Adobe Education Technologies

We here at the Adobe Education Technologies blog are in full Holiday swing! To celebrate this season of giving, we wanted to share with you a great Connect Professional resource that Adobe offers to our Connect customers, the Connect Pro Resource Center. This is a web site with a variety of excellent resources for you to get the most from your online class, meeting, presentation, or portal built with Adobe Acrobat Connect.

Read on . . .

Acrobat Connect Professional will stretch your dollar.

First, as we face the many challenges of tighter budgets and shrinking resources, using a web conferencing tool can help you get the most from those dollars. Adobe offers Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional, a Flash-based tool for online collaboration, presentations, and classes that is rapidly becoming a favorite among educators for its flexibility and power. You can learn more about others who are using it at the Acrobat Connect Professional site on Adobe.com.

However, if you are working with Connect Professional, you may want to take your meetings a step further. If so, then we have the site for you. The Connect Professional Resource Center is a web site devoted to helping you to be more successful when using Connect. Among the the things you'll find:

• A large number of resources (99+)
• A variety to types of materials including downloadable PDFs, HTML Articles, FLVs, and self-running Captivate demos and Presenter Presentations to allow users to learn in the way that makes the most sense to them
• Content that is tailored for users of all levels from Beginners to Power Users that is presented by topic so users can quickly and easily find the right content to meet their needs
• A special new section for rollout tools where administrators and product evangelists can download items such as the newly released Connect Pro Intranet Portal Template Kit or starter PowerPoint decks to train users on how to use Connect Pro via Instructor-led Training, or better yet, via Connect Pro
• The site also includes a tie in to our community site ConnectUsers.com and the recently launched Best Practices User Group

Go ahead, check it out, and consider these resources our gift you. Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or just enjoy some well-deserved rest and time with the one's you love, we here at the Adobe Education Technologies blog wish you the all best!

Posted by Timothy Plumer Jr at 12:00 PM | Permalink

If you’re like me you might be spending way, way too much time glued to your computer screen learning about Adobe’s tools and technologies. To give you an idea how much time I sit on my buns here in my home office learning our cool tools, I go out and purchase a new home-office chair each year since I wear and tear the heck out of them from Adobe tool learning overuse! So if you haven’t seen the sun or the moon in a few months, or noticed your kids have grown three inches since the last time you saw them you might want to check out another cool way to learn about Adobe tools and that is attending or even starting your very own Adobe User Group.

Adobe User Group meetings take place world-wide each month and are a fantastic place to not only learn about our tools they are also a great place to meet like-minded souls “in-person” who are interested in the same Adobe tools and technologies you’re interested in. They’re also a super place to locate freelancers if you’re interested in say hiring someone to add some Flash to your Dreamweaver site or optimize a ton of .JPG images with Photoshop. The reverse is also true. Many times attendees at Adobe User Groups are freelancers or contractors and they let other attendees know they are available for freelance work if they are looking for a job or project.

Over a decade ago I started a user group in Los Angeles, CA called the Macromedia (acquired by Adobe a few years back) Director User Group. I mentioned the idea of starting a user group to a follow Director enthusiast over coffee one day and we decided to go for it and start one. Within three months we had a mailing list of over three hundred people who signed up for it and our monthly meetings drew on average around sixty attendees every month. I hosted the meeting and had a blast running it for over three years including inviting guest speakers to come and share with the group the latest and greatest Macromedia tools.

One of my all-time favorite meetings was when I invited a Macromedia evangelist, Ralph Mittman to come speak to our group about some silly new tool called “Flash” I had heard about. I remember well all of us scratching our heads during Ralph’s demonstration and wondering why the heck Macromedia purchased this oddball tool (formally called “Future Splash”) and what on earth we’d use it for? Little did we know or foresee that this so-called silly tool would totally usurp Macromedia Director and revolutionize the web within a few short years.

All of us sitting there ended up being the early adopters of Flash and we most likely would not have gotten into it so early if we hadn’t had Ralph come and share with us what it was and how it worked. Bottom line, user groups are many times where revolutionary technologies are first shown to people before they become widely known to the general public.

How do locate or start an Adobe User Group in your area? Simple. Check out the Adobe User Group page here and do a search for one in your area, or sign up to start one if one is not present.

Of special note to educators most schools are more than happy to make an empty classroom or auditorium available once a month to host a user group meeting.

Do keep in mind as a host of a group you will be called upon to manage a mailing list, create a web site for the group, and get the word out about your meetings and more. While running a group can be super fun to do you’ll for sure want to be realistic about budgeting time each month to market, manage and host your groups meetings. A good rule of thumb is to email host of successful current Adobe User Groups and learn firsthand the best practices of starting and running one.

Richard John Jenkins

Posted by Richard John Jenkins at 12:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As an employee of Adobe I sometimes take for granted that educators who are using Adobe tools and technologies know all about our great learning resources we offer such as: live online Acrobat Connect Pro tutorials, pre-recorded webinars, insightful white papers, the many excellent Adobe blogs and much more. One of my all time favorite learning resources to share with educators however is our incredible Adobe TV resource; and even better as of last week Adobe TV has added an Education channel!

So what exactly is Adobe TV? Read on in my Adobe Education Technologies Blog post for today to learn all about it!

Adobe TV is an online video resource dedicated to expert insight and inspiration into Adobe’s many tools and technologies. Adobe TV offers tips, tricks, innovative techniques and behind-the-scenes tours of all things Adobe delivered by way of streaming video right to your desktop by top Adobe trainers, partners and more.

Above is a screen shot of the current Adobe TV Home Page.

Many of the presenters on Adobe TV are world renowned personalities such as whacky Russell Brown who is recognized as a Photoshop Guru. Greg Rewis (previously from Macromedia Inc. which was acquired by Adobe) is well known for his excellent web background and deep knowledge about Fireworks, Flash and Dreamweaver. Want to know more about Adobe Bridge? Then check out the super video called The Complete Picture by Julieanne Kost, or Flash in a Flash by John Schuman. You can even tune into an Adobe TV show called “After Hours at Adobe” which profiles many Adobe employees including sneak peeks into the amazing things they’re working on and doing with Adobe tools and technologies – and did I mention that all of these great videos are free?

All the video episodes on Adobe TV can be searched by keywords, titles, star ratings, and presenter names including sorting by way of most popular and highest rated. You can even save your favorite episodes, subscribe to them or download them to your desktop for later viewing. A really cool aspect of Adobe TV is you can embed your favorite channel or video into your very own web pages or blog in up to three different size formats; as an example check out the learning Adobe Bridge CS4 video below I embedded into this very blog post.

Above is an example of an embedded Adobe TV video in this blog -very easy to add to your very own!

Currently there are nine Adobe TV channels: Acrobat, Max, Photographers, Designers, Video Professionals, Developers, How To, and the newest, Education. More channels are planned for the near future so check back often to see what gets added. Also there are product specific categories such as: Flash, Dreamweaver, Soundbooth, Premiere Pro and many more.

So what do you need to view Adobe TV video content? Pretty darn simple! All you need is the free Adobe Flash Player 9 or the free Adobe Media Player, both of which can be downloaded on Adobe’s home page.

Nothing beats free learning so check out Adobe TV today and the new Education Channel and share with your education associates and students.

Happy Adobe TV learning!

Richard John Jenkins

Posted by Richard John Jenkins at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

In Part 1 of Flash CS4: Motions Preset panel, I introduced the Motion Presets panel and demonstrated how it allows you to save as a preset your animation and apply it to an object on the Stage. I also pointed out that we’ve provided a library of prebuilt animations that you can preview before applying.

Well, how about if you want to preview your custom preset? Fortunately Flash CS4 allows you to do precisely that, and in this post I'll outline the steps.

Creating a preview for your custom preset:

In just four steps you can easily create a preview for your custom motion preset.

First, create your tweened animation and (from the Motions Preset panel) save it as a custom preset.
Second, create a FLA file that contains only a demonstration of the tween. Save the FLA with the exact same name as the custom preset.
Third, create a SWF file from the FLA file with the Publish command.
Fourth, place the SWF file in the same directory as the saved custom motion preset XML file. These files are stored in the following directories:

Windows: \Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Adobe\Flash CS4\\Configuration\Motion Presets\

Macintosh: /Users//Library/Application Support/Adobe/Flash CS4//Configuration/Motion Presets/

Now when you select your custom preset the preview will display.

Additional resources:
Lee Brimelow, Platform Evangelist at Adobe, recently posted on this very topic. Lee also has a video that you should check out.

Cheers!

Posted by Rick Miller at 10:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hey folks. The people in the Creative Suite marketing unit have completed the CS4 Print Guide. This is a good, solid resource to help you understand how to successfully print from the CS4 applications (or at least create file that will print). We at the Adobe Education Technologies blog thought you might want to give it a look-see. Check it out by following this link: Link to the CS4 Print Guide.

Posted by Timothy Plumer Jr at 5:54 AM | Permalink

So, you may have heard about metadata and wondered what the fuss is about. Well, it's certainly useful stuff. If you use Bridge or a search engine, you can benefit from it. However, that's not the topic of this post. This post is about the exact opposite--getting *rid* if metadata (and why you may want to) Read on. . .
First off, let me restate that I really do LIKE metadata. If you use it (such as keywords, titles, and the like) you can more quickly organize and locate files you care about. However, I was a presentation a few weeks ago, and I was challenged on the issue. The person I spoke to had a good point. He was talking about PDF files and the fact that a PDF may give away some secrets if the metadata on board contains something of a private nature, like a person's name who would otherwise prefer to be left anonymous. His concern was with the PDF makers in Word that automatically add metadata to a PDF from the Word file when you convert to PDF. So, I decided to make a little recording for you. Follow this link to that recording and enjoy!

Posted by Timothy Plumer Jr at 11:28 AM | Permalink