Screen sharing and audio

A colleague from Western Institute asked me this today - it's something others have asked so I thought I'd post the answer here.

"I am wanting to demonstrate PhotoStory by sharing my screen on Connect, but it seems audio in PhotoStory movie does not come through to connect. Have you had any experience with that?
When I play the PhotoStory back, I can hear the narration, but nobody else can. I had a similar problem the other day when I had a video playing on my desktop, shared my screen, and nobody could hear the audio from the video."

Screen/application sharing only shares the screen, not the sound unfortunately.

I’ve used Connect to show websites with sound - you could do the same with PhotoStory. Here's how...

Share the screen, plug in some good speakers, and hold the mike to the speakers - clumsy solution but it seems to do the job, everyone said they could hear clearly. Remember, you will need to set your audio playback so it plays through the speakers, not your headset.

If you have a video file – and it’s in the .FLV format – you can upload it into a Share Pod and it will play with sound for everyone. If it’s not in that format you can convert it at Zamzar or Movavi.

Supported file types in Connect

Content library and Meeting rooms:

• PPT, PPTX – PowerPoint
• JPG – images
• SWF – Flash
• FLV – Flash video
• MP3 – sounds

Content library only - convert GIFs & PDFs to Flash Paper if you want to load into a meeting room (or you could use screen sharing):

• GIF – images
• PDF – Adobe Acrobat
• ZIP – compressed ZIP files/folders

Neither – not compatible - convert to Flash Paper:

• DOC, DOCX – Word
• XLS – Excel

Connect how-to's for teachers

Adobe Connect User Group AsiaPac has a great collection of "how-to" downloads aimed at the education and training sector, lots of material on planning and facilitating online lessons.

Adobe Connect forums

Adobe have a user forums website where you can search for solutions to problems or post a question. There are forums for Connect and Presenter. If you go in through the main page and are looking for Connect stuff be sure to go to the Connect Professional forum, that's the version we have in TAFE. There's also an RSS feed.

Presenter 7 Audio sync issues

Some people are having issues with Presenter 7.0 where the timing is off, and the start or end of a track gets cut off.
There is an update available for presenter that reportedly fixes this issue and several others, at http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4005.

The WSI help desk shopuld be installing this update soon for all Presenter users at CLI.

Connect 7 new features

Here's a page from Penn University with a good overview of Connect 7's new feautures.

How to embed Captivate files in Presenter

Can you embed Captivate files in Adobe Presenter? Yes, but there are a few tricks to know.

Here's a detailed guide I found in a great blog on Adobe Connect, Adobe Presenter and Captivate. There's a part 1 and a part 2.

Audio troubleshooting in Adobe Connect

You've run the Audio Setup Wizard in Adobe Connect and audio still isn't working properly! Rory O'Brien put together this short instructional movie on how to troubleshoot audio in Adobe Connect.

... and here's an even shorter version that Rory made a while later.

How do you track quizzes created in Adobe Presenter?

Tony Lorriman of Hunter asked me this question so I thought I'd post an answer for all to see.

First you need to get your quiz onto the server.

Uploading option 1: Publish your Presentation to the Connect server. You do this via the PowerPoint menu: Adobe Presenter > Publish... > Adobe Connect. Note that you'll need author rights for the Connect server to do this.

Uploading option 2: If you don't have author rights you can simply publish to your hard drive and then upload it to the Content Library. After you've published and checked your quiz, check the "Zip files" box under "Output options" in the Publish window, then publish.
Then upload the zip file to the Content Library on the Connect server - if you've been designated a meeting host you'll have your own area called "My Content" that you can upload to.

Viewing reports: After students have done your quiz,
Go to the Content Library
Select your content item in the list
Select “Reports”
Select any of “Summary | By Slides | By Questions | By Answers” to browse quiz results.
This will show total answers only, not how individuals answer. (That feature is in the training module which TAFE hasn't bought … yet.)