August 21, 2009
Back to School with Buzzword, Part 1.
Posted by Michelle Cardinal at 8:26 AM
As a student at City College in San Francisco over the summer, I used Buzzword to complete my class essays. I have to confess that it's a given that I would, since I'm also Community Manager for Acrobat.com. As many of us students will be returning to class in the coming weeks, I want to encourage you all to give Buzzword a try. What I found is that Buzzword so easy to use and elegant, it quite literally makes working on assignments more fun.
For instance, when approaching a topic, I have a jumbled buzz of ideas in my head that I want to capture, and translating the thoughts into a coherent report is easier with Buzzword. Buzzword's comment feature allows me to jump to the side of the current sentence to add a note to myself - a nice place holder to remind me to look up a fact or research an example - without interrupting the flow of the writing. Here's a screenshot of what I mean:
After reading the rough draft, the comment feature also comes in handy for additional thoughts such as what I need to add, where it's best to add it, what I should consider deleting, and what I need to think about some more before committing it in my report. It's a much quicker - and also more tree friendly - process vs. printing out a copy and then hand writing comments.
When it is time to print out the final copy, what you see in Buzzword is what you get on the printed page, which is not always the case with other word processors. And it's important when I'm running up against a deadline and the essay must be a certain length - I know exactly where I'm at on the page. Since the documents are stored online, I'll never have to use the "I'm sorry Professor, the dog ate my laptop!" excuse. As I move forward with school, I'll always have a record of any work completed using Buzzword... it may or may not be useful, but certainly nice to know it's there.
As Community Manager for Acrobat.com, I also hear from other students about how Buzzword improves their experiences. Varun Buxi, an MBA student, says: "Adobe Buzzword makes it easy to combine documents and get all the details right, then print the piece and hand it to the professor, complete with a high-quality layout. With Buzzword, I can produce better quality work." You can read more about why Varun loves Buzzword here.
On the flip side, I don't want to leave out the other part of the learning equation - teachers! In my next blog post, I'll explain Buzzword's collaboration features in detail, and why teachers are using this unique tool for improved classroom dynamics and interaction.
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