Creating and Managing Digital Portfolios Using Adobe Acrobat by Allanah King

These are my notes from Allanah King‘s presentation “Creating and Managing Digital Portfolios Using Adobe Acrobat” at Learning@School 09 today in Rotorua, New Zealand. Allanah on Twitter: http://twitter.com/AllanahK. MY THOUGHTS AND COMMENTS ARE IN ALL CAPS.

4 options to sabotage Wes’ keynote tomorrow
– when you hear the terms “pedagogy” or “digital native” get up and whoop!
– big boxes will be by the stage, shortly after the keynote starts they will get up and leave
– 2 minutes before the keynote: the video “Dancing Man” will go on the big screen
– then we can all dance to Matt’s video

Allanah King’s Collaborative Dancing project (on YouTube)

900 teachers and kids around the world are joining in

My school: 5 teachers, about 100 kids, 2005 started ICT cluster group, at that stage I had a computer at home for email
– and Google searches!
– went to a workshop on learning management systems, put us in buzz groups and took a photo, in the time it took for us to come back he’d used Blogger to put our photo on the Internet

I can do this sort of thing well
– now I working with kids to help them discover what they do well

THIS IS WHAT SIR KEN ROBINSON IS TALKING ABOUT IN HIS BOOK “THE ELEMENT”

Then connected with a teacher in Wales
– through audio podcasting
– 12 hour time delay makes things difficult
– worked things out very early or late
– blogging together

Woman in New York wanted to learn about web 2
– last week of school for us
– videoing water going down the toilet in the northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere

A few years ago, someone shared a link to becoming an Adobe Educator
– got to go to Australia for several days, there are 3 of us from NZ
– last year was in SF, I just had to pay airfare
– lots was over my head, it can be very good to be with people in over your head tho
– free tablet from Wacom, free copy of Adobe CS4 for me
– this is where I come from

We are moving to a digital portfolio at school
– we want it to be accessible
– so we are going to PDF format, with a free reader you can use it with any platform

Then I found out if you buy Adobe Acrobat Pro you can do very clever things with your PDFs
– normally PDFs are just text
– but with the Pro version, you can embed videos in it

Talk with a neighbor with your experiences with using PDFs

You know as an Apple user life is easy, you know on the dark side of the force things are more difficult… 🙂

Office 2007 has free download for PDF creator, but it is not a true PDF, it is a Microsoft XPS format so as soon as you start talking about embedding video that is broken with the Office exporter
– CutePDF is a Windows-based

Man at Edsoft at the conference says $115 for full Adobe Acrobat version in NZ

After opening PDF in Acrobat
– click on Multimedia tab at the top for 3D tool, Flash tool, Sound tool, Video tool
– example doing video: select a movie, Acrobat converts it to Flash format and embeds it
– example inserting mp3 audio file (makes an embedded audio player on the document

My latest and greatest find for $80 – Cytek makes this
– EZspeak
– it is yellow and fun
– you can record

Acrobat has an option to create a PDF from a webpage
– you can actually save a website as a PDF, if it is a big website it can take a long time
– very cool for my students to be able to take a snapshot of their websites/blogs and add that to their learning portfolio

THIS IS LIKE WEB WHACKER USED TO BE: IT HAS AN OPTION TO CAPTURE MULTIPLE LEVELS
– THIS IS A GREAT WAY TO ADDRESS THE CONCERN THAT CERTAIN WEBSITES WHICH CONTAIN STUDENT INFORMATION MAY NOT STAY/REMAIN

Features I use of Adobe Pro
– create from website
– add comments
– add multimedia

Next step is the digital portfolio side of things

At Appleby School we are now using Google Apps for our domain
– so we log into Google by logging in with our school email accounts

Showing how you can upload a PDF and share it via Google Docs
– embedded videos in PDFs only play after you download them, they don’t play directly in the browser as you look at the document in Google Docs

We are a five teacher school so we don’t have a lot of extra money for commercial solutions, we are saving only to Google Docs at this point for many things

THIS WORK IS REALLY GOOD. IT REMINDS ME OF THE NEED FOR AN INTEGRATED LEARNING MANAGEMENT SOLUTION WHICH WILL SHOW A TIMELINE OF WORK. RECOVERY.GOV IS A DRUPAL-BASED SITE THAT IS USING AN OPEN SOURCE TIMELINE TOOL THAT HAS SOME PROMISE IN THIS REGARD. I THINK USING ACROBAT PRO IN THIS WAY IS GREAT, BUT THIS IS A TOOL FOR CREATING DIGITAL ARTIFACTS. GOOGLE DOCS DOES NOT AGGREGATE CONTENT AND ENABLE A TIMELINE-BASED PORTAL FOR CONTENT. www.allofme.com IS A WEBSITE THAT CREATES A TIMELINE-BASED VIEW OF PUBLISHED CONTENT. THIS IDEA NEEDS TO BE INTEGRATED INTO A WEB 2 PORTFOLIO SOLUTION.

http://fairfieldintermediate.wetpaint.com IS AN ELECTRONIC PORTFOLIO-CLASS WIKI WHICH ERIN FREEMAN HAS CREATED AND USING USING WITH HER YEAR 6-8 AGE STUDENTS. HER CLASS BLOG IS ON http://ffis.blogspot.com. I AM GOING TO TRY AND GO TO HER SESSION THIS AFTERNOON.

GREAT JOB ALLANAH!!! 🙂

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learningatschool, Learning@School09, L@S09, #lats09, technology, learning, portfolio, assess, pdf, newzealand

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