"How to" Guideline series is coordinated by Helen Mongan-Rallis of the Education Department at the University of Minnesota Duluth. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions to improve these guidelines please me at e-mail hrallis@d.umn.edu.

UMConnect (Adobe Connect): Facilitating a Meeting

By Helen Mongan-Rallis. Last updated: December 18, 2008

Once you have created a meeting, you should go into the meeting "room" ahead of time to upload any documents that you may want to use in the meeting and to set up the meeting audio/video.

1. Enter the meeting room: to do this, go to "My Scheduled Meetings" --> then from the list of meetings below, click on the "enter" button to enter the meeting room. This will launch a new UMConnect window (so you will not be in your browser anymore, but in UMConnect). Once you are in the meeting room, a default series of little windows (called "pods") will open, namely: camera and voice, attendee list, chat, note, and share. More about each of these later!
   
   
   
   
2. Audio Setup Wizard: The first time you facilitate a meeting as a host using your computer (and any time you fa ciliate a meeting with a computer that hasn't been used to facilitate a UMConnect session), you will need to set up the audio connection settings using the audio setup wizard. To do this, see the audio setup wizard guidelines.
   
   
3. Turn on Camera and Voice: In order for others to be able to hear you (and see you if you want to use a camera) you need to turn on the camera and/or microphone. To do this click on the icon below the camera and voice pod (it shows a picture of a video camera and a microphone)
   
   
   
   
4. Click on the icon showing the camera if you want to start the video (Note: You do not need to use a camera for UM/Adobe Connect sessions - it works just fine without this). If you want to have a picture of you up, but don't want to have the video running, then once you have turned on the video and your image is shown in the pod, click just on the small camera icon, and it will capture a still image of you but turn off the video.
5. To talk hands-free, click on the lock next to the "talk" button. Hands-free enables you to talk without having to keep holding down the "talk' button. It is useful if you are presenting and need to be able to move around, type on the computer and so on. However, it also means that others presenters cannot speak (it shuts out any other audio). Thus:
6. If you want to have more than one person talking, you should use the "hold to talk" button (the one that says "talk" with a picture of a mice). Click on this, pause about 3 seconds, and while you are still holding down the talk button, you can speak. When you are done speaking, keep holding the button for about 2 seconds, then release. Then the next person can click on their talk button, and speak. Note:
   - It is important to pause before and after speaking while still holding the button down so as not to cut off the audio.
   - Only one person can speak at a time. It will take a few minutes for you all to "get the hang" of this!
   - To enable more than one person to speak, the host will need to change the status of the attendees to make them presenters (see step 7 below)
   
   
   
   
7. Changing status of other attendees: As host, click on the icon next to the names of the attendee whose status you wish to change --> their status initially will show up as "participant" --> select "presenter" from the list of choices. This will enable them to be able to speak and also to upload content into the share pod.
   
   

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