Adobe Education Technologies

A great training resource is worth its weight in gold whether you are a novice user or a seasoned veteran working with an application. And Adobe Acrobat 9 is one of those programs so chocked full of feature goodness that many have yet to tap into the true potential of this "Swiss Army knife of Adobe software!" So time and again I am asked for a list of great Adobe Acrobat 9 resources and I have compiled some of the best in this article. My recommendation is to copy the links below into a MS Word document, save it to your computer, and explore at your leisure.

Adobe Resources

Adobe Video Workshop
Video tutorials which cover Adobe Acrobat 9 as well as the other Adobe Creative Suite 3 applications.

Adobe Education eSeminar Series
Education-focused sessions running August and September 2008 and are also being recorded for future playback.

Adobe Education Leaders Blog
Great blog with relevant information from fellow educators - search for Acrobat topics.

Adobe Technologies in Education Blog
This blog - search for Acrobat topics.

Adobe Acrobat 9 and Accessibility
Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro and Acrobat 9 Pro Extended software provide authors with a complete set of tools to create and optimize accessible PDF files from almost any source.

Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Help Resources

LiveDocs and PDF help content.

Adobe Acrobat 9 Forum

If you have a question or technical issue, this should be your first stop.

Electronic portfolios, digital assessment, and lesson planning with Adobe Acrobat

Guides for:

• Helping students create personalized, media-rich PDF portfolios of their coursework
• Making use of the commenting and reviewing tools to digitally assess coursework
• Streamlining lesson planning using PDF forms

Adobe Acrobat 9 Technical Guides

A wonderful resource to start with if you are new to Adobe Acrobat 9.

3rd Party Resources

Adobe Acrobat User Community

One of the most comprehensive resources outside of Adobe for all things Acrobat and PDF.

Adobe Training Partners

Adobe has a network of training providers ready to deliver superior instruction through a public class or a customized onsite class at your location.

Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Classroom in a Book and Other Printed Resources

Amazon.com listing of Adobe Acrobat 9 training books. Many of these titles can be also found at your local bookstore, but usually at a steeper price.

Total Training

Subscription-based video training which really goes in-depth into Adobe Acrobat 9 features and PDF workflows.

Lynda.com

Subscription-based video training which really goes in-depth into Adobe Acrobat 9 features and PDF workflows.

Happy Learning!

Posted by Patrick Koster at 5:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Announced on 8/26/08, Adobe will be shipping updated versions of its consumer-focused image editing and video applications, Photoshop Elements 7 and Premiere Elements 7. They can be purchase separately or bundled together. You can pre-order your own copies on Adobe's website, or check with your reseller if you are buying for your school.

You may ask, "Aren't these just scaled down versions of your professional applications with all the powerful/cool stuff taken out?" Absolutely not! The Elements products have many powerful tools like; advanced selection tools, layers, effects, transistions, color keying (green screening), and more. The Elements applications are just better geared for those getting started with digital media. They include organizers for your media, images and templates that are ready to use, pre-made projects that you can easily add your photos and videos to, and more. They are are also ideal for expanding the use of media into traditional school subjects like math and science, because you can build a mock newscast or commercial on a topic without being a media pro.

You may also ask, "Are these applications just on Windows?" Pretty much, we do have Photoshop Elements 6 available for Mac, but typically Photoshop Elements releases for the Mac have lagged behind Windows releases. We also don't have Premiere Elements on the Mac. Why? With a bevy of media tools in Apple's iLife, that is included for free on their computers, the Adobe product teams believe it is better to focus on the Windows platform that does not have these tools. That said, the Elements products have a lots of great things to offer that you won't find in iLife. If you think Adobe should be making Elements products for the Mac, fill out a feature request form and let the product teams know.

Check out all the new features on the product page, and stay tuned to our blog for updates on all the cool things you can do in the classroom with the Elements twins.

Posted by Robert McDaniels at 2:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

How to Create Flash eLearning without Major Programming

You love Flash and would like to create some cool eLearning quizzes with it, but aren’t ready to dive into learning Flash’s deep ActionScript programming language for your quizzes? Well guess what, you don’t have to be an ActionScript guru to create compelling Flash eLearning! Flash has a series of little known built-in eLearning “interactions” which you can create in no time without deep programming knowledge. Other than a few simple timeline stop frame actions, everything you do is drag, drop, and typing in your courseware questions and answers; there are even built-in buttons to check for the correct answers and also allow you to move on to the next quiz.

So how does this all work?

Start (see screen shot below) by going to Flash’s’ menu bar: Window > Common Libraries > Learning Interactions. Choose one (see example below) of the following interactions: Drag and Drop, Fill in the Blank, Hot Object, Hot Spot, Multiple Choice, True or False. Follow the simple instructions in the panel on the left, type in your question, add your answers and test your movie – that’s it. If you want to use more than one quiz simply add a few timeline stop frame actions in a frame within the timeline at the end of each quiz.

Anyone using a Flash-enabled browser can see your eLearning content. You can even customize the quizzes’ interface, colors, fonts, graphics and more to meet your class or schools needs. If you want to get really fancy you can send tracking information to a server-side LMS (Learning Management System) that compiles with AICC & SCORM compliant standards. There are even powerful built in quiz templates that track cumulative results from a sequence of interactions which can then be routed to your LMS including Adobe’s very own Acrobat Connect Professional.

Basic Requirements

Your eLearning interactions will run on any computer with Flash® Player 6 or later and a Flash-enabled web browser. The eLearning content is compatible only with ActionScript 2.0, so you must specify ActionScript 2.0 when publishing your Flash documents using the eLearning interactions.

To track user data from the Flash learning interactions, you must have the following: A web server-side LMS, such as an AICC- or SCORM-compatible system, Internet Explorer 4.0 or Netscape Navigator 4.0 or later (Windows), or Netscape 4.5 or later (Macintosh). Tracking to an LMS with learning interactions does not work with Internet Explorer on the Mac.

For more information check out Flash Learning Interactions  on Adobe.com.

Posted by Richard John Jenkins at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For those using Adobe Presenter 7 (if you are not familiar with Presenter, check out our previous blog entry Presenter Cards), you may have noticed an issue with quizzes.

Let's start with what you can do. In Presenter, you can build a quiz into your project to assess the students' attainment of the information. Each question in a quiz can be weighted and count towards an overall score. Based on that score, you can allow a user to pass or fail the quiz, and by choosing a behavior, have them jump to a particular slide in the presentation or to a URL. Often the URL is either another Presenter project (moving them to the next level of material) or the URL of the project with the quiz the userfailed to make them review the material. Either way, it is useful to employ the behaviors as instant feedback and action based on the results of a quiz. See an example by clicking on the following link: Quiz Example. Attached to the quiz is the PowerPoint project file (I didn't use any audio to keep the file small. Feel free to experiment with it).

However, there is one thing to note. You need to add at least one content slide after the quiz results page so the project has time to load the URL. This is true even if you don't ever jump to that slide. In the example project there is a slide that simply displays the phrase, "Thank you." You never see it, but it's there and it needs to be for the project to correctly jump to an external URL. This problem does not occur when you create a quiz that jumps to another slide (which is alomost irrelevant anyway--it's rare in my experience that you wouldn't have at least one slide after the quiz results in such a case).

For more about Adobe Presenter, check out the Adobe Presenter 7 page on Adobe.com. Also, be aware that there is an update available for Adobe Presenter. Learn more about that in the Knowledgebase Article about the Presenter update to 7.1.

Posted by Timothy Plumer Jr at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The upcoming release of Flash Player 10 will include some changes that may require existing content to be updated to comply with stricter security rules. You will want review the upcoming security changes in Flash Player 10 to determine whether you need to modify existing content to ensure compatibility. Read about them at:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/fplayer10_security_changes.html

A practical guide to working with policy file changes in Flash Player 9 and Flash Player 10 beta is available to assist your customers with changes to the core of the permission system. Get that at:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/fplayer9-10_security.html

If you are impacted, you can download the release candidate beta of Flash Player 10 to begin testing their content changes. It is not necessary to be in the pre-release program.

http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

Posted by Timothy Plumer Jr at 6:36 AM | Permalink

Whether you need to find curricula, lessons and activities, White papers, and other resources to help you teach, Adobe Education has what you’re looking for.

For yearlong, project-based curricula that develop career and communication skills, please check out the following:
• Visual design: Foundations of design and print production.
For a year-long, project-based curriculum that develops ICT, career, and communication skills in print and graphic design using Adobe tools. You can use the Visual Design curriculum in career and technical education courses and in courses involving photography, graphic design, and English/language arts.

• Digital design: foundations of web design.
Digital Design is a year-long curriculum guide that develops ICT skills in web design and production using Adobe web tools. You can use Digital Design in career and technical education courses as well as general web design classes.

• Digital video: Foundations of video design and production.
The Digital Video project-based curriculum develops career and communication skills in video production, using Adobe tools. You can use the Digital Video curriculum in career and technical education courses as well as courses involving video use in academic courses.

• Rich Internet application (RIA) teaching resources.
These resources provide a combination of online workshop modules for self-study, course projects to apply the skills learned, and book recommendations to put together a course on RIA design and development.

For educational White Papers dealing with issues such as eLearning, digital communication, Electronic Thesis and Dissertation solutions, Visual literacy, and more, please check out Adobe in Education White Papers.

For educational articles on a variety of topics, please check out Adobe in Education Articles.

Cheers!
Rick Miller

Posted by Rick Miller at 10:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The Acrobat 9 Customization Wizard for Windows is a tool to help you deploy Acrobat 9 in an environment where you need to control the deployment of Acrobat. From our website:

"Adobe Customization Wizard 9 is a free downloadable utility designed to help IT professionals take greater control of enterprise-wide deployments of Adobe® Acrobat® 9 and Adobe Reader® 9. With it you can customize the Acrobat installer and application features prior to deployment. Providing a graphical interface to the Windows Installer for Acrobat, the Customization Wizard enables IT administrators to:

• Modify the installer via a transform file (MST file) without altering the original package (MSI file)
• Customize the look and feel of Acrobat or Reader before deployment to meet the unique needs of your user base
  

Adobe Customization Wizard 9 works with the Adobe Acrobat 9 family:

• Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended
• Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro
• Adobe Reader 9"

Get it and learn more at:

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=3993

Posted by Timothy Plumer Jr at 10:17 AM | Permalink

The Adobe Education eSeminar Series begins August 14, 2008.
These free of charge online events will cover topics such as distance and eLearning projects using Acrobat 9, creating interactive PDF files, electronic portfolios for students and educators and much more.
The presentations will be conducted by Adobe education product experts and/or Adobe Education Leaders.
This is a great opportunity to learn from the experts right from your computer.
Please click this link for details and registration.

Posted by John Schuman at 9:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Adobe Education Leader (AEL) Dave Forrester from Olympia High School in Washington State has the most unique web based business card I've ever seen an educator use, and he made it entirely with Adobe's Presenter 7 software - a simple and inexpensive Power Point plug-in.

Dave also uses Adobe's Acrobat Connect Pro to share his Connect Card with his education associates and colleagues around the globe but do note, you don't even have to have an Acrobat Connect Pro account to host your Connect Card; a link to the actual file will do just fine since your card is simply a .SWF file (Adobe Flash).

Dave's Connect Card has a picture of Dave, email link, his bio, a streaming audio overview, his contact information, his school's URL, several blog links, Adobe, web, training resources and much more.

To learn more about Adobe Presenter 7, Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro, and our awesome AELs (Adobe Education Leaders program) including Dave Forrester, click on any of the links here. To see an example of my Connect Card, check it out here.

Warmest,

Richard John Jenkins

Posted by Richard John Jenkins at 7:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

adobe tools cheat sheets

How many times have you wished you could have a quick and simple way right at your finger tips to remember all of the top menus, palettes, features, and keyboard shortcuts for your favorite Adobe tools? If you're like me you may have dozens of multicolored post it notes with scribbles of many of your time saving keyboard short cuts littering your desk, monitor and keyboard. Wouldn't it be nice if you had one tidy place for all of these and well organized? Well now you can and they're free!

Custom Guide Inc. offers dozens of free "Cheat Sheets" in .PDF format on several popular software companies' tools including Adobe's tools. These printable quick references guides (perfect for laminating) cover: Photoshop, Acrobat, Fireworks, Flash, Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Premiere Elements.

If you print these cool reference guides out on heavy double sided stock paper and then laminate them (perfect for resisting my endless coffee spill mishaps) they are the perfect indestructible companion to help you get your Adobe tools job done a lot faster by having many workspace reminders and keyboard short cuts right at your finger tips.

Check them out here: http://cheatsheet.customguide.com/

Warmest,

Richard John Jenkins

Posted by Richard John Jenkins at 11:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)