Adobe Education Technologies

I have recently downloaded the Adobe BrowserLab extension for Dreamweaver at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/browserlab/. I like the idea of being able to test how the CSS will render on different browsers/platforms without having to have all these browsers and versions be installed on my machine. One feature I particularly like is the ability to display not just a side-by-side comparison of the page render on 2 different browsers, but to display the 2 renders on top of each other as onion skins. It is amazing that sometimes 2 CSS renderings may seem to look identical on different browsers. Yet when put on top of each other, the pixel shift becomes apparent.

If you are Dreamweaver users, I would highly recommend you download the extension and give this a try. It is free trial for now. Hope yo would like it.

As part of Adobe's ongoing commitment to sustainable practices and utilizing green technologies to offset power usage, Adobe recently installed 20 Windspire® wind turbines to generate renewable energy through the "wind tunnel" that exists between Adobe's three downtown San Jose towers.

The Windspire® wind turbines were manufactured by Mariah Power of Reno, Nevada.

Link to the story in the San Jose Mercury News.

Yes. Yes we do say. We here at the Adobe Education Technologies blog love labs. Whenever we feel like facing a new challange and playing with some cool, new tools, we drift on over the Adobe Labs (link to Adobe Labs) and check it out. A new tool we found there got us very excited, so we wanted to share it with you.

Adobe WorkflowLab (beta)

It can be used for planning out project tasks and overall workflow and organize thoughts for project post-mortems or to learn about best practices using built-in workflow starting points. Go grab it for yourself and have a look (link to the WorkflowLab beta)

Read on for more details. . .

Imagine you're a Science or Marine Biology classroom teacher who wants to help your students learn about Orca Killer Whales. You assign your students a project to do some research about Orcas on the web, write up a paper or two about the whales, and best of all since your high school is located not far from the Pacific ocean in the North West area of our country you arrange a fun and exciting field trip.Your students and you board a ocean worthy vessel. Your students take tons of photos and videos of actual killer whales with their digital video & still cameras in their natural habitat to use in their projects.

Now imagine you're back in your classroom after the field trip with your excited students; all your students have these great photos & movies of Orcas on all kinds of cameras including photos & videos they've taken with their camera equipped mobile phones or PDAs. Your students are giddy as heck to share their photos & whale movies with each other as well as use the images for their Orca projects. You've asked them to create multimedia slideshows of the whale photos, edit their movies, copy and paste the images into their papers and maybe even post a few images on a web page or two as part of an online gallery.

If you're like me you may be thinking (or in my case complaining!) what I would have to do next is to get all the photos & videos put in one place (part of a workflow) so the kids could see all the pics & movies all together. I would then have to collect all those digital camera's SD cards, copy and paste all of the kid's photos/videos off of each card on to one computer, or I could plug one end of a USB cable into each camera and the other end into my computer and transfer all the photos/videos through the cable to one folder on my desktop - either way a very, very time consuming pain in the butt chore!

Today's guest blogger is professional commercial photographer Dave Montizambert (bio below).

Here's a lens trick, based on a simple but often over looked principle, that you can add to your bag of tricks: create a long lens compressed look with a short lens.