Ben Forta | Blog

Blog posts tagged Spark

Roanoke County Public Schools (RCPS) in Virginia gave Spark for Education a try this past school year, and the results were beyond what I could have imagined. Their journey started with teachers from the district coming across Spark and trying it themselves. Within minutes of using Spark, teachers at RCPS were thinking of what this could do for their students and were asking how quickly they could have it in their classroom. And in a matter of weeks they deployed Spark to all of the 15,000+ students and teachers (and in the middle of the school year!). You can read more in Sharif Karmaly's blog post.

Today we announced the availability of Adobe Spark for Education, the same Adobe Spark that you know and love (and like Adobe Spark, just as free), but adapted to better suit the needs of our younger users.

This idea is perfect for younger students, and works particularly well when using Adobe Spark on the iPad. The idea is to encourage students to create their own storybook with not just their own story, but also their own pictures and their own voice telling the tale.

Lots of teachers encourage students to keep a daily journal, something short, focused, a few minutes of personal expression and communication to start each day. Student journals are usually written, but they need not be, and video journals are cool and lots of fun for kids to create. Here's how it works:

One of the most popular features in Adobe Spark is the ability to search the internet for free Creative Commons images for use in videos, pages, and post. Spark is used extensively by children, and so we utilize safe-search to ensure that only appropriate images are returned. But, no public image search is ever 100% safe, that's an unfortunate reality.

Last week at BETT in London we announced that Adobe Spark, including Premium Features, would be made available for free to students and teachers. The release is planned for April, so not a lot of details were provided with the announcement. But, there's been huge interest in the upcoming offering, and lots of you have been wanting more information. So, with time to spare on this flight from London back Stateside, I've compiled some notes that should hopefully better explain things. (Of course, details could change between now and the planned release in April).

Students (and their teachers) love Adobe Spark. But, Spark isn't quite perfect, yet. The two most common concerns are expressed by teachers are the lack of support for minor (under 13) logins, and the lack of integration with existing school logins.

Well, both are about to be resolved.

Dr. Younus Y. Mirza, Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at Allegheny College, has shared how he uses Adobe Spark Video and Adobe Spark Page to advertise his classes in an informative and very personal way.

Just in time for Back-to-School, the Adobe Spark Post team has created 5 remixable posts for you to use in the classroom:

It's Back-To-School time, and teachers all over are prepping for another year in the classroom. Back in prehistoric times, when I was in school, that meant sharpening lots of pencils, trying to get last year's chalk mark remnants off the board, obtaining a stack of clean projector transparencies and duplicator carbon sheets ... ouch! Teachers these days do much the same, although we've (thankfully) traded much of that ancient technology for shiny laptops, Chromebooks, iPads, and desktop computers.

Over the past few years, I've had the good fortune and privilege of meeting thousands of passionate educators the world over, and many have shared the innovative ways that they are using our FREE Adobe Spark in their classrooms. Just as I've done the past two years, I've compiled some of my favorite teacher-shared Spark classroom ideas into this post.