Showing posts with label students. Show all posts
Showing posts with label students. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Adobe Creative Cloud – A Great Choice for Students

No doubt you’ve heard about Adobe Creative Cloud – still wondering what all the buzz is about? In a nutshell, it’s about having all the tools you’ll ever need for going from creative concept to production of A-grade visual projects, winning portfolios or stunning websites. With a special $19.99* monthly membership for students, you get access to all of the Creative Suite 6 tools, web hosting services, fonts, and cloud storage for syncing and sharing creative files. There are lots of reasons to love it:

Get Noticed: Deliver powerful presentations, a personalized web portfolio or a unique Facebook cover photo that everyone is raving about. Because Creative Cloud membership allows access to every Creative Suite 6 tool, the possibilities are endless. Feel a bit overwhelmed? Check out this collection of tutorials to help you get started.Build Job-Ready Skills: According to a U.S. News & World Report article, one of five skills everyone needs to have on a resume is knowledge of Adobe Creative Suite. As you experiment and create eye-catching projects with Adobe solutions, you’re building experience with the latest industry-standard tools like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. Now your resume will stand out from the crowd! Check out Adobe’s How-to Channel for more helpful videos and tutorials.Receive Instant Upgrades: No more annual upgrade purchases. Cloud members have access to exclusive updates from Adobe, at no additional cost. When a new release comes out, it is automatically available via the Cloud. For example, we recently added several new features to Illustrator CS6 and just included an iPad publishing service, Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, Single Edition, for making digital editions of magazines and yearbooks.Enjoy a Great Value: Creative Cloud membership is now available for students at $19.99 per month – that’s less than a night out with friends! The CS6 Master Collection would cost you about $800!

 So what are you waiting for, check out Adobe Creative Cloud here!

*Limited time only, offer ends November 4, 2012


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Saturday, October 20, 2012

Top 10 reasons students will love the new Word

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

The new Office is packed with features that students will love and Word is no exception!  Today, we present the Top 10 reasons we think students will be head over heels for the new Word.  Download the Customer Preview today and tell us which of these is your favorite new feature!

You already add pictures to your school reports to make them more interesting.  With the new Word, this is easier than ever.  Whether you need a stock photo to help make the report more visually appealing or a picture you took of your lab results with your smartphone and uploaded to SkyDrive, you can use the Insert Online Pictures feature to quickly grab pictures from a variety of web locations and services.  For the times when a picture just isn’t enough, you can embed a video in your document.

Once you have pictures, videos, charts or other graphic elements in your document, chances are good the next step you take is moving and resizing them – tweaking the placement until the document layout looks just the way you want.  In the new Word, the Layout Options button will show up when you select the content and let you quickly choose a text wrapping option.

Once your content has text wrapping applied, just click and drag it to a new location.  Along the way, you’ll see the rest of the document contents updating in real time – no more guessing at what you’ll get when you let go!  When you see the green alignment guides light up, you’ll know you’re aligned with important areas like the center of the page or the top of a paragraph. 

You’ve always used Word to get things done, but the new Word can help you get more things done, even faster than before.  Need to quickly summarize your document?  How about look something up online?  Guess what?  Now there are apps that can help you do those things, and more, without leaving Word.  Click on the Apps for Office button on the Insert tab and check out the apps that are offered through the Office Store.

Writing a lab report and need to include a table of data?  That process gets easier in the new Word.  Now you can quickly insert a new column or row, just by hovering with mouse in the area where you want it and clicking on the insert widget. Once you have your table created, apply one of the new, updated table Styles to make it look great.  Prefer to copy the formatting of another table’s borders?  No problem – the new Border Sampler tool found on the Table Tools Design tab under Border Styles lets you copy the formatting from one table and quickly draw new borders with the same style.

Screenshot of table border menu

Admit it, you hate reading documents that have track changes turned on.  Unfortunately, you really need to see what changed.  With Simplified Mark-up view, you don’t have to choose between seeing all the changes and knowing how the final document will read.  Instead, you see change bars in the left margin that show you where the changes happened.  One click flips between showing and hiding the changes. 

Comments are also easier to process, thanks to the ability to reply to a comment directly.  You can also use comments as a document’s to do list - when you are done dealing with a particular comment, just right click and Mark as Done.  It won’t be deleted, just greyed out so you know you’ve finished that work.

In previous versions of Word, you could only get new or updated bibliography styles when we released an update or service pack. Obviously, your next assignment, which probably requires the latest APA style citations, can’t wait until the next service pack or version of Word. Since the new Office is connected to the cloud, all the citation styles can be stored in the cloud and updated as soon as a new format is available. Every time you start Word, it checks for updated citation styles and downloads those to your computer. Now, you don’t need to worry about your bibliography style being out of date!

Reports and papers for school can get long, fast.  Sometimes you want to focus on just one section at a time or send the paper to someone else and have them focus on just a few particular sections.  If you create your document using Styles to format your headings, you can collapse the sections by hovering over the heading and clicking the Expand / Collapse widget that appears just to the left of the heading.

You can also collapse or expand all sections at once by right clicking and using the Expand / Collapse options on the context menu.

When you collapse a heading, the contents are tucked away out of sight while you’re reading or editing the document.  You can set sections to be collapsed by default, so each time the document is opened, the reader will see the document exactly the way you intended.  To mark a section to collapse by default, right click on the heading and click Paragraph…, then check the Collapsed by default option.

For the times when you want to quickly find something in your document, whether it is a bit of text or a specific chart, the Navigation pane can help.  Click or tap on the page number in the lower left corner of the Word window to show the pane.  From there, you’ll be able to type a search term, look through the document’s headings or scan through page thumbnails to find what you need. 

You’ve worked hard to get all the right content into your report, but before you turn it in to your professor, you want to make sure it looks great.  Use the features on the new Design tab to find or create a Theme and a Style set that is uniquely yours.

You can also use the updated built-in content like coordinated cover pages, text boxes, headers and footers to add some extra polish or pizazz.   All of these will work with the Theme’s color & font sets and will update automatically if you decide to change your theme later.

Have a paper that was saved as a PDF that you need to go back and edit, but don’t have the original document anymore?  With the PDF Reflow feature, Word can convert that PDF to an editable Word document.  Word will pull the content from the fixed format PDF and preserve as much of the layout and formatting as possible. You can make the changes you need and save again in any of Word’s formats, including PDF.

You definitely have to write papers as a student, but you inevitably need read them as well.  The new Word includes a reimagined reading mode that incorporates the goodness of traditional paper while embracing new technologies.  It was designed to be used on a touch-screen device (like that awesome Surface RT that you’ve got your eye on) but it also works great when using a mouse and keyboard.  It has a clutter free UI that helps you focus on the content, but puts the tools you need right at your fingertips: you can quickly add comments, highlight important information, lookup a definition or translate a phrase, all without leaving Word. 

When you need to take a break, Word helps you remember where you left off – even if the next time you start reading, you’re on a different device.  When you are signed in to Office, your most recently used documents will be stored online, making it easy to find them the next time you open Word.  When you do open the document again, the Resume Reading feature acts like a bookmark that will take you back to the last page you were reading.

Group assignments become so much easier when everyone can work on the same document at the same time.  The new Office is integrated with Microsoft SkyDrive, so you can easily save your work in progress to your free SkyDrive account and share the document with the rest of your group, all from within Word.  If they don’t have Office yet, no problem.  All they'll need is a browser, where the document will open in the Word Web Application.  You don't even need to mess with permissions. Anyone with the link can comment and edit.  Better yet, everyone with the link can work on the document at the same time, whether they want to use the browser or Word.  When you are ready to share your changes, and see everyone else’s, just click the Save button and the document will be refreshed.


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Sunday, July 3, 2011

Giving students a competitive edge through the Adobe Certified Associate

Once again it’s that time of year when university students hand in their final projects, complete exams and prepare to enter the world of work.  I must say I don’t envy them in the slightest!

It’s no secret that graduates are in for a tough ride – combine increased competition for jobs with employer uncertainty and you have a highly competitive and volatile job market. All this considered, it’s more important than ever that universities help students get additional skills under their belt to give them that competitive edge.

One university which has the right idea and is well worth its Centre of Excellence status is London Metropolitan University.  It offers both internal and external students the chance to take Adobe Certified Associate (ACA) courses in Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Flash- a recognised qualification within industry.  The courses are run through a number of modules and evening courses, aiming to give students a deeper understanding of digital skills, which they can build upon over their university years.

So what are the benefits of taking the ACA? Students leave university equipped with valuable digital skills and they get the added bonus of having the recognised ACA qualification on their CV for that all important foot in the door!

Check out for yourself this video for more information on how London Met is delivering the course:

Liz Wilkins is Senior Marketing Manager for Education at Adobe Systems UK. Her involvement with Adobe Education products has seen her work closely with a range of educational institutions, championing the use of digital media tools in the curriculum, and their integration into a number of subject areas in order to better prepare students for the future demands of the workplace. Liz works closely with teachers and administrators integrating software, curriculums, and instructional resources as well as certification options and professional development tools. Through promoting digital literacy in cross-curricular education, teaching essential career skills, and streamlining administrative processes Liz has experience working in partnership with a diverse portfolio of schools and further education institutions.

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