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Acrobat ConnectPro User Community is a great community site which is free and a place where you'll find a wealth of resources that will help you learn the technology and connect with others who are passionate about the Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional Suite. The site is broken down in five main sections: Community, News, Events, Learning Center, and Forums. The Community section offers User Group management, connecting you to others in your geographic or industry, a Member Directory, Community Gallery where you'll find Adobe Presenter Presentations, recorded Connect Pro meetings, Partner Showcase, and Spread the Word. The News section offers the ability to Subscribe to the News RSS Feed to any News and/or Blogs that are happening within the community. The Events section alerts anyone to upcoming Meetings, Seminars, and lists an archive of past records of key meetings and presentations. In addition, the Learning Center contains tutorials, topic of the month, Connect Pro Extensions, and Additional Resources. Finally, the Forum section allows for the ability to community members to post important information, announcements and events. I started Connect Fridays for the Adobe Education Leadership Program and now have moved over to manage a monthly ConnectPro User Group meeting for K-12. Please join me every third Thursday of each month, 11:30 a.m. Pacific Standard Time to learn about the ConnectPro suite. Everyone is invited! Meeting URL: http://www.connectusers.com/groups/k12/events/389/.

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Headsets, Chat, VoIP, Internal Microphones, Webcam Microphones, and External Phone Calls are the most popular ways in which people use to communicate inside Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro. For individuals with a hosted Connect Pro account or for the fortunate ones who have their own Connect Pro Server Cluster, telephone integration with Connect Pro is the way to go. Go ahead and put the headsets away and contact a company like MeetingOne: http://www.meetingone.com/us/ and get your Adobe Connect Pro Meeting Room configured to call your educator's cell phone or office phone automatically. Yes, the Connect Pro Meeting Room will call you and get you right into the meeting room with up to 50 other individuals. Just contact MeetingOne and set-up the "Conference Room Number" and "Host Access Code," then login into your Adobe Connect Pro account and go to "My Profile" and then "Edit My Preferences" save the information, open up your room, and turn on the internal telephone bridge and start talking and sharing in real time. It even gets better, the telephone integration works with the recording feature inside Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional. Anyone can now turn on the recording while talking on the phone and retrieve the audio and presentation from the Meeting Room. In addition, I watched the keynote from Adobe MAX 2009 and saw in amazement how cell phones will be able to host a Connect Pro Meeting. So basically, you can be inside your car, looking at the ocean, open up a Connect Pro Meeting Room on your cell phone and have the meeting room call the cell phone sitting in your hand, what is Adobe going to think of next?

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Jackie Specht's Connect Card - Meeting One

Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro is an awesome service for presenting and collaborating at a distance. Unfortunately, not a lot of people at the University of Denver (and other universities, I'd imagine) have a Connect Pro license and have to look elsewhere for such services. In preparing for the H1N1 Influenza virus, faculty actually have a lot of options beyond setting up a standard Blackboard course. Adobe offers some great free tools to help users collaborate across great distances.

One of the services provided by Adobe is called ConnectNow, which actually shares a lot of functionality with Connect Pro. You won't be able to conduct an entire class with the service (as it only supports a limited number of connection per room) but you can share your desktop, take control of a student machine to work through a problem, and it includes rich whiteboarding and chat tools.

Couple this with Buzzword, Presentations, and other Acrobat.com tools, and you can easily conduct your course at a distance in the event of student or faculty illness. I'm fortunate enough to have a Connect Pro account and conduct all my office hours through that service.

Today's faculty have a set of really robust, free tools at our disposal and should take full advantage of whichever ones complement our specific courses.

One of the challenges I tried to overcome for the past couple of years was how to help a math teacher use Adobe Connect Pro. The white board inside Adobe Connect Pro is not designed for a math teacher’s extensive use of a mouse and the amount of time they spend drawing out equations would make any math teacher’s hand ache. They would prefer using a dry-erase marker. At the same time, most of the students won’t be sitting in front of a computer to watch a math teacher draw out the equations. On the other hand, I tried document cameras, web cams, and HD Camcorder’s plugged into a Connect Pro Meeting Room’s Camera and Video Pod with a FireWire connection. The big challenge here is frame rate. The hand motions always look blurred and lagged behind a person’s voice. The solution is to integrate SMART Board technology with a Connect Pro Meeting Room. Basically, a math teacher uses a SMART Board to draw out equations just like if they were using a white board with dry-erase markers. It is a simple set-up and integration with Adobe Acrobat Connect because all a math teacher needs to do is open up a Connect Pro Meeting Room and begin a ‘Screen Share’ and ‘Recording’ of their desktop. The image which is being displayed on the desktop is of the SMART Board, so every hand motion is in synch with the voice and it looks seamless and transparent to the students. They are just watching their math teacher draw out equations on the board just like any other day in the classroom, however, a recording of every move and teacher’s voice is being made possible by Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro in the background. And students who had trouble on particular day and/or where just plain sick can now watch the recording of the lesson from home as many times as they would like through a simple hyperlink found on the teacher’s website. The teacher could also be sick the next day and could make a recording of their lesson from home and give it to the sub for the day and not even come into work, just kidding!

Example of Connect Pro and a SMART Board

Adobe Connect Pro
Smart Boards

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My Connect Room

The Decision Makers Can’t All Make It - What Can You Do?

A simple solution, use Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional to set-up a
Meeting Room to capture a vendor’s audio and presentation. These presentations
are traditionally done with a computer, screen and projector. Basically, the set-up
of an Adobe Connect Pro Meeting Room does not influence this traditional presentation
set-up for the vendor. The Meeting Room is used to capture a screen share of the desktop
of the vendor. All one has to do is start sharing the vendor’s screen in the room and start
the audio capture and recording. Some potential issues are getting permission from the
vendor to record the session, I would suggest letting the vendor know a long way
in advance the recording will be only used for internal school district use.
Another issue is how to get the questions from the presenter into the recording?
I would just ask the vendor to repeat the questions back into the microphone or headset
so the questions and answers make it back on the recording.
Once the vendor’s presentation is complete, all you have to do
is email the rest of the team who could not make it with the link to the recording so they can
watch the vendor’s presentation at their own timing. The hope is with Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional and the rest of the team to make a smart decision on the purchase
of the new software on the re-review of the the presentation from the vendor.
This creates a larger opportunity for a group process even though one person
may have been only present at the vendor’s original presentation.

Dave Forrester
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