Virtual Materials Toolset: Tutorial 1: Slides and Cards – UnitusTI Help Center

Introduction

Designing your Slide

Creating the Pack

Creating The Cards

Creating a Card in the Cards Screen

Creating a Slide and a Card using the Slide Wizard

Final Considerations

Additional resources

Introduction

Content in the VMT is organized in Packs . A Pack is like a folder where you can store Slides , Cards , and other resources for later usage during a Session .

For example, the “VMT Tutorial 1: Slides and Cards” Pack that accompanies this tutorial is a Pack that contains a single Slide, and that slide is made of four different Cards:

A Card may have many text labels and pictures on any of its sides (you can add content also to the backside of a Card). The same card can appear in multiple slides, allowing you to save time by reusing content.

The resources in a Pack are not limited to Slides and Cards. Other resources like Random Cards, Widgets and Variables are also available to enrich the VM experience, and will be introduced in the following tutorials.

Designing your Slide

In this tutorial, you will create a basic pack with one slide and a few cards .

When designing new content, it is recommended to start with a draft of the desired activity, as in the following diagram:

The following steps will show how to present a card with a picture of an animal on the top and three cards with different animals’ names on the bottom. In this example, the goal is for the client to pick the card with the label (the animal name) that matches the picture at the top.

Moreover, the card at the top will be anchored, while the cards at the bottom will randomly swap places every time the user loads the slide during a session with the client.

Creating the Pack

In the Home screen of the Virtual Materials toolset, you will find the “Packs” Icon in the “Content Creation” section:

By clicking on “Packs”, the toolset presents a list of packs accessible for your organization. By default, the list includes:

The packs created by members of your organization (including you)
The packs made by third parties that your organization is subscribed to.

You will create a new Pack, so select the “New” option in the top menu bar (see screenshot above).

The toolset will ask you to provide a name and a description for the pack. In this example, we will use “Tutorial 1: Slides and Cards” for the name and “ Create a single slide with four cards” for the description, as in the animated screenshot above .

Creating The Cards

Once the pack is created, the toolset will present the list of slides. The first time you enter this page, your list of slides will be empty. Your next step will be to create one or more slides for your Pack, and when you do that you will be able to add another element that you may create ahead of time or during the process of creating the slide: a Card . You can create cards at any time from the “Cards” menu option at the top of the screen, or you can make them during the slide creation process using the Slide Wizard.

We will show you both options. First, you will create cards directly in the “cards” screen and your last card will be created using the slide creation wizard.

Creating a Card in the Cards Screen

The Cards screen is empty by default, just like the screen of slides. Cards can be grouped into Decks, but in this tutorial, you will not use this feature. Instead, you will create the first card of the bottom row of the design:

Select the “New” button on the “Cards” side of the screen.
You have to type a name for the card and select a Layout.
Select layout 6, the “only label” layout:

After closing the current card, repeat the process for the two remaining cards: “Cow” and “Cat”.
At the end, the screen of “Cards” will look like this:

Creating a Slide and a Card using the Slide Wizard

You have now created the three cards needed for the bottom row of our design.

Now you will create the Card at the top and the Slide simultaneously, using the Slide Wizard. By following the next steps:

Go back to the Slides screen and click on the “New” button.
Enter a name for the slide: “Slide 1” is OK.
Next, enter a description for the slide: “Select the name that matches the picture”.
Select the layout: choose the layout called “Three Comparisons”, because it has four cards, with one row of three at the bottom, just like our design.

After these steps, the application will present the “Define Slide Content” dialog. In this screen, cards are represented in gray, select each card and the actual content for each one.

In the following sequence, we select the first card in the bottom row and select one of the Cards that we created in the previous step:

We should repeat this process for the second and third cards in the bottom row.

Finally, we want to create a card for the top of the slide.

Select the top gray square in the layout.
Select the Search card button.
Instead of selecting an existing card, click on “Create”.
Enter a name for the Card.
Select layout 4, which contains a single Picture.
In the Pictures Screen, search for a picture by the name “cat” and select it.

As a final step, select the “Anchored” checkbox while the top card is selected. In the case of random shuffling of cards, the animation for shuffling will only affect the bottom row.

The screenshot below displays how the Slide Content looks like by now:

By clicking or tapping on “Next”, the first slide will be created and populated:

Be sure to check the “Shuffle on Load” checkbox on the slide properties, so the positions of the cards are randomly changed (except for our anchored card at the top).

Use the button “Preview” in the Slide screen or launch a local test session to test the effect.

Final Considerations

Keep in mind that the layouts (both for Cards and Slides) are just helpers to speed up the creation process. You can always modify the content of Cards and Slides to create elements with custom designs.
Feel free to explore modifications to the slide! For example, change the slide’s background color, click on each card, and change their position, size, or rotation.
Try different layouts of slides and cards.