The Center For Teaching and Learning is gearing up for an exciting new technology purchase that will greatly enhance the ability for instructors to author online presentations. It will allow users to use skills and software they already possess and have installed on their desktop computers.

The purchase in question is Macromedia Breeze, a software platform that allows the easy authoring of slide presentations using Microsoft PowerPoint on any platform (Mac or PC). They can then be published to a server (via Windows PC only at this time) that automatically converts the slide presentation to a streaming Flash movie that is playable on any platform (Mac, Windows, Linux) that has the Flash Player installed.

Macromedia touts that their ubiquitous Flash Player exists on over 95% of computers connected to the Internet across the globe today. The presentation is effectively streamed at a bandwidth that accommodates even Dialup connections, but of course will be optimized for broadband (On-campus, cable modem, or DSL) connections.

One of the more exciting possibilities for the Breeze platform is that the Player itself is capable of doing much more than just streaming the presentation. Since the player is essentially the Flash Plug-in, your PowerPoint presentation can now be much more interactive and media-rich as it is capable of doing everything the flash plug-in can do.

Macromedia is pushing for the flash platform to be a media-centric interface to the World Wide Web called Rich Internet Applications. They should be much more user-interactive than simple static web pages that one has to navigate from page to page to get information. So if you are a fan of Flash, then you may be excited to learn that you can insert any flash movie into your PowerPoint presentations. This means you can have streaming video and audio right inside your PowerPoint presentation, not to mention chat rooms, learning objects, software demonstrations, and much more.

Information on product access, demonstrations, and training sessions will be available soon.

For more information on Macromedia Breeze please visit: http://www.macromedia.com/software/breeze/?promoid=home_prod_breeze_101503

For more information on Macromedia’s Flash Player plug-in visit: http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/

For more information on Macromedia’s Rich Internet Application philosophy, please visit: http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/mx/flash/rich_internet_apps.html