Adobe Education Leaders

My friend at the Arizona Republic newspaper, who I worked with years ago when I was on the photo desk, called and said she had an immediate need for students well versed in the production of DPS apps.  I said , no problem, hung up the phone and announced we had to figure this out.

2 months ago 6 Seniors, myself and my colleague, Dr. Laurie Ralston, embarked on the path to create our first DPS app.  We quickly learned that the how to’s are scattered about and the DPS App itself is found after what feels like a treasure hunt. We began studying apps (magazines) on the iPad and jumped head first into the world of e-publishing.

These are graphic technology students, creative “techies” and design types, that have had no journalism experience. But, as I had been a  photojournalist early in my career , and used to photograph for numerous magazines, we began our approach conventionally- developing the mast-head assignments and mapping out the stories we would do. Some were in charge of photo, others in charge of video, writing and of course, we chose our managing editor, the glue to hold us together.

We are still building it ( shooting, writing, refining page design) and I am documenting our progress so as to be able to simplify the process and produce  “An Educators Best Practices Guide for DPS ”.  Hopefully this is of interest to others and I plan to return to this blog soon for our next update.

Penny Ann Dolin

Director, Technical Imaging

Polytechnic campus,Arizona State University

We are introducing video into the curriculum ( Graphic Information Technology, Arizona State University). Several students are getting up to speed on Premiere and have produced some videos for the college. ( http://vimeo.com/31663179 ) .  GIT is all about creating content and video needs to be part of the mix!   http://photo.asu.edu

Another session done! This one involved middle school. It was great to teach science and technology via photography. And as always, great fun to show off what Photoshop can do.

We just concluded out Prime the Pipeline grant and it was great. Educators and students demonstrated the photography and video they did and proudly showed their Rich Media PDFs containing their stills, video and audio. They had a great time going “deep” into Photoshop, InDesign and Acrobat Pro ! I will be posting the final video compilation of their images at http://photo.asu.edu  – check it in a few days.

And now… time for Finals….

This community event turned out better than I could have imagined. We had people sitting in the floor to hear this presentation by Rick Miller. Although I have brought in Adobe and others before, this really brought home to me how important it is to connect  students with the real industry tools they will encounter.

It’s also good for students to hear from others than their teachers from time to time. Adds cred to what we teach them : )  I am planning to do this several times a semester.

Today we take for granted ways of communication that were considered technically advanced just 20 years ago.  An understanding of word processed documents, spread sheets and basic presentation software  is considered baseline knowledge for a productive workforce and is currently utilized by K-12 educators. The current challenge is communicating effectively and  in a way that encourages retention.

Increasingly complex computational science and engineering concepts need to be communicated to those we are educating in a  rich multi sensory manner in an effort to  engage and inspire  further learning activities in these disciplines. The challenge today is that teaching materials have not kept up with current cultural approaches to gaining attention that are evident in the commercial and entertainment world.

Getting attention in today’s incredibly information rich world is akin to a competitive event. Educators need to develop media rich ways of presenting information in an effort to stimulate further interest in the areas of science and technology.

I am working on a summer seminar for K-12 educators to teach them new rich media ways to reach their students. We will focus on InDesign, Photoshop and Acrobat. We will create documents that contain  audio, video, images and forms as a way to leverage current technology to connect with their students. I look forward to sharing my results with all the AEL’s – perhaps in San Jose? : )