Introduction
[Lauren W.]: Hi, I'm Lauren from the Adobe Learn team, and one thing we can all agree on is that group projects are a lot.
Between keeping track of everyone's ideas, making sure that your sources actually make sense, and then somehow turning it all into a polished presentation, that adds up quickly.
But with Student Spaces in Adobe Acrobat, it doesn't have to be that chaotic.
In this video, I'll show you how my group used Student Spaces to stay organized, actually collaborate, and then pull everything together without all the usual stress.
Set up a shared space for your group
When I'm kicking off a group project, the first thing I like to do is create a Student Space and drag in all of my documents.
That means the assignment's rubric, class materials, research docs, rough notes - anything we might need.
Then I'll share the space with the group, making sure that I have the permissions set to Contributor for each person I invite.
Right away, everyone's working from the same set of information which keeps us from constantly asking, "Wait, which version are we using?"
Add new research as you go
From there, we usually split up the work and go our separate ways to research our parts independently.
As each person is researching, we can drag new sources into the shared space.
That way, everyone can see what's already been added, and we can avoid duplicating work and build off of each other instead of all researching the same thing separately.
Once everything starts coming in, we can shift into making sense of it.
Make sense of sources with Study Tools
Instead of us all skimming through each document, we can use the generated Study guide to understand what's actually relevant to our project.
I can even generate a podcast or a video overview version to get the main points in a different format.
No matter how I'm reviewing, I can always check the citations to see exactly where something came from and make sure it actually supports our argument.
As we go, we'll start building out our notes inside the space.
This is where things really start to come together.
We can capture key points and link back to sources so that later on we're not stuck thinking, "Wait, where did you see that?"
And then spending an hour trying to track it down again.
We're organizing ideas as we go instead of pulling everything together at the end.
Since everyone can see each other's notes, it's way easier to stay aligned.
We can comment and respond and build off of each other's ideas, instead of working in silos and trying to merge everything at the end.
Collaborate and generate the presentation
I can quickly check on what my teammates are working on and adjust my part if needed.
I can keep things moving without a ton of back-and-forth messages.
Before we move into the final presentation, we can quickly review everything as a group.
Because all of our notes and sources are connected, it's easier to spot gaps, overlaps, or anything that doesn't quite line up and fix it early.
Now that we're aligned, we're ready to start on our final output.
We can generate a starting point for our presentation based on everything we've already created.
There are also clean and professional templates to start from, so we're not spending time overthinking the design.
From there, we can edit, refine, and shape our presentation into something that we're really confident in.
We can adjust the content, swap the visuals, and make sure we've hit every single point in the rubric to make sure we lock in our A.
Ultimately, we are still in control of this content, and that's so important.
Completing this assignment is the goal, but it isn't the point.
We're doing this to prove that we learned what we were supposed to learn.
So I don't want the AI to just do it for me.
Student Spaces helps us get started and stay organized.
So instead of juggling five different documents, three group chats, and a last-minute slide deck that somehow has way too many fonts, we can see the same sources, we can build on each other's ideas, and we can actually stay aligned as we go without scrambling to piece it all together the night before.
Test it out with the practice files that I've included in this tutorial, or with the project that you're working on right now.
