Using Collaborate Plan to set up your Blackboard Collaborate Session in advance of the arrival of your participants is a great way to focus on your audience and not the tools.

1. Mastering Collaborate Plan

2. What can you do?
• Share your desktop
• Turn on/off your microphone and set maximum talkers
• Create & distribute participants to breakout rooms
• Send a message to the chat window
• Send a file to your participants
• Load and play multimedia files (WMV, MPEG, MP3, QuickTime,
Flash)

3. What can you do?
• Set the poll type and send results to whiteboard
• Have participants take a quiz
• Record your session
• Go on a Web Tour
• Work with the whiteboard

4. Add a new action
• Click the gear icon
• Select Audio -> Set Maximum Talkers (4)
• Select Video -> Set Maximum Cameras (2)
• Select Recorder -> Start Recording
• Select Recorder -> Pause Recording

5. Activity - Breakout Rooms
You are creating a meeting for 10 participants and want to break them
into five groups of two for an activity. After the activity, bring them
back to the main room.
• Using the Breakout Room actions, split
your participants into groups of two.
• Create a second action for bringing them
all back to the main room.

6. Activity - Sending a File
You have a PDF that you want to send to all the participants. Load the
file into your plan and create an action when you want participants to
save the file.
• Drag the PDF from the desktop onto the file
area at the top of your plan.
• Do not convert it to a whiteboard file
• Uncheck the Prompt Participants option
• Add a Prompt to Save File action to your
plan.

7. Activity - Sharing your desktop
You want to share your desktop, which is displaying a Word document,
with all participants. After you are done, you stop sharing your screen.
• Add a Share Desktop action to your plan
from the Application Sharing menu.
• Add a Stop Sharing action to your plan.

8. Activity - Sending a Chat Message
You want all participants to visit the College of Education website.
Send the link in a chat message.
• Select Send Chat Message from the
Actions menu
• Rename the action to “Send COE link”
• Type http://coe.arizona.edu into the
message text field.

9. Working with the whiteboard

10. Activity - Loading your Whiteboard
After creating your whiteboard screens and saving them to your
computer, you need to load them into your plan. Add an action for
going to the next slide.
• Dropping the whiteboard file into your plan
will load it into your room.
• Add a Go to Next Whiteboard Screen
action.

11. Activity - Changing the Polling Type
You want to query your participants to check for understanding. Your
question is a multiple choice answer with 4 options - A-D. Publish yor
poll stats to the Whiteboard.
• Select the Polling action and choose Set
Poll Type
• In the inspector, select the A..D poll type

12. Save your plan

13. Create a Collaborate Meeting
1. Visit http://oia.arizona.edu/resource/collaborate
2. Click the button for Collaborate Scheduler
1. Log in with your NetID
2. Click Create Meeting and make up a meeting name (e.g. My Plan Workshop)
3. Set the start date to just slightly into the future
4. Set the end date to a month from now
5. Click Create & Save Links
3. Click the first link "For your use ONLY"