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Class Project
Using Adobe Acrobat to Create an e-Portfolio
Technology has made portfolio creation easy for students, who can gather their digital creations in a compact format for showing off at a later date. Maybe their parents want to see what they’re doing in their advanced graphics design class, or maybe an employer is interested in their AutoCAD accomplishments. Regardless of the material or the audience, your students will enjoy using Adobe Acrobat to create their own e-portfolios.
Here’s a step-by-step guide that you can use to help students compile their web-based work using Adobe:
1. Have students determine what they’d like to collect and store in their e-portfolios (classroom projects, tests and quizzes, artwork, engineering drawings, etc.).
2. Remind students that they can create multiple portfolios for different types of projects and documents (and that they don’t have to jam them all into a single e-portfolio).
3. Tell students to open Abode Acrobat 9 Pro (or earlier version of the software). The program will serve as the “basket” in which they will store their images, videos, documents and/or other materials using a PDF portfolio (this format allows pretty much anyone to view the materials, from any computer).
4. In Acrobat, students will be working with a document pane that displays Adobe PDF documents, and a navigation pane on the left side where they can browse through open PDF documents. The toolbars appear at the top of the window and are organized by feature type.
5. To kick off their portfolio-building exercise, have students upload one text, image or video file at a time to their e-portfolio, which should be named with a simple naming convention that they will remember (such as, “My11thgradeportfolio.pdf”).
6. Tell students that individual files should be named in ways that clearly identify their contents (since viewers can see these filenames).
7. Discuss with students the fact that Adobe PDF documents preserve all the fonts, formatting, color and graphics of the uploaded files, regardless of which application they were generated in. To convert files to PDF formats, students will need to take the following steps within Adobe Acrobat:
In Acrobat, do one of the following:
- Choose File>Create PDF>From File;
- Or, in the toolbar, click the Create button and choose PDF From File. In the Open dialog box, select the file. You can browse all file types or select a specific type from the “Files Of Type” menu.
8. As students continue to add files and build their portfolios, remind them that these projects aren’t static, and that they are expandable and scalable. They can contain as many pages as necessary, and are easier to update than paper-based versions.
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Adobe Acrobat
