The school district of Palm Beach Florida places a heavy emphasis on ensuring that all its staff and faculty—from principals and teachers to coaches and media specialists—are able to collaborate on a regular basis. But with a district numbering about 12,000 teachers and 650 administrators, who serve 170,000 students across 162 schools spread over an area about the size of Rhode Island, getting everyone to meet seems nearly impossible, not to mention costly.

At least it used to. That’s all changed since Kim Cavanaugh, education technology specialist for the district, rolled out the Macromedia Breeze Web communications system from Adobe Systems, allowing Palm Beach County educators to meet more often without having to leave their schools.

The technology enables schools and districts to deliver online communications and training to anyone who has access to a computer loaded with the Macromedia Flash Player. Specifically, the district uses Breeze Meeting, installed on a Dell dual-processor server in the district’s data center, for online meetings and training. The district also has multiple copies of Breeze Presenter installed on classroom computers so teachers can use their accounts to publish student presentations onto the district server.

Palm Beach County is in its first year of implementing the Breeze solutions—conducting training with district staff, school administrators, and teachers, and raising awareness of what the software can do. The district has also created Palm Breeze Café, a weekly Webcast in which members of the district’s ed-tech team discuss with teachers the different uses of common technology tools, such as blogs and Google. At many Palm Beach schools, media specialists have even set up projectors to enhance after-school training sessions.

Since launching the Web conferencing solution, the district has continued to find new uses for the Breeze technology. For instance, a Palm Beach elementary school class recently used Breeze to receive a lesson on the solar eclipse from its teacher, who was in Turkey viewing the eclipse. Other international collaborations include an upcoming project in environmental studies in which schools in the district will collaborate with schools in Costa Rica to examine environmental problems and concerns the two areas share.

They see many other different uses for online meetings developing as they train staff and roll out accounts. For instance, they have members of their construction services department meeting with architects and builders to discuss school construction, the applications are endless.