Acro bytes by Kurt Foss

With another school year getting underway in many locales, both educators and students will be looking for new ways to harness technology to enhance the learning process. In other aspects of school management — from K-12 to colleges and universities — administrators are also continually on the lookout for ways to streamline processes with changing technological solutions. Among those being widely adopted at all levels are Acrobat and PDF, as can be verified by browsing the assorted case studies in the Education area of Adobe.com.

Previously we profiled Ali Hanyaloglu of Adobe Systems, the company’s Technical Evangelist for Acrobat in Education, as someone who plays a key role in helping to promote the use of Acrobat in and around the classroom environment. But there’s another person outside the company, as Ali was quick to note and credit, whose efforts have contributed significantly to the same cause.

Steve Adler says he first discovered Acrobat about 10 years ago when working as a high school physics teacher in the Northern Valley Regional High School District in New Jersey. By 1997 — Acrobat 3.0 era — Adler says he “had students take existing presentations and design a functional interface and add web content and rich media.” There are some today who still consider PDF as suitable only for to-be-printed documents, so it’s obvious Adler was among the minority who grasped the potential early on.

Since then, he has worked with teachers, administrators and students at his
high school and with others around the country. In addition, he offers training and consulting in the publishing, legal, engineering and insurance markets for companies in the New York area. Adler also teaches a curriculum design course with Acrobat at Stanford University’s Digital Media Academy each summer.

At his school, Adler helped develop an Acrobat-based teaching tool that utilizes audio commenting with PDF files for instruction and assessment. “Users of Reader-enabled commenting can participate,” he says, “and teachers and students can exchange information electronically. It’s great for portfolio assessment. In addition, with the proper language kit installed, Acrobat can serve as a very efficient, low-cost language lab. Students can read, speak and type in just about any language. The same is true with music and recitals. Students can listen to audio comments of instrumental recordings and respond back in a efficient manner using the free Reader.”

Probably his most visible contribution to the educational community is the Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Curriculum Guide, available for download by educators on Adobe.com. It’s a series of topical lessons that explore the key features of Acrobat. It includes interactive exercises, based on related resource and project files.

“The Acrobat Curriculum guide evolved as I saw some key needs for the
teaching and understanding of Acrobat,” Adler says. “It consists of about 12 lessons with 40 activities that allow teachers to teach appropriate areas and others to teach themselves. The assets provided make it easy to get started and there are ideas for taking each lesson further.”

The guide is intended for certified educators to use in educational institutions. Non-educators and other companies are able to license it for a nominal fee. According to Adler, it has been adopted by some large organizations across the world for training their staff. More information is available at Adler’s Guide Educational Systems site. He also sells an eight-hour Acrobat 7 training video featuring 145 lessons, available from the Virtual Training Company.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 7th, 2006 at 3:24 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.