Eugene Westlake wants his school
district to "get out of the paper business," and he thinks
he's found a way to do that.
Westlake, superintendent of the 2,500-student Northern Valley
Regional High Schools (NVRHS) in northeast Bergen County,
N.J., has encouraged the use of Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document
Format (PDF) to share correspondence and records with staff,
students, and community members.
PDF is a universal file format that allows anyone to view
and print a document regardless of the hardware or operating
system in use. Already common in a variety of services and
agencies, the technology is catching on in schools as well.
For Westlake, the PDF format makes sense. Using Adobe Acrobat
Reader, which can be downloaded free from the Adobe
site, anyone can open a document with formatting, fonts,
and graphics intact. Files can be shared, viewed, and printed
exactly as the original document.
"I wanted to make the most use out of the technology that
we had," Westlake says. "I believed that if we have computers,
then we should be using them. ... We should be a paperless
society."
NVRHS is wired for technology, thanks to a 1995 bond referendum
that enabled the school district to update its wide-area network
and extranet. Bergen County residents have free dial-up Internet
service, and NVRHS students have wide access to computers
that are constantly being updated.
'A
nice solution'
Steve Adler, the district's technology integrator, started
using the PDF format with his students and colleagues in 1995,
then introduced it to the district two years later. By 1998,
the product was in administrative offices.
Initially, administrators and staff used PDFs to streamline
the distribution of high-volume documents, such as teacher
manuals, throughout the district. Tasks that previously took
up to two to three weeks were completed in days. Projects
that usually took days were now done in 24 hours.
"It looked liked it was a nice solution," Adler says. "It
was really quite tuned into our needs and the information
that people needed. It was a good way to improve communication
both internally and externally."
Materials are available as PDF files to teachers, students,
and parents, who download the documents via the Web. The documents
include handbooks, grading policies, school regulations, event
calendars, and administration forms. All approved curriculum
and state standards guides are available as PDFs, as is the
superintendent's weekly newsletter.
Westlake says the PDF format has helped in policy review
and development. The district's policy manual -- previously
available on paper only -- has been converted into a PDF file,
put on a CD-ROM, and distributed to board members. Board members
review proposed policy changes online or at home, using a
searchable index. The PDF format also allowed members to make
certain changes to the document.
School board president Elizabeth Rosenberg, for one, is happy
she doesn't have to look through a huge book anymore for important
school information. "It's very convenient," Rosenberg says.
"I bring it to work with me and just put it in my computer
at work. It just makes life a little bit easier."
In
the classroom
Northern Valley Regional teachers have also found PDF to
be a great tool in the classroom. They now share lesson plans
with colleagues and have increased their teaching resources.
With each student having his or her own e-mail and server
space, teachers have also been able to make more creative
assignments.
"The students become authors and designers of an experience
instead of just pounding out papers," Adler says. "They take
a lot more ownership in the projects."
Tim O'Boyle, who teaches applications of science and technology
and honors physics, uses the format for a number of class
projects. In one DNA assignment, for example, students were
asked to research several articles and summarize the use and
importance of DNA technology. Instead of continuously going
to the Web, the students downloaded the articles from Web
sites right into their PDF files for research purposes.
"I feel my job is to expose students to as much as possible,"
O'Boyle says. "PDF is good because it is easy to use and has
a wide variety of purposes."
As a final project, one student developed a study guide for
the CSI television show, which focus on criminal forensics.
The student used the PDF format to summarize the stories and
link the information to the show's Web site. Another student
compiled links to more than 50 Web sites on the field of forensic
science, cataloguing the information and making it easy for
students and teachers to use. Those in the science department
call the guide the "ultimate resource."
O'Boyle says the PDF format not only allows him to be more
creative in teaching, but has also helped him improve his
organizational skills. He now catalogues all his worksheets
into small, accessible, and easily transportable files.
"[It] allows me another avenue of teaching," O'Boyle says.
"It gives me one more program to teach to students that is
easy to learn and very widely used on the Internet."
But
there are limits
As adviser to the student newspaper, Marissa Januzzi Thomas
has also found PDF to be a helpful tool. The format enables
the newspaper staff to compress large Pagemaker files that
make up the pages of the school paper.
"The PDF files print more quickly, take up less space on
the archive, and can be compiled and read in a linear fashion,"
Thomas says.
PDF files can also be uploaded to the school's Web site without
losing their formatting, a feature that appeals to Thomas.
The technology helps in archiving the school newspaper --
which would have proven valuable last summer when two years
of editions were lost during a cleanup. This year, Thomas
plans to convert all the newspaper files to PDFs and hopes
to one day create an archive that is searchable by community
members.
"It's nice to know people probably won't be reinventing the
headlines for our back issues once they're archived," she
says.
Though Thomas is very pleased with the technology, she admits
it has limitations. One disadvantage, she notes, is that she
cannot edit or remove graphics once documents are converted
to PDFs. (Some publishers find that feature a plus, however,
as it means readers can't copy, cut, or otherwise manipulate
copyrighted material.)
Adobe product manager Rick Armstrong says there's a misconception
about Adobe PDF. There are actually two versions: the Acrobat
Reader, which allows users to open a document, view it, and
print it; and Adobe Acrobat 5.0.
The free Acrobat Reader will not allow you to create a PDF
file. Users can do so by going to Adobe's Web site and paying
$9.99 for each file, or by purchasing Acrobat 5.0, which retails
for $49 for school districts. Acrobat 5.0 allows users to
create, edit, and annotate documents, and users can set up
their own security permissions that set limitations on what
can be done to a document.
Changing
old patterns
Northern Valley Regional High Schools has used Adobe PDF
consistently for three years now. One of the biggest challenges,
says Adler, has been getting people to change their old ways
of communicating.
"Getting people to adopt a new way of getting their information
and generating information is a challenge," he says. "People
are creatures of habit. They are so used to passing paper
around and sending things the way they always have."
Adler says he hopes school staff will become comfortable
enough with the technology to be able to use Web resources
without being connected to the Web. With the PDF format, he
believes, educators can bring things available on the Web
to the desktop. His goal is to integrate PDF technology into
the day-to-day workings of the school district and classrooms.
"I want to see it used as another communications tool," Adler
says. "PDF makes it easier for people to get their jobs done."
