Adobe Education Leaders

Google is showing off an interesting opensource collection in wave.google.com

Adobe just released free exam study guides to prepare students and educators for the new Adobe Associate Certifications. In addition, Adobe Press has released three new offerings in the Learn by Video series.
The free exam study guides include:
- Web Communication using Adobe Dreamweaver CS4
- Rich Media Communication using Adobe Flash CS4
- Visual Communication using Adobe Photoshop CS4
Versions for the older CS3 are also available.
The Learn by Video series includes:
- Learn Adobe Photoshop CS4 by Video: Core Training in Visual Communication
- Learn Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 by Video: Core Training in Web Communication
- Learn Adobe Flash CS4 Professional by Video: Core Training in Rich Media Communication
See details>

School Counselors are charged with developing programs in three main domains for students. These three main domains are academic, college/career, and personal/social. I would like to bring everyone’s attention to The Why Try Organization. They are leaders in bringing systemic and sustainable student motivational programs into schools to address dropout prevention, violence prevention, drug and alcohol prevention, truancy reduction, and increase academic success for all students. The WhyTry Program is simple, hands-on and a visual curriculum which helps youth overcome and proves their resiliency. Christian Moore, M.S.W is the founder of the program, growing up in Washington, D.C. area within a family of twelve children. By an early age, Christian had been diagnosed with Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder, conduct disorder, and severe learning disabilities. Today, Christian speaks at a large number of conferences and events each year inspiring educators and students to make their lives better. The School Counselors use this program at my high school and we have seen dramatic results with helping our students in difficult situations. So check out their website and resources!
The Why Try Organization
Christian Moore, Founder of the Why Try Organization

My Connect Card
My Connect Room
Profile

“As the dark clouds of the economy envelope the marketing world, many wonder if digital marketing may be a ray of sunshine in the gloom. To find out, the Society of Digital Agencies conducted a broad survey of traditional and digital agencies as well as brands, digital vendors and even freelance digital experts.”
Most interesting for me is page 20 of the report:

Go, Flash!
…why is Java grouped together with JavaScript? Eh?
Grab the full report or visit SoDA.

Adobe took the time and listened to a few Adobe Education Leaders, Adobe Connect Pro Product Experts, and other points-of-view and developed a resource center dedicated to the building and support of Online Professional Development using the Acrobat Family of advanced software tools. The Resource Center uses excellent visuals and work flow strategies to develop and deploy a variety of scalable professional development models, which can be distributed over the web. Whether you need to create and distribute on-demand professional development content, deliver live professional development sessions, or deliver a hybrid of both models, you’ll find great help and resources within this area on Adobe’s website.

Professional Development Resources Link
Professional Development Models

My Profile

The all new Ask Mr. Z Blog on SchoolTube.com is intended for educational users of Adobe Visual Communicator. Hosted by Adobe Education Leader & Community Expert Rob Zdrojewski, the video episodes and blog articles are based on user questions about creating school TV newscasts and class video projects across the curriculum. New episodes are released each month. Take a look and see if you have a question to Ask Mr. Z!
Episode 4- Preparing The Morning Newscast

http://blogs.schooltube.com/robz/
Have a question or show suggestion? Ask Mr. Z HERE

http://fcit.usf.edu/
Established in 1982, the Florida Center for Instructional Technology (FCIT) has been a leader in working with educators to integrate technology into the curriculum. With its location in the College of Education at the University of South Florida, Tampa, FCIT is available to assist over 1,200 pre-service teachers who graduate from USF each year as well as thousands of in-service teachers in Florida. With funding from the Florida Department of Education, Office of Instructional Technology, FCIT provides many instructional resources for Florida’s teachers and students.
FCIT’s award-winning resource and training websites receive over one million hits per school day.
msweeney@coedu.usf.edu

SchoolTVMadeEasy.com is pleased to present a unique school TV workshop opportunity this summer with Adobe’s Visual Communicator software.
Learn how to produce school TV news shows and class video projects
at Amherst Middle School’s state-of-the-art “Green Screen” TV studio near Buffalo, NY.
http://www.AmherstTechTV.org
July 14-15
July 24-25
August 4-5
Join Amherst Middle Technology teacher and Adobe K-12 Education Leader Mr. Rob Zdrojewski for an inside look at how Amherst Middle School produces live school news shows and classroom video projects using Adobe Visual Communicator 3. Participants will learn how to begin or improve school TV news programs on any size budget and create video productions that have the professional look of network TV.
More details at our site for Visual Communicator users:
<a href="http://http://www.SchoolTVmadeEasy.com“>http://www.SchoolTVmadeEasy.com
Learn more about Amherst Middle School’s award winning Tech TV program at:
http://www.AmherstTechTV.org

1.Tell a story.
Instead of simply burning a DVD of your kid’s soccer game (BORING) capture the highlights from the entire season and create a documentary. The NFL does a great job at this. They are able to take snippets of video throughout the season, add narration and music, and turn it into a compelling story. Of course having a voice like John Facenda (the voice of NFL Films) certainly helps.
2.Don’t Focus Only on the Positive
Success is great! Heck, who doesn’t like to succeed? However, some of the best selling NFL videos document football follies! Try incorporating a bit of life’s struggles into your videos; failure is often times waaaaay more interesting than success (at least on video).
3.Tell the “Rest of the Story”
Senior Jason McElwain scored 20 points for his high school basketball team. Big deal…that is until you hear the rest of the story. Jason was the team’s manager, not a player, and is autistic. His coach, Jim Johnson decided to add Jason to the roster for the last game of the season, entitling Jason to a basketball jersey and hopefully some play time. Jason went on to score twenty points in four minutes, and won his way into the hearts of sports fans across the nation. Without the details…you have no emotion!
- see the video on YouTube
4.Take the Road Less Traveled
My cousin invited me to watch a video of his honeymoon in San Francisco. I rolled my eyes, sighed, and prepared myself for home video boredom. It turns out that Matt and Julie are a bit more adventurous than your average honeymooners. At each location they would walk up to the locals and interview them (think Jay Leno’s “Man on the Street”). The best part of the tape documented Matt finagling a turn on a street performer’s drum set. It was both funny and interesting. It didn’t hurt that they spent a bit of time in post production cutting out the boring parts, adding music, and highlighting the interesting stuff.

5.Add Humor
I taught middle school and junior high science for six years. Hands down the best instructional videos were those starring Bill Nye the Science Guy. He seemed to have a short 20 minute, highly engaging video for just about every topic I taught. He incorporated humor and wacky (but relevant) experiments into every episode. The students and I loved Bill Nye.
So there you have it. My five tips for combating movie mediocrity. Anybody else care to share?

At the recent Adobe Ed. Leaders camp I was introduced, via a colleague, to a wonderful application put out by Adobe called Kuler, http://kuler.adobe.com/.
Not being a graphic artist by any stretch of the term artistic I was mildly curious but not whole-heartedly ready to add the Kuler application to my repertoire of technology related tools and software. I made a note of the application in my “things that might interest me” notebook where I have dozens of useful tech tools and tips that I have collected but not adopted as a tool of my own.
Recently I spent some time with the Kuler application, reading the tutorials and the many useful web links Adobe has provided on color theory. Well I must say, after reading these web links, that I understand the importance and need for thinking about color. And Kuler makes it so easy. Select any of the rules of color such as analogous, complimentary or triad and then use these principles to easily select five colors that you could use in a website, print publication or DVD without worrying about color coordination or appearance. You could copy the hex values from the Kuler app or use your Adobe ID to login, save your color combinations as a palette and download them to Adobe programs. I teach technology to middle school students and will now insist that all students use Kuler before beginning any multimedia project. Along my excursion I discovered two other interesting sites. One site http://www.mariaclaudiacortes.com/colors/Colors.html contains a movie about communicating with color and the message colors transmit. The second site http://www.colourlovers.com/ contains collections of color combinations uploaded by color enthusiasts, similar to Adobe’s Kuler, that can be downloaded to Adobe products as color palettes.
I give Kuler two thumbs up.