Adobe Education Leaders

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.

Posted by Joseph Labrecque at 11:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

My Connect Card
My Connect Room

Posted by Dave Forrester at 9:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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
My Connect Card

Posted by Dave Forrester at 7:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The answer is yes! There is urban legend out there about hosted Connect Pro accounts and recordings. Individuals who have hosted Connect Pro accounts may think they can’t make a copy of their work through the use of recordings. However, they definitely can by going to “Recordings” on their hosted Connect Pro account and bring the FLV (Video File) across to their local machine using the “Make Offline” button. Once the FLV file is across to the local computer, the end user can do some cool applications with the video file in the real world. They can download the free Adobe Media Player off Adobe’s website and add the videos to their personal video favorites. Students can download the free media player and the video files can be streamed over a local network to them. At the same time, the FLV video files can be embedded into Acrobat by using Adobe Acrobat 9 and viewed with Adobe Acrobat 9 Reader. This blog post includes a brief ten minute webinar on the process and cool ways to apply the Connect Pro Recording technology to your world. So check it out, you can make a copy of yourself in your time zone, and then distribute yourself one hundred fold in multiple time zones and time periods by using your new technology resource found with Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional.

Short Webinar on Connect Pro Recordings

My Connect Card, Digital Business Card
My Connect Room
My Profile

Posted by Dave Forrester at 8:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The million dollar question: How do I get audio from a multi-person phone conference into a Connect Pro Meeting Room? Well, I can make you the Connect Pro Superhero! The parts you need for the solution is a JK Audio – THAT-2 for around two hundred dollars, Computer, Connect Pro Meeting Room, Phone, Phone Conference Bridge, and RCA mini jack plug. The RCA mini jack plugs from the THAT-2 device into the microphone jack into a computer. The person who sets up the phone conference should be the person who opens up the Connect Pro Meeting room as the Host. First, the Host of the meeting should make the call and open up the phone conference. Second, the Host of the meeting can run themselves through the Audio Set-up Wizard to make sure the Connect Room is listening for the audio coming from the THAT-2 device. Next, the Host of the meeting can push the “Hands-free” button inside the Connect Pro Meeting room to start the stream of audio from the phone. I would make sure as the Host not to promote anyone, keep everyone in the room as a Participant because people who are promoted to Presenter or Host could also push the “Hands-free” button and mess up the audio set-up. If you must promote someone higher than a participant, make sure you tell them not to push any buttons! One last piece to your Superhero success, don’t forget to push the record button when you start the meeting.

JK Audio - THAT-2

Dave Forrester
Adobe Education Leader
My Profile

Posted by David Forrester at 3:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A little over 48 hours ago I released our first online Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional course on our district's Blackboard system. I was curious to see what the response would be. In December we offered two stand-and-deliver (SAD) format courses and both filled up within 15 minutes of being released on our district system. With an overbook capacity of 24 participants planning on filling the room we thought we would be training a lot of educators, both administrators and teachers, on the benefits of Connect Pro.

Continue reading "Do Educators Want Connect Pro?" »

Posted by Lee Keller at 1:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A few days ago I was able to put Adobe Connect “through the ringer.” I had dabbled with Connect a handful of times, but last Tuesday, I had the opportunity to teach a day-long workshop that “connected” educators from various locations across Texas.

In all honesty, I had a few pre-workshop jitters. Would the participants be able to follow my directions? Would the class be engaging? How would the audio sound? Would the participants be able to see what was happening on my computer screen?

To my delight, everything worked out great!

The day before the workshop I logged into my Connect dashboard and set up the meeting. I then announced the host URL (the address of the meeting) by sending an email to the participants. The preparation took about five minutes.

The morning of my workshop, I logged into my Connect meeting a bit early to make sure the audio and screencasting functions were working properly (just a precaution). I then shared my screen, turned on my mic, and the workshop started promptly at 9:00. I spent the next five hours teaching a course on ways to implement Adobe Acrobat 9…and it went without a hitch!

The end-of-workshop feedback was fantastic. Everybody enjoyed learning over Connect and it saved some serious travel dollars. The only complaint from the participants was that they couldn’t see the instructor. That was my fault, as I was using my PC (no webcam) and not my Mac. Connect would have easily allowed me to broadcast a small video if I had used a computer with a web cam. Live and learn…

All-in-all, I feel that Connect is a very viable alternative to face-to-face instruction. It allowed for multi-location synchronic learning (something that face-to-face instruction cannot provide), but also saved some coin. What a bargain!

Scott Trudeau

Posted by Scott Trudeau at 7:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)