Ed-Tech @ DU

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 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. Both Google and Adobe offer 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 the tools from Google, 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.

Acrobat.com hosts many free, collaborative tools and services- the bulk of which can be very useful for educators.  Some of the more prominent tools include:

Buzzword – A collaborative online word processor that creates print-perfect documents that can easily be co-authored and shared for comment and review.

ConnectNow – A personal web conferencing service designed with small group collaboration in mind that includes desktop sharing, annotation, file sharing, and integrated chat.

Presentations – Create stunning presentations right from your browser. Work with others online on the same presentation at the same time. No more emailing attachments back and forth, combining comments or wondering who has the latest version.

Tables - Similar to a spreadsheet; your data tables are online so everyone has access to the latest information — no need for multiple versions or e-mail attachments. And with simultaneous editing, no one is locked out while others make changes.

Share – Document and file sharing, including access control and unique document URLs, plus a document previewer that can be embedded directly in web pages.

All of these online tools are build upon the Flash Platform and will function the same over Windows, Mac, or Linux, regardless of web browser brand or version.

You will need to sign in with an Adobe ID to access any of these tools.

Learn more at http://www.adobe.com/acom/ or go directly to http://acrobat.com/ to begin using these services.