While watching the NBA Finals a couple of nights ago I saw a commercial for Adobe Creative Cloud Express. In that commercial they said something to the effect of “even Kindergarteners can use it.” That inspired me to create this list of ten ways that Adobe Creative Cloud Express can be used in K-12 schools.
Before jumping to the list, I’d like to point out that on my YouTube channel you will find some tutorials on using Adobe Creative Cloud Express including this one about making videos and this one about making websites.
Adobe Creative Cloud Express offers many great templates that you and your students can use to create graphics like posters, collages, announcements, and Internet memes.
- Students and teachers can create simple posters to print and post in their schools to announce club meetings, campaigns for class elections, or to post encouraging messages to students.
- To help students understand and show that they understand what propaganda messages look like, I have had them create simple early 20th Century-style propaganda posters of their own. Adobe Creative Cloud Express has a built-in image search that can help students find pictures to use for those posters. Students can also upload pictures they’ve found in the public domain.
- Create a meme-style graphic to share on your classroom, library, or school website. The graphic could be intended to encourage students and parents to remind each other of an upcoming school event. You could also create a meme to encourage students to continue reading over the summer.
Videos:
The video editor is my favorite tool in Adobe Creative Cloud Express. Videos are created by adding text and images to slides. You can record yourself talking over each slide. A library of free music is available to layer under your narration or you can use that music in lieu of narration.
- Create a short flipped-lesson. The recording tool makes it easy to precisely record your narration over the slides in your lesson.
- Have your students create video lessons. The slide aspect of the video tool lends itself to students creating short Ken Burns-style documentary videos. Have them use Adobe’s search tool to find images to use in their videos or have them use a site like Flickr’s The Commons to find historical images. I’ve had students make this style of video to tell the stories of people moving west across the United States in the 19th Century.
- This is the time of year for end-of-school assemblies and celebrations. Use the Creative Cloud Express video creation tool to make a video of highlights of the school year. Rather than narrating the video you can use music from Adobe’s library.
- Create an event invitation page. Create a page that outlines the highlights of an upcoming school event like a fundraiser or open house night. Include images of past events, images of prizes, or include a video about the event. Should you need people to register for your event, include a link to a Google Form or Microsoft Form.
- Create a digital portfolio with Adobe Creative Cloud Express. Students can organize their pages into sections to showcase videos they’ve made, documents they’ve written, and their reflections on what they’ve learned.
- Make a multimedia timeline. While it wasn’t designed specifically for making timelines, the formatting does lend itself to timelines. Ask your students to research a series of events, find media representative of those events, caption the events and media with dates, and then place them into the proper order.
- Write an image-based story. Students can write a story about themselves by using pictures they’ve taken placed into a simple site made with Creative Cloud Express. Another way to think about image-based stories is to have students search for images and use them as writing prompts. Ask them to choose five pictures and write a story that connects the images.
