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Welcome to part three in our Adobe Connect training in how to use the host functions inside of the Connect meeting room.
In part one we talked about the meeting menu command. In part two we talked about the remainder of the menu options.
And in this part were going to talk about the layout bar that's on the far right of the host menu
and also about the Attendees pod. So let's begin.
On the far right of your menu are two more options. The first one is the help option which will give you internal help also it's there for your
students If you are having a minor problem, or you just can't to remember and to do something.
Then you can run into this help area
and quickly take a look.
When you have more time, maybe not in the middle of a class, you can come in here, browse around a little to see
what they may offer you.
Remember that your students also have the same option, so if they are having trouble doing something
or need some help with troubleshooting, you can encourage them to go check out the Help.
The last option on this menu is your connection status. This is
similar to a light should be green indicating that your connection to the Internet is excellent at this time.
This is an ongoing status so it could degrade into yellow or possibly even
red. If it does that you probably noticed that you were having some problems either hearing people,
or whatever it is you might be doing - maybe they can't hear you as well or maybe the microphone seems to come and go.
This is also true of your students - they would have this status light as well - so if you or one of your
students are having trouble hearing other people, have them check that status. If it's yellow
possibly even red, then the only thing I know that you can do is to exit out Adobe Connect
and enter again. Sometimes getting a fresh connection to the Internet helps out. If your students continue to have problems with it,
then encourage them to talk with someone who can help them with their Internet connection. it's possible they are having trouble with that line
that's coming in for them. It definitely is an Internet problem
and really not an Adobe Connect problem.
Let's talk a bit more about the Attendees pod. It is the pod that's pretty important to you as the host.
One thing that you can do in this pod is, of course, see who's attending, who is a participant and who's a presenter.
If you'll just float your mouse over the top of one of the attendees, like in this case, the participant, then you will have another window that opens up to
the left of that person, and it gives you a list of things that can do as the host.
You could start a private chat with that person down in the chat box area. If you do that, their name will appear another tab right next to the tab
"Everyone," and they would also receive a flashing tab with your name on it showing
that you wanted to have a private chat with them. The next option down is to Enable Video - in case they entered late and their video isn't enabled.
Or they started up their camera late. Whatever it may be, they just have put that option here as a convenience for you.
You could request the screen share
I'm not going to actually talk about how to do that in this presentation; but what it allows you to do is something to think about for the future
you can actually
make a participant to a presenter have them share their screen, share their desktop perhaps.
And then you can request to take over control of their desktop to show them how to set settings, how to run a program - whatever It might be.
It is a pretty powerful tool which you can use. We've already use it to help
students and adjuncts set things up on the computer when it wasn't quite right for them.
That is something for down the road. The last two you're more likely to use and frequently to use. With these you can promote people or demote
them. In this case we could promote our participant into a presenter, or you can make them a host. Remember that hosts have "all power" so
normally when dealing with a class of students, you probably don't want to do that -
unless for some reason you need to leave
the meeting and have somebody take control of it. It would be very unusual for that to happen.
You can also demote yourself. I don't recommend doing tnat but it is a possibility for you to do.
The key thing you want to remember to do is when a participant is ready to make a presentation,
you will want to promote them to be a presenter. That way they can control their presentation. They can upload if they need to,
their own power point or PDF
or whatever they want to share and then they can take control
of that part of the screen - of sharing
their work. It's a very powerful tool that you probably will want to use.
I have been asked if we could have break out rooms inside of Connect. Yes, we can. As you can see there are three icons
right below the attendees title
part of the pod.
The middle one is the one for
creating and starting breakout rooms.
I have already clicked on that so you can see what it looks like down below there.
One thing you have to decide when you
go to the breakout rooms is do I want to click and drag each person in there individually, or if it is a pretty
good size class and I don't care to have them in a particular group, I can actually have
Connect
take the people and divide them up equally into the different break out rooms. The other thing that you can do is use the plus sign
to add another breakout room, so if you would want to add a fourth or fifth break out room, you certainly could do that.
One way you can get people in, as I said, was to click and drag them down into the breakout room
where you want them to be, or as you can see on this screen,
when you allow your mouse to hover over that person's name, it lets you choose some options. This option is which break out room do you want
them to be in, or put them back into the main meeting room. Let's see what happens when we choose to let Connect automatically place people
into the breakout rooms.
I have added a third person into the classroom for this demonstration, obviously I couldn't ask Connect to disperse just one person into
multiple rooms, so I've added another person. And then I've selected all the people that I would like to have placed into breakouts.
In this case you can see I've highlighted all three of us - the two students and the instructor. The way that you do this is the same way you
select a a list of things in other computer programs. You would click on the first one, then take your arrow down and point to the last one,
while holding down the shift key, click while you're pointing at the last person. That will highlight all
the people in that range of names on that list. Then all I would need to do is go over
and choose the criss-cross icon.
I'm not sure what else to call it but a disburser icon. So click on the disburser icon. It will go ahead and place the people into however many
breakout rooms you have set up. Let's take a look and see
what Connect was able to do.
Here you can see that Connect has disbursed my three highlighted people into two rooms.
My students went into two break out rooms; I was left in the main meeting room.
I can take myself by either clicking and dragging or opening up the little window and selecting which one I would like to send myself to.
I can move from breakout room to breakout room to see how people are doing. One important point here though is that this a two step process.
Once I place people in the breakout rooms,
look above there. It says Start Breakouts. So I haven't actually, officially, put them in there and allowed them to get started yet. So once I have
them into the breakout rooms, I must remember to come back up here and click on "Start Breakouts" so that they can begin their conversations with
their group - working on whatever it is that you've assigned.
Let's see what that looks like from the host point of view.
Once you have placed the students into their breakout rooms and you have clicked on start breakouts, you'll get this message on the top,
as do the students, that says you are now in a breakout session. However for the host, you are
allowed to broadcast a message to all the people, all the attendees, who are in the
different break out sessions.
To do that, I'll show you how to do that in a little bit, you just choose "broadcast message" from the attendees pod option menu. When you are
finished with the breakouts, your time is up and you pull people back in, you can end the breakouts. to do that by either clicking here in this
black box to "end breakouts" or down below the main meeting area in the attendees pod where it says "End breakouts."
When you end the breakouts, the people remain in the breakout rooms until you bring them back.
Let's see how that works.
Here I've decided it's time to
get the people back out of the breakout rooms and put back into the main meeting room so they can report back to everyone what
they discussed during their
break out meeting time
I've done this in one fell swoop so to speak, by going to the first person in the first break out room and clicking on that person
and scrolling down to the last person's name in the last breakout room
and do a shift click. It will highlight everybody that's in all the different break outs. Then you will get this box on the side to open up, allowing you to tell you
how many people are selected and allowing you to placing them all into one of the rooms, or more likely to bring
them all back to the main meeting room. So it's a very easy way of moving groups of people around.
This shows the attendees option menu opened up so you can see
all the many things that you can do
concerning the Attendees right from this pod itself. You can see here where you can change their role,
remove a person if you need to remove them. The only time I've had to do this is when someone
actually got themselves into the class twice and then it'll have their name and it will have their name a second time with a 2 after it.
Then you, as the host, come in and highlight that person that's in there too many times and remove that selected user. You can mute all users if you
have a lot of echo problems, you might want to do that. You can clear everyone's status - if everyone has their hands up or whatever.
You can see all the different things you can do here. The one thing that this screenshot doesn't show you, because
right now I don't have anybody in a breakout room, is the very option I talked about, that is broadcasting a message to all attendees who are
in a breakout room. But if they were sitting in a breakout room and you clicked on this option menu,
you would be able to find that option here and click on it, type a message, and broadcast
it to all of the rooms.
Notice that every one of the pods does have an option menu.
The one down in chat you can see that pretty clearly here and there's one up there for the documents or the share screen, and one for video.
There is one for every pod. And according to which pod you will see which options you need to be able to do.
But all of them will have the hide option which would be to close up that pod, or the maximize option which would make it to the full screen.
Just take some time when you get your own meetingroom,
look through and see what other controls as the host that you might have.
Now just to show you how the different layouts appear. Some of them are standard and you will
be able to see them right away. Others maybe I've created or changed a little. Just to give you an idea that they do look different, I've click off of the
documents lay out and clicked onto the desktop layout. The desktop layout allows me to have a much larger share screen,
as you can see, and that would be good for sharing a PowerPoint or perhaps wanting to show a video or
something like that. Or participants may be wanting to share their presentations.
Whatever you want to do. Is just gives you a larger portion of the screen devoted to sharing.
But it does keep the Attendees and the Chat areas
on here for you.
Lets take a look at the next one.
The next lay out is setup or preset for a whiteboard use. You can use a white board overlaid on any of your other sharing areas
So as a host you can open up these tools and use them to mark up power points
or a PDF or whatever you might want to do. In this case I just wanted to have a blank area
where I could type some things up on the screen as perhaps we were brain storming. In this case all I did was click on the T for text,
typed in a message, and on the right hand side I could have the text highlighted and choose what font I wanted it to be, how large I want it to be,
the color of it and so forth. Again, just take some time to take a look at this tool and see how you might be able to use it for your classroom.
This is kind of a fun option that we really wished to have before now. That of having the ability to show videos.
You're able to show videos that are either flash based or MP4s.
within Connect. This one happens to be an app that was designed by other users - with Connect being based on open source - users can
actually develop new things and make them available for the rest of us to use. So someone created
something called Connect Tube. It's used to help find and display You Tube videos. In this case I've typed in a search
for Campolo
and hit "go." It will very quickly goes out and comes up with a list you can scroll through.
In this case, anything that has to do with Tony Campolo, find the one you're looking for
and then click on it to show it to the students.
Lets see what that would look like.
by what it does is that it will start
Here I have chosen one of Tony's video podcasts and wanted to show that to all the students. Once you've clicked on the video you'd like to show,
just like in You Tube, you get that big red arrow in the middle of the screen. DO NOT use that arrow!
The arrow WILL get the video running and students can start it running
also;
however, you can't get the audio to shut off. I've been known to
start the videos like 2 times or 3 times just a few seconds after each other; and then, of course, all sound is jumbled together,
one on top of another. So learn from my mistakes! Use the controls at the bottom for play, pause and stop.
That will just keep things a lot cleaner for you with fewer headaches.
The last layout that I have in my layout area is one for video discussions.
This one, even though it seems shocking to me right now to have my face staring at me so large,
would allow you to actually have a nice large area
where everyone who has their web cam enabled would be able to see each others'
web-cam pictures instead of little thumbnails. You would have a nicer of size frame for each person, depending on how many you do have using their
web cams. The only downside of using a webcam is that if your Internet connection tends to be a little slow
you will notice that the web cams will
kind of freeze on you every once in awhile. So that might be an individual
person's decision whether they really can use their web cam or whether they can view everyone's web cam at one time. Video takes up the most
of the band width of your Internet connection to the actually
use the web Cam along with the microphone. You will just have to judge that by
what kind of connections that most of your students might have; but it really turns out to be a nice way of having discussion
on line with all of your students. It really works out nicely.
Let's go now and see how you might be able to
design your own layout.
I had told you that we can create our own layouts; and let me show you very quickly how you can do that. There's one of two places you can go -
up on to the layouts menu
option there's a creating new layout option for you in there - or down on the lower right hand side
below your list of layouts you have 2 icons. One is for settings that you have in your layouts. The second is the one we want. It is the little plus sign
and that is for adding a layout. Once you click on the plus sign, you get the message here in the center
and you need just to fill it out to create a new
layout. You can either create a new blank layout which gives you an actual black screen to which
you add each pod and size each one the way you'd like it to be. You're welcome to do that.
Or you might choose the second one which will duplicate an existing layout. That's the one that's a lot quicker because that allows you to use this
drop down arrow to choose which of the layouts comes close to what you want.
You choose to duplicate it and then down below enter the name for the new layout
Type in a new name for it and click OK. You will have your new layout created which at that point is a duplicate of one you already have.
It allows you to go in and swap out different pods, maybe size them differently - whatever it is you had in
mind that you had a new layout for. Try it out. it works fairly well.
Now you can see that I have created a new layout. It's listed over on the right hand side as "copy of.." - it is a copy of the video discussion. I'm still in the
original video discussion. You know that because it has the blue highlight on it. If you notice there's X's in a circle
up in the top right corners of all the other layouts except for the one that you are in. In this case my new one is also highlighted with a yellow dotted
line. The X allows you to get rid of any layout that you don't want. So if you try one out and don't like it, you can get
rid of it. All you need to do is click on the X in the top right hand corner.
Look ahead to see what that would look like.
In this example you can see I decided I really don't need a duplicate of the video discussion area. So I've decided to go ahead and delete that.
I've clicked on the little red X. It comes up then allowing you to delete that layout.
And as you can see the duplicate layout for video discussion area has been removed.
That's pretty much all we wanted talk about concerning layouts at this point.
You can have a lot of fun designing them; and there will be cases where you will want to have duplicates of layouts made. So just get into
your meeting room and give it a try.
OK, we've made it to the end of part three. These three sessions we spent talking about how to use the host meeting
menu and the host screen to our best advantage. We talked about how to use all the options underneath Meeting how to use the other menu
options going across the top and this session we learned how to work with the different layouts - how to switch among them.
Also how to create a new layout. And I talked about how to use the Attendees pod which
is really important for classroom management. The next thing we really need to talk about
is how to create our own meeting rooms.
We want to do that so that you can create a meeting room
for any of your courses. You can usually just reuse that meeting room while you're in that course. In that way the next time you teach the same course
you may already have some things uploaded in your room and it'll take a minimal amount of time to get ready for the Connect sessions.
The next thing that we will do also is talk about how you record your meetings. We talked a little bit about it
but not really how to do that. And then how can we find information
about our meeting that has been recorded, and get that info to the students.
Remember you'll record a meeting for a couple of different reasons. One would be to pre-record an
introduction to some topic or perhaps to your syllabus. Then secondly if you're having an
synchronous meeting with students not everyone can make it. So if you record that meeting, and later make that recording link available, then all of
your students will have the opportunity to see it. So why don't you look for that next and you will see that video among the other videos listed for
training in Connect. I'll see you then!
Good bye for now.