Talk about grass roots! Teachers often find themselves being the ones not only educating our children, but also educating each other in how to use all the different applications, systems, computers that are needed to run a school and a school district.
I recently had the pleasure of conducting an Acrobat workshop with an Education Service Center in Texas. This is a state that "gets it" when it comes to education and technology. Texas gets a lot of things, especially when it comes to food!
During the workshop I met a teacher who had taken on the responsibility of putting together documentation on how to use the core systems of the school: email, SIS, and so on.
Although she understood the power of Adobe PDF, she also realized the power that Acrobat gave in creating and sharing a single electronic binder of instructions, guidelines and policies that many teachers and staff contributed to, including herself. Everybody uses different applications on different operating systems to create the content. By creating a single PDF from multiple ones that she received, with hyperlinks, bookmarks and screen capture videos, she is now able to share the knowledge, online and in print, with anyone in the ISD (Independent School District) from any machine on the network.
The downside is that because her work has been received so well, she's been asked to provide other types of documentation for the library, database systems, etc.
And I gave her some homework to find out how to secure her PDFs from changes...