While watching the NBA Finals a few nights ago, I saw an ad for Adobe Creative Cloud Express. In that ad, they said that “even kindergartens can use it.” This has inspired me to compile a list of ten ways that Adobe Creative Cloud Express can be used in K-12 schools.
Before moving on to the list, I would like to mention that on my YouTube channel you will find some tutorials on using Adobe Creative Cloud Express, including video creation and website creation.
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 for printing and posting at their school, club meetings, class selection campaigns, or posting encouraging messages to students.
- To help students understand and show how they can see propaganda messages, I let them create their own early 20th century style promotional posters. Adobe Creative Cloud Express has a built-in image search that can help students find images to use for those posters. Students can also upload images found in the public domain
- Create a meme-style graphic to share in your classroom, library, or school website. The graphic may be intended to encourage students and parents to remind each other of an upcoming school event. You can also create a meme to encourage students to continue reading in the summer.
Video:
Video Editor is my favorite tool in Adobe Creative Cloud Express. Videos are created by adding text and pictures to slides. You can record the speech on each slide. A library of free music is available at the level under your description or you can use that music instead of the description.
- Create a short flipped-lesson. The recording tool makes it easy to accurately record your descriptions on the slides of your lessons.
- Ask your students to create video lessons. The slide side of the video tool allows students to create short Ken Burns-style documentaries. Ask them to use Adobe’s search tool to find images for use in their videos or to use a site like Flickr’s The Commons to find historical images. I created this style video for students to tell stories of people who moved west across the United States in the 19th century.
- It is the time of year for school closing and celebration. Use the Creative Cloud Express video creation tool to create a video of school year highlights. You can use music from the Adobe library instead of describing the video.
Simple Website:
Pages are tools for creating simple web pages for displaying images, posters, videos, text and links.
- Create an event invitation page. Create a page that highlights an upcoming school event such as a fundraiser or an open house night. Include photos from past events, prize photos, or a video about the event. If people need to register for your event, include a link to a Google form or a Microsoft form.
- Create a digital portfolio with Adobe Creative Cloud Express. Students can organize their pages into sections to reflect the videos they have created, the documents they have written, and what they have learned.
- Create a multimedia timeline. Although it is not specifically designed to create timelines, formatting lends itself to timelines. Ask your students to research a series of events, find media representatives for those events, caption events and media with dates, and then put them in the correct order.
- Write a picture-based story. Students can write a story about themselves using pictures taken by them on a simple site created with Creative Cloud Express. Another way to think about image-based stories is to search for students’ images and use them as writing prompts. Ask them to choose five pictures and write a story that connects the pictures.