DevLearn 09 Follow-up

After nearly a week out of the office attending the Adobe Summit and DevLearn 09 Conference I'm back in my office catching up. I met some really wonderful people and really enjoyed the conversations we had about the state of eLearning. It was very exciting to meet up with professionals in this area who I have only interacted with online for the past couple of years. To say the least, we are living through some really interesting and exciting times when it comes to learning and how to capitalize on the power of the web for eLearning.

I had over 50 participants at my session Delivering e-Learning Assets in PDF Format and focused on how one can deliver a range of content using the ubiquitous PDF format. During my session I showed how I am using Adobe Acrobat Pro Extended, Adobe Captivate 4, and Adobe Presenter to create rich and engaging eLearning assets. Using a combination of these tools it is possible to create some interesting materials that can be shared with the Adobe Acrobat Reader. One of the real take aways from the presentation is that it is now possible to embed video in your PDF's which your users can view with the free Adobe Acrobat Reader 9. During my demonstration I showed how you can embed SWF files into a Word document and create an interactive handout which can be saved as a PDF file. In fact this is the way I recently created my ebook Technology Supports for Writing. There a lots of ways to use PDF's to create handouts and eLearning materials using Adobe Acrobat Portfolios. You can take a look at this video that I created to give you some ideas of how you might use the Portfolio feature in the work that you do. To get a copy of my handouts from the conference you can download them from the DevLearn 09 Web site.