Fun with Adobe products

One of the richest artifacts I can include in my portfolio is a copy of my former school's SACS plan. It offers evidence of leadership, technical skill, vision for technology integration, professional development experience and ability to secure funding. My problem was that the document was an old PageMaker file. I thought I would have to impose on someone for help, but it turns out I was able to convert it using Adobe InDesign. Then I needed to convert those multiple files to one PDF file and bookmark so portfolio reviewers could easily navigate the document if desired. Ironically, this task was something I had wanted to do back when we had our SACS visit. We wanted to offer an electronic version to the SACS Visiting Team members but we a) ran out of time and b) thought they might prefer paper.

As I was inserting all the bookmarks, I noticed a comment feature. I gave it a try and thought it would be useful, too. It works almost exactly like Word's comment feature, displaying a little speech bubble in the document. When you run your mouse over the comment icon, you can read the author's comments. I'm using this to annotate and/or highlight some of the relevant things in the large document. I was afraid it would only work on the full version of Acrobat, but the comments behave correctly when viewing documents in Adobe Reader, too.

I'm so excited! I had intended to use the commenting tool on a handful of Word documents (such as a syllabus) but I'm always reluctant to assume everyone has Word. I know most people do, but I disagree with this in principle.