allows your users to

view their courses on their mobile/iPad web editions of

TalentLMS.

9. EXPLAINER VIDEOS

Moovly

Moovly is an easy-to-use animation creator with a library

of editable images & templates. The free version is quite

limited; paid plans give you many more options such as

uploading of video clips, copying scenes, custom fonts

etc. With the free version you can export onto Youtube

and then stream within your TalentLMS portal.

Rawshorts

Rawshorts is another great explainer video creation tool.

You can choose from a variety of premade, industry

speciﬁc templates and customize your project further

with a drag & drop builder.

Cheaper and Free Alternatives

Similar to Rawshorts, Biteable is a good option if you

know you are going to create a series of videos, since for

a ﬂat fee of $99/year it allows you to create an unlimited

amount of non-watermarked, HD, downloadable videos.

own narration. The free version comes with limitations,

such as a maximum of 30” videos and no exporting of

video. However, you can embed the link of your video

directly within TalentLMS.

Cheaper and Free Alternatives

If your budget is constrained, you should give Synﬁg

Studios a shot. It is free 2D animation software, de-

signed as a powerful solution for creating ﬁlm-quality

animation with vector and bitmap artwork. It does take

some eﬀort to learn but you can achieve great results

using it.

6. SCREEN RECORDING

Camtasia

Screen recording is useful for teaching software and

computer related courses, your choices in this area

don’t get much better than Camtasia Studio. It allows

you to easily capture screen recordings, edit them and

add animations and eﬀects, before exporting to Youtube,

Vimeo, MP4, and many more formats.

ScreenFlow

ScreenFlow is a tried and true Mac alternative for

screen recording. Just like Camtasia, it lets you record,

edit and share your computer sessions, and even oﬀers

visual eﬀects and advanced audio editing (for voice-

overs, soundtracks, etc).

Cheaper and Free Alternatives

Windows users can try Icecream Screen Recorder; or

Bandicam, a lightweight screen recorder. For screen

recording on the cheap, both Windows and OS X

oﬀer some rudimentary screen recording function-

ality. While neither oﬀers much in the way of editing

your screen recordings, you can always ﬁnish them oﬀ

in a regular video editor.

7. PRESENTATION

Prezi

Prezi is an online presentation tool that re-invents the

traditional Powerpoint-style slides. It’s a free, web based,

ﬂash program which means that you wouldn’t be able to

access it oﬄine. You can easily embed your Prezi within

a TalentLMS unit.

Slideshare

SlideShare needs no introduction, as it is the most po-

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