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.

Many on-campus systems rely heavily on Adobe software- specifically Coldfusion and the Flash Platform… but how “open” is Adobe?

The recent release of DU CourseMedia™ includes an update to the VPS Projection System.

VPS is an extension of DU CourseMedia™ that can be installed on a user’s desktop or laptop computer in order to project gallery objects through either single or multiple projection setups.

So, what’s new?

• Only have one external projection screen? No problem- now you can split that screen into two and compare objects with ease. This is perfect for classrooms with only one projector. The software will prompt you to use this feature upon login if your hardware is in compliance.
• Simulated laser pointer support: Moving your mouse cursor onto a display object will render it as a virtual laser pointer. Just move off of the object to return to normal.
• There are also data enhancements regarding login for users of the standalone version of CourseMedia™. This does not affect DU users.

In order to get this update, you can download it manually from CourseMedia™ at http://coursemedia.du.edu/, or simply adjust the “Config” parameters to point to CourseMedia™ as illustrated below.