Adobe for School Projects
updated: February 22, 2011
Adobe Systems' Digital School Collection software suite offers powerful options for classroom instruction and student involvement. You can engage students in projects designed to reinforce learning in subject areas from languages to math and history to science, all through a multidisciplinary exercise in creativity. From kindergarten through high school, Adobe software can help you tie graphics skills together with other subject matter and let your students show off what they have learned in front of classmates and for broader audiences in the community at large.
You and your students can use Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 to create photomontages of significant figures in a history lesson, add pictures of the actors to the program for a school play, create a photo book that shows pictorial examples of vocabulary words or add visual reinforcement to almost any essential concept. Adobe Systems provides prototype lessons complete with guides and lesson plans. Use these examples as is, customize them for your class or use them as the inspiration for your own lesson materials.Add movie-making magic to your lesson plans with Adobe Premiere Elements 9. Your students can create a time-lapse video showing germination of a seed or accumulation of snow through a window, write and stage a short movie featuring puppets as actors in a history lesson brought to life, dramatize part of a play or create their own video opinion essays expressing their reactions to a lesson in civics. If sample lessons don't give you an idea for your classroom, join the Adobe Education Exchange and share ideas with other teachers and administrators.Podcasts add a new level of engagement to classroom projects and activities, especially as part of the Web presence for your class or school. Adobe Soundbooth CS5 can help your students create and edit everything from audio essays to music experiments and share them with other classes, family members and the community. Support foreign language instruction with student-generated tools, create oral histories featuring interesting stories from fellow students and faculty or edit recordings to share with a sister school in another country.If you are considering adding Internet-based materials to existing lessons or expanding teaching materials to include Web-based resources, Adobe Contribute CS5 provides a simple, easy-to-use application for collaborative design and production of website materials. Your class can create galleries of student artwork, produce pages featuring the podcasts and movies you make or create link pages documenting research for a class project. This WYSIWYG editing software combines creation and review with the tools necessary to put your HTML-based pages on your website and manage your site as it grows.Reduce your school's carbon footprint by implementing digital forms for many classroom and online tasks. Adobe Acrobat X enables you to add interactivity to existing documents so you can repurpose current forms in digital format. Teachers and administrators alike will appreciate the ability to reduce their paper usage and save time by sharing information more readily and more completely. Streamlining paper-based tasks can free up budget resources to help enrich academic programs while boosting productivity.