Suite allows new presentation
possibilities
Contact: Carl Strang, Assistant District Superintendent for Technology and Innovation, (518) 862-5331
The Northeastern Regional Information Center's Adobe Connect Pro service has been steadily gaining more attention as a cost-effective way to deliver quality staff development training via the Internet. Now, a new video suite is expected to help further that growth.
Adobe Connect presentations enable people to come together no matter their location. Participants can “attend” presentations from their home or work computers by logging on to a specific website. There, they can hear a presenter speaking in real time, ask questions and make comments through a chat feature, view presentation materials (such as PowerPoint slides) and download and share documents.
In September alone, NERIC's Adobe Connect system hosted 53 different meetings and recorded 360 hours of content between rehearsals and actual presentations.
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| Above, Managing Coordinator Ira Goldstein explains how to use equipment that is part of NERIC's new video suite. |
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| Above, New York State School Boards Association staff Jay Worona and Barry Entwistle use NERIC's new video suite at 1031 Watervliet-Shaker Road to tape trainings. |
Ira Goldstein, NERIC’s managing coordinator of emerging technologies, said the video suite, which became available this school year at NERIC's 1031 Watervliet-Shaker Road offices, takes Adobe Connect capabilities to a new level by giving attendees the ability to actually see the presenter speaking in real time.
“As users become more comfortable and familiar with the technology, we see great potential in using this media as a means of student and staff instruction,” Goldstein said.
The suite, housed in a former office space, looks like a mini TV studio, complete with microphones, cameras, editing equipment and computers. The suite allows users to designate a “producer” (who can be a NERIC staff member) to facilitate the presentation behind the scenes. The person in the producer role typically fields questions from attendees, moderates discussion and/or controls camera angles so online attendees can view presenters as they speak.
Barry Entwistle, director of leadership development for the New York State School Boards Association (NYSSBA), said the organization plans to experiment with the video suite’s capabilities in the coming days. NYSSBA, a regular user of NERIC’s Adobe Connect Pro service, has grown its webinar offerings over the past two years to an average of two per month thanks in part to the flexibility Adobe Connect offers its webinar attendees.
“We have a consistent group of repeat webinar users and they just love it,” Entwistle said. “Not only are we able to provide training from this organization, but we can also link up with people in their own districts and provide examples from the field. We allow boards to share with other boards best governing practices.”
Further, Adobe Connect‘s recording capability is particularly attractive to some school board members — because webinars are recorded, registrants can choose to watch webinars when it is convenient for them, and reference the presentations indefinitely by keeping the links.
“Our webinar attendees don’t have to spend additional time away from family, or allocate money toward travel costs,” Entwistle said. “What’s more, signing up for a webinar is like purchasing a book — they can share it with anybody, and develop their own resource libraries for training staff members.”
Goldstein says the video suite’s capabilities will be on display at NERIC’s upcoming Regional Technology Awareness Day on December 10 at The Desmond Hotel & Conference Center in Albany. “My hope is that people will begin to see our video suite as a place where they can produce quality media pieces on instruction,” he said.
