2018 Back To School With Adobe Spark
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 three years, I've compiled some of my favorite teacher-shared Spark classroom ideas into this post.
2018 The Tech Rabbi On Combining The Unexpected
The Tech Rabbi has been experimenting with Adobe Spark and how to use it in the classroom, and shared this wonderful post on Creativity Is About Combining The Unexpected, Not Just Drawing It. This is a fantastic classroom idea suitable for students of all ages.
2018 How To Add Your Own Fonts In Adobe Spark
I mentioned Adobe Spark's support for custom fonts when we announced it earlier this month. To help you get started with this feature, our own Amy Copperman has posted How to Add Your Own Fonts for Branded Content That Is Just Your Type.
2018 Adobe Spark On Android
It's here! The public beta of Adobe Spark Post on Android is now available. Details in this blog post.
2018 Adobe Spark Custom Fonts
We just updated Adobe Spark to support custom fonts, now when creating and managing your brand and branded themes, you can upload your own fonts to the brand. Custom font support is a Premium Feature, so it's available as part of any paid plan (Creative Cloud or Spark). It is also available for free to education users as part of Spark for Education.
2018 The Magic Behind Spark's Magic Layout
Adobe Spark Post's Magic Layout sets you up for success quickly by employing a content-aware layout system to suggest intelligent cropping and layout positions based on the content you choose for your design. It makes educated guesses for you to get you almost all the way to a finished product. For instance, if you choose one tall photo and one wide photo and add a text element, Spark Post will automatically place your content in a layout with one vertical and one wide cell. Even more amazingly, it will position an editable text box where the system detects there's relative empty space and common design rules predict it will be most readable. The magic behind Magic Layout is artificial intelligence, as this post explains.
2018 Roanoke County Adopts Adobe 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.
2018 Adobe Spark For Education
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.
2018 Spark In The Classroom: Video Storytelling
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.
2018 Spark In The Classroom: Video Journals
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: