Academic Licenses Blog

Try Adobe Software for Free

Not sure if you need Photoshop Extended or if Photoshop Elements would be fine? Photoshop Elements is definitely easier on the budget so if you could use that instead wouldn't you? Or maybe you are thinking about migrating to Dreamweaver from Frontpage but not sure about the learning curve and if you could be up to speed by time school starts back in the fall.

Adobe offers free 30-day trials of almost all of their software. This is a huge advantage that I find comes as a surprise to educators all the time!

http://www.adobe.com/downloads/

They also offer free training -- in the form of online videos -- that can get you moving really quickly.

Professional Development: Adobe Training and Certification

Dreamweaver. Flash. Photoshop. What if your school (or district or college) had a training center that offered training and testing on these Adobe applications? You provide the instructor - but the curriculum materials are provided for free from Adobe. It is the testing part that you pay for: $2,495 per year. 30-user lab (max) but you can provide testing for an unlimited number of students for one year. Professional development for educators and students; as well as any adult learning classes you might offer.  Professional development with more than just accountability: a certificate with a title that the educator can add to their professional resume.

Adobe Certified Associate (ACA) -- Adobe offers three areas in which to gain entry-level skills:

• Web Communication using Adobe Dreamweaver

• Rich Media Communication using Adobe Flash

• Visual Communication using Adobe Photoshop

The stimulus plan includes $650 million marked for education technology. It is my understanding that this funding will reach the schools through the EETT program which designates that 25% of EETT grant money is to be used for professional development.

I'm going to break down each certification area over the next few weeks and go into more detail.

Free Classroom Resources for Software

A really cool emerging trend with software publishers is all the free training and classroom support they are now offering to teachers. I'm just gonna mention a few of the resources currently available -- i will revisit this topic from time to time as I hear of new stuff.

Final Draft "the industry standard: professional screenwriting software" (that's what the box says) offers a free K-12 Teacher Workbook that you can download from their site.

FileMaker offers training materials, podcasts, webinars, a resource guide . . . a library of info on using Filemaker Pro in the classroom.

Adobe's offering is heavily focused on curriculum and lesson plans. This is an extensive resource that can be researched by product or by solution.

Sony Software - Vegas Pro, Vegas Movie Studio, Acid Pro, etc. - they have free training videos.

Serif - this is a line of products that work together like a suite. Huge in the UK they are just now making their big splash in the US. I saw a demo at a recent tradeshow: very impressive. Beautiful, elegant, easy to use. All kinds of free demos and tutorials. Worth checking out.

Enjoy!

Product Review: LanSchool 7.1

As you probably know, LanSchool is classroom lab management software. It allows the teacher to monitor and manipulate every computer in the room from his/her computer. There are other products that do this -- such as NetOp.

What you may not know is that LanSchool was built with both the teacher and the K-12 student in mind. For the teacher, LanSchool is super easy to use (who wants to spend a lot of time learning new software?) and crazy powerful. Blank all screens, show the teacher screen, show a student screen, monitor all screens at once, etc. They have free online step by step training available 24/7 for teachers who want to brush up on all the functions. Oh, and LanSchool is definitely built with the student in mind . . . the Eddie Haskell student that is! The smart, tricky, trouble maker that wants to play poker on line instead of work. The teacher can shut them down and have them back on task in an instant. And though they TRY ALL THE TIME I have never heard of a student hacking into LanSchool. Ever.

FYI - I do sell LanSchool and have for years. However, this is not a paid endorsement. I don't do those.

More Web 2.0 -- Acrobat Pro 9.0 Extended

I just saw a demo of the beta version of Acrobat Pro 9.0 Extended. And, as with any beta, it choked a few times . . . but hey! That's what beta is, you know? I'm confident it will be perfect when it starts shipping later this month. Anyway, the thing is, it was really awesome. Here are just a few tidbits:

• Collaborate Live with Screen Share function -- the dialog works like any chat but you both see the doc on the screen and can manipulate it!
• Form Fill on steroids. It is crazy easy to create a form with fill in the blanks with Acrobat 9.0 and you don't have to go to a 2 hour training session to do it! Prepare to be frightened . . . when people fill out the forms and send them back to you there is a function that captures and compiles the data for you! Scary, huh?
• Turn anything into a .pdf. Now you can have movies, sound, interactive buttons, even 3D models (with the Extended version) in your doc! Works with everything! Flash, Dreamweaver, Captivate, etc.

The demo was at 8 am this morning and i had a little bit of a headache but it was obvious that 9.0 is going to change how we work. Oh yeah, I am SO going to get it.

Web 2.0 in the Classroom

I am trying to review a new book for teachers called Weaving the Web 2.0 Tools into the Classroom by Patsy Lanclos. I say "trying" as the information is so incredible that i keep stopping to check everything out! I made it to page 17 before i really started freaking out.

So, i get to page 17 which begins the Google Productivity Tools chapter. I already have a Google Account of course. (Google Analytics is a fantastic tool for web business folks.) but i had never really looked at all the other apps.  I log into Google and go check it out. I have to look around a little to find the document apps but once there they have links to youtube videos that explain everything REALLY fast. The documents, spreadsheet, presentation tools are crazy cool with all their collaborative features that scream for use in the classroom. Basically the thing is that the document stays stationary -- just one document with saved changes attached. The collaborators go to IT. Not the other way around where you have lots of documents with new revisions being emailed as attachments -- with readers/teachers/collaborators trying to figure out which is the current version. Wow. yeah. And collaborators are named and color coded so you can see who said/added what.

Honestly it was kinda scary and made my head hurt a little. It reminded me of the first time we got online (at home, spare bedroom, 1994 i think?) we could see it was really cool but weren't really sure what to do with it, you know? That is where i am right now. The possibilities keep popping in my head but they are mostly a little cloudy. I do realize that without a doubt this is huge. And i'm just seeing the tip of the iceberg.

Academic Software Licensing 101

Just this week I had a customer who knew nothing about academic software licensing. We in the business are always surprised but of course "how to buy software" is not a course you take as part of your Bachelor's Degree in Education.

So, here is the deal.

Software publishers such as Microsoft, Adobe, Symantec, Corel, Quark, McAfee, etc. offer deep discounts on their products through licensing. This means you license your computers for the software and buy one media (DVD/CD) (or download it free if that is available) called a multi-install CD and you load it on your licensed computers. The media itself is not licensed -- for example:

Sally has 17 computers in her lab. She wants to put Office Pro 2007 on each of these computers. She must buy 17 Office Pro 2007 licenses. The media is downloaded for free from Microsoft after she gets her license.

A common misunderstanding about academic software is that it is a limited version. This is NOT the case. The software is the same as what you would buy in BEST BUY for example. Why you ask? I mean isn't this that "there is no free lunch" people are always talking about? Well, no. The software publishers do have a motive. If you teach their software in your schools then students will want it on their home computers and when they grow up (and they do!) they will want it in their offices.

It is very effective, this trickle-up method. Which is why they do it. This does not make it dark and evil -- I heard a few of you out there with your disdainful tsk tsk tsk. They have an agenda and you get the software you want at a great price. So enjoy! Stop with the worry wart!

Microsoft School Agreement: Is it for you?

There always seems to be a lot of confusion about the Microsoft School Agreement -- is it a good deal, will it save us money, etc. Let me clear this up if I can. The Microsoft School Agreement is not built to save you money. It is not the equivalent of a site license that brings the price per seat down the more computers you put it on.

Instead the Microsoft School Agreement makes your licenses extremely easy to manage and keeps all your licenses current --- so that you can roll out the newest versions as soon as they are released (if you want to). Price wise: it depends on your situation. If you update your software every three years then the price is a wash. What you would pay to buy the new versions of Office and Win/Vista OS every three years is pretty much broken down into a yearly installments and that is what you pay each year for three years. Another nice feature is that you if you add computers during the year you don't have to count them until the next year when you renew. Sweet. You don't have to concern yourself with being compliant because every computer is automatically covered.

If, on the other hand all together, you have your technology on a 5 year plan -- where you lock in your operating systems and application software for 5 years, then the Microsoft School agreement is not for you. It would be a huge waste of money.

Hope this helped. I think a lot of folks get discouraged when they first hear about it because they are told it is a "deal". It is a really good choice for a lot of school districts but it is never really a "deal".

Budget Blues? Think outside the box

When outfitting a classroom lab it is crucial to consider alternatives when the "dream" is simply not in your budget.

For example: I know you want Adobe CS3 Design Premium for all 14 of your student computers. I know you have big plans for a design class that will give your students marketable skills or even set them on the road to their dream career. But you just told me that your entire budget for this class is around $1,300. At roughly $93 per machine -- it is time to discuss another plan. Oh, you could buy 3 Design Premium licenses. And what? Let the kids work on those computers once a month with a rotation?

There are other less expensive, well known and respected products that are worth considering.

CorelDRAW Graphics Suite 4.0 - This is solid creative design software with all the tools you need to teach a design class. Never used it? Corel provides 2 hours of training with the product -- plus all kinds of training resources built into the product.

QuarkXpress 7.0 - For years Quark did not offer academic discounts. Because of this most high school tech people don't even consider it. Quark is, however, the industry standard in creative design and page layout. And the pricing now fantastic -- about $95 each for those 14 computers. It is reported to be really easy to use -- I saw a demo of QuarkXpress 7.0 at a trade show and it did look really intuitive. But no worries -- they offer free training videos on the Quark website.

Still too much money? Then Microsoft Publisher 2007 licenses are $23 each. Creative design for both print and web.

You can find something in your budget -- but you might have to rethink it a little.