Adobe Connect

Adobe Connect:

I was introduced to this tool recently and found it extremely fascinating to be in a classroom but not actually a 'typical' one. This interesting feature helps learners and teachers to connect in a class beyond the physical boundaries of a classroom, setting them all up in a 'virtual' scenario. Similar to a traditional classroom, the teacher here is the controller with all the learners as the attendees in the discussion forum classroom. Adobe Connect helps a teacher set-up a discussion forum page where he/she can invite all the learners to participate in any kind of discussion, group communication, demonstration of new idea or learning a new technique. Once the teacher sets-up the page, the link to the page can be emailed to the learners as an invite to the forum. The good part of Adobe Connect is, the learners don't have to go through the ordeal of a sign-up or registration. It is very simple, once the learner clicks on the link, the link opens to the Adobe Connect page asking the learner to input his/her name which will show his presence in the list of attendees and help his participate in the virtual class.

This way, the teacher can actually make a record of the students attending the session. The chat space in the discussion window helps the participants to interact with one another, but, there is a very interesting feature to participation here. Up on top, there is a bar which has an emoticon of a person raising his hand. Once clicked, it gives various options to participate: Raise hand, Agree, Disagree, Step-away. So, if there are two or more people willing to participate at the same time, the raise hand emoticon helps the teacher pick and select the participant, helping to maintain the flow of discussion. Similarly, other emoticons can be used to show the participant's opinion to a matter being talked about.

This particular tool can be used by a language teacher as a follow-up session to the lesson that had taken place in the classroom. Many times, when a new topic is introduced in class, a teacher is not very sure of it being comprehended by all learners and therefore Adobe Connect can be a good follow-up option for a teacher to evaluate her students and further plan and progress with the topic the following day. For example: If a teacher introduced the topic of Nouns in the class, a follow-up session on Adobe Connect could help her gauge as to how many students understood that particular part of speech, the teacher could ask students to participate by asking to give examples of nouns, and then take it further to forming sentences with nouns. In another way, a student could give a sentence and the teacher could ask another student to pick out the noun from the sentence given by the first student. Similarly, such sessions could be built up and a complete activity could take place with all parts of speech.

I feel such sessions help teachers save classroom time as well as keep a check on the progress of all learners. However, such sessions demand more time of the teachers and students, and the students who do not have the facility of computer or internet are unable to participate.

The following link can help you understand the feature better:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibPXu8k5tMY