 Hi there everyone. This is Katie Morrow from ESU 8 with this mid-February 2018 Wednesday webinar. I've been excited for quite some time about the educational opportunities for students to create and show their learning with the free Adobe Spark tools. However, it was just recently announced that very soon the Adobe Spark suite will be completely free to schools with no age restrictions, no COPPA issues, and no in-app content that costs a fee. Potentially scheduled for this April 2018, this update will allow your school IT to use existing student logins, Google or Office 365 for example, to access all Adobe Spark tools for free. With that being said, I want to show you why this is so exciting and what the Adobe Spark tool suite can do for you in your classroom. Many of the resources I'm sharing in this webinar came from Adobe Spark's educational website available at the URL on your screen at the bottom. I'll take you there for a short visit right now to show you what's available if you were to check it out on your own. You'll notice that there are some examples using the different Adobe Spark tools in the classroom. I'll share some of those myself on this webinar later but there's some great ones available on this website as well. Some posts about additional ideas for classroom lessons using Adobe Spark and some getting started guides and resources available as well. So with that, let's take a look at a presentation available on that website that can help us get started with creativity and storytelling using Adobe Spark. If you've ever heard Sir Ken Robinson speak or many other inspiring educators, we know that creativity is just as important as literacy in our schools. In one aspect it works hand in hand. When teaching literacy, we have to allow our students to be creative in order to embrace those skills that are so important in their educational journey. No doubt that Adobe Spark is a tool that encourages that creativity and gives students choice and voice in order to show what they're learning and extend their learning from the classroom on beyond. So what is Adobe Spark? Adobe Spark is an integrated web and mobile solution that enables everyone, especially teachers and their students, to easily create and share impactful visual stories. There's no right or wrong way to share an idea or tell a story so there's no right or wrong way for students to use Adobe Spark but the three basic ways offer a great suggesting starting point. A post is an image optimized for social media. If you're going to be posting ideas or links, then post will create the compelling attention grabber that you can use. A Spark page is a highly visual text-based story. Think of it as the word processor you wish you had when you were in school. As such, it's ideally suited for text-based projects and assignments that involve lots of photographs. And finally, a Spark video is a narrated movie and thus best suited for oral presentations, the type of storytelling that you may have previously used a slideshow software for. You can also use all three Adobe Spark formats together. You can embed one within another or use them in isolation. Anyway, it offers a lot of creative choices. It's also great to know that Adobe Spark was actually designed for the younger learners. This being said, it's definitely applicable tool for all the way through our high school grades. And nice to know that there's a short learning curve making it easy to adopt with even the younger grades. If you were to choose how to use Adobe Spark, you would need to choose whether you want to use the web-based platform available on any laptop or Chromebook by visiting spark.adobe.com and from there choosing which of the three Spark tools you want to start with. Or if you're using Adobe Spark on the iPad, you need one of each of the three free Adobe Spark apps. There's a specific app for Adobe Spark post, for Adobe Spark page, and for Adobe Spark video. So how is Adobe Spark being used in education? There are numerous examples available online. These are some of the few that were shared in the starter guide. You can take a glance at all of these options. And then I hope to show you some specific examples actually built as well. So you can see what the two the three tools can actually do in your classroom. Let's get started with Adobe Spark post. Think of post as a poster generator. This might be a simple social media post, a title banner perhaps for a website, or a Twitter post that you want to share with an expert outside of the classroom. In the first example on the left, students were asking scientists their questions about the solar system. In the example on the right, this is just a proof of concept of a book advertisement, much like a movie review poster, but for a book that was recently read. You can generate the graphics easily. You can search for copyright friendly images right from the Spark post app, and you can have some control over the design and layout of your creation. The Adobe Spark video examples that I want to share include one from young learners who shared their trip to a farm for a field trip. I'll let you view that one now. It's actually on Adobe Spark's website as an example. I went on a field trip to a farm. We took a bus and I stuck with my friends. The pigs are drinking milk from their mommy. This is a baby cow. It's called a calf. We gotta pet the goat. Go eat Joseph's name tag. The sheep says bah. The sheep give us milk and wool. The cow is really big. It lives in a barn. We learned the cows give us milk and yogurt. The farmer is the tractor. This is my class. We are listening to the farmers. They tell us about the oxen. The oxen are strong workers on the farm. We got to hold the baby chicks. One pooped. I thought it was a cute chick. I had a great time on the farm. The farm is really great. Another example comes from an eighth grade science classroom. This is used to retell what they learned about the nitrogen cycle. Let's watch this Adobe Spark example here. You may be lost, but turns out you're actually in science class. So I guess I'm going to tell you about the nitrogen cycle and how it works. And yes, it's by me, Jacob, you're one and only. Your favorite person. So fun fact, when lightning happens, it's not just to scare you. It's actually to break the two nitrogen atoms apart and send them spiraling down to the soil. When it's in the soil, it's a great source of food. So guess what the plant does? It uses it for food to help it grow. What amazing facts. And when we eat this, guess what happens? Oh yes, you're right. We get nitrogen. I really hope you said nitrogen because I can't really hear you. And just as it helps the plants grow, it helps us grow too. So my mom wasn't lying. When we eat our veggies, we do grow big and strong. Oh, that's why I'm six foot, huh? But sadly, sadly all good things have to come to an end and we must die at some point in our lives. But we're not done yet. After we decompose, found nothing but bones. We restart the nitrogen cycle by putting the nitrogen that we once had in our bodies back into that soil. I think you can see how both of those examples show not only a great understanding of content, but also that amazing voice that comes through of each of those students, sharing their ideas and enthusiasm for what they're learning in school. The final tool in the Adobe Spark Suite is Adobe Spark Page. These are those scrolling web pages where you can bring a lot of images to life and really have it look like a professional product online when your students are finished. There's three examples here, all three showing some research that most likely took place by these students. This first one is sixth grader who explains and teaches about the Colorado River, including the geography, Grand Canyon, flags, the source of the Colorado River, some facts and statistics, information about the people. You can see the scrolling web page format that Adobe Spark Page allows for really looks slick and professional when shared online. I'm just scrolling down through the web page and able to read back the information and see the pictures however the students set it up. Let's take a look at the second example that Adobe Spark shared here by a second grader. This one's actually sharing a trip to Singapore and what she saw and learned. So a great way to share photos, put some text labels on them, share additional information in between each photo, and let viewers who want to see what you've learned enjoy it with that Adobe Spark Page. The final example is a high school example sharing information and facts about the Supreme Court. You can see different styles for adding to your Spark Page include poll quotes, basic text, of course the images with captions. On this one you'll even see that the students have added videos so that the viewer can take the time to hit play and view a video right in line with the rest of the information, full page graphics and more. So those are some Adobe Spark Page examples. Now let me show you how what the tool looks like when we actually go inside of it online. To visit the three tools with a laptop like I mentioned before you need just go to spark.adobe.com or on an iPad you'll need each of the three apps. Now regardless of which way you're accessing Adobe Spark you do need that Adobe login. It's a free sign-in and a free account which in the past was restricted by a 13-year-old age requirement so that younger grades of students were encouraged to access Adobe Spark by using a shared classroom login. It's easy to set up and easy to manage from the teacher's point of view but not as personalized and individualized and in future when we are happy to see the April update hopefully be announced this will no longer be the issue. So for those of you who want to use it tomorrow know that you will need some sort of Adobe login to access it. All right so when you visit spark.adobe.com for the first time you'll want to create that new Adobe ID if you haven't in the past or login if you already have one. I'll login with my email address and password and access my dashboard of my Adobe Spark projects. You can see my different posts pages and or videos all saved on my dashboard here and like I mentioned the blue plus the middle top allows me to start with one of the three apps right across the top of my screen. Let's start with a post and go in the order we've been mentioning throughout this whole webinar. You can start with a template from Adobe Spark post. They give you some really good starting points for what an online poster or social media post might look like. They also give you different sizes and starting kind of layouts from which they're easy to adapt. You can also start from scratch. So my sizes are listed below. I'm just going to do a typical poster size. What do I want to say is the main text on it. So I might say my vocabulary word and create a poster to show my understanding of a new term. There we go and I can put that vocabulary word in the middle. I can add additional text boxes with the green plus. I can add text and photos. Let's use the word immense as an example. I can drag and drop those boxes. I can change the font size and color and let's do a loud font here. I'll just change the color just to show that it's possible. And then I'll use that green plus again. This time adding a photo. I can't upload any photo from my device using this upload button here but I also like the power to find free photos in some Creative Commons licensed galleries. I could just type in the word immense here. It may not find a great image because it's a pretty abstract adjective but maybe large might. No results again. Let's think of something that is immense like a mountain. The results are coming from two very well known safe Creative Commons sites Unsplash and Pixabay and I like this image here of this mountain. I can definitely adjust how much of that image shows and move it around within the frame. And I could maybe add a filter to my photo or even use that green plus again and put another image or another text box. Most certainly I would probably want a definition, a part of speech for my vocabulary poster and once I've created that simple post then I share my project by making it publicly viewable saving it in my Adobe Spark gallery and I can also download it and just use it as a graphic on my device to share however I see fit. In upcoming versions when we get that educational licensing available we can remove this logo but for now that's part of the free limitation is keeping that logo on our creations and that's Adobe Spark post. I'm going to go back to my main menu here and show you how to create a page. Now Adobe Spark page that scrolling web page it's really great for retelling a large amount of information maybe a research topic or a jigsaw unit where every student is in charge of retelling that story not just with text but also with visuals. So in this scrolling web page you can see it works just to go from top to bottom as the student. You might add your title at the top about Abraham Lincoln my subtitle might be my name and then the pluses just let me add or in this case I just have the option to fill in that gray space with a photo. I can upload one again or find one. Let's just put in Lincoln here. I'm sure we'll get some options for free copyright free photos. Is Lincoln in it? Oh Lincoln Nebraska. Let's use the Lincoln memorial here and it'll fill that that title banner space with that image. Now for the next plus I have the choice I can either have viewers scroll through my page and see a photo, a piece of text, a button, a video, a photo grid or a glide show. Let me really quick demonstrate each of these. Photo is the same as we used to fill the title spot just place the photo on the screen and then you can choose whether or not you add a caption. The next option is text. This is your text box. There's a couple of header styles or a pull quote style. You can do a bulleted or numbered list. You can format your text to be bold italics. You can even add a link to a website. If you would want your viewers to visit a website you can just select that and make it an active link. There we go and any additional text around that can be left aligned, right aligned. You just edit that text box by clicking on it and using these commands that come up some formatting options as well. The next plus is to add a button. I like buttons for choices so you could place buttons center aligned or left aligned and have more than one button that would let viewers go visit various examples or different websites to learn more. We'll just hit cancel there. The video option allows you to get a video from YouTube, Vimeo or a different Spark video and just embed it on the page so that viewers don't have to leave your Adobe Spark page but rather can just hit the play and view the video in line. Next we have a photo grid. This is helpful if you have numerous photos. We can place as many as we want into the photo grid. We'll just select a few here and you'll notice it just places them where it sees best in that photo grid. You can adjust them a little bit by making it a large photo or not, changing the order of the photos and the images in your collage. Once you've got your grid the way you want it you just hit save and it goes back to your scrolling page and that's an element in your Spark page. There you can add that caption or choose not to as well. And finally the glide show. This is just a fancier way of formatting the information on your screen. If we were to put an image here it just gives it that fancier look and feel to what's gliding across the screen as the user scrolls. You may have noticed some of them in the examples that were shown earlier as being that glide show element as opposed to just a scrolling photo and text. So now you see once I hit save on the glide show then I'm back to my Adobe Spark page but when I get to that element it has that different feel to it. Here's the gliding text box on top of the um we can put a button or a link on there too. The capital state capital building in Lincoln Nebraska and it again has some different options because you're in that glide show element. So that's really all there is to it. You do not have to go in the order that I went in I just tried to give you a quick glimpse into all the options on the Adobe Spark page. I'll go back to the main menu. The nice thing about sharing an Adobe Spark page is once you've created one it's already a web page. So if you just share that link you can use the URL of your page with anybody else and let them access all of your information through that one link. I use a Adobe Spark page for professional development web pages so that I can share information in a variety of formats whether it be images, videos, text, buttons where people can click on it they can do it all in that scrolling web page. So they're able to use the URL that I share with them that came directly from Adobe Spark. And finally the video. We'll click on the plus here and give you a quick tour of the Adobe Spark video tool. This one might be all about me as an example. They do have templates which give you kind of the base storyline for a lot of generic ideas. You can also just make up your own, start from scratch. You'll see a lot of commonalities with Spark post and page that we've already looked at when you visit a Spark video for the first time. We can definitely watch these tips later on. We can add text, video, photos or an icon. And just for something different here because we know how to look for photos on the sidebar like we did with the other two. We know how to add text and hopefully video is pretty self-explanatory. I'm going to choose the icon this time. This search is the noun project which is as another Creative Commons license repository of images but this one is more they're just simple images that can tell a story without using those full color photographs. It gives a different look and feel to it. So all about me I'm going to search for an icon that represents being a teacher and the noun project pulls up lots of options. Let's use this one. Okay so my first slide you can see down here at the bottom contains the icon that I found from the noun project and there's a couple of slides that are ready for me credits and outro that I can't change but if I click this plus down here I just get a second slide or have those same options. Let's go with an icon again. Something else about me let's put an icon to tell about my enjoyment of photography. These are just those simple simple graphics that I can then add my voice to to bring the story to life. I'll click the plus on the bottom and get a new slide. Oh this one let's do a split screen that looks like fun. That's the layout and then I will use on this side I'll use an icon. Let's put Shamrock to talk about my hometown here and on this side put something to represent Nebraska so I've got my town and my state let's put a corn cob or something that will represent the cornhusker state that looks great. There we go and I've got my third slide and you can see how easy this is. I don't even need to show you how I can mix in videos just text slides and or photos as well. What's really powerful with Adobe Spark video is how once we've got our slides created we'll just click this red record button and record our voice narrating on top like we heard those students talking about the field trip to the farm and the nitrogen cycle and I just hit that record and talk and the slides advance when I advance them and when I'm finished I can share this final video and download it even as a standalone video to either hand in or share with my classmates inside of the classroom without needing to post it online. However if I do want to upload it to YouTube or share it some other way online I'm able to as well with the Adobe Spark video tool. So that's it. I hope you can see many uses for these free tools. I hope that they are not very intimidating but rather inviting for both you and your students and know that if you ever need any additional assistance or inspiration for ideas for the classroom don't hesitate to reach out to us at ESU 8. Thanks for listening and have a great rest of the month.