Welcome to a new chapter of creative literacy, curated especially for you, the heart and soul of your school's creative journey.
As librarians and media specialists, you wield the power to unlock the full spectrum of digital storytelling with Adobe Express. This guide is your compass, pointing the way to a world where every student’s story is visualized, valued, and celebrated. Together, let’s make creativity the cornerstone of our learning communities!
This guide is broken down into the following topics:
- Introduction to Adobe Express
- Getting Started: Try a Guided Activity!
- Idea Sparks for How to Get Started
- Enhancing Literacy through Creative Storytelling
- AI and Media Literacy with Adobe Express
- Instructional Partnerships and Collaboration
Additional templates and crowd-sourcing of ideas are located on our Padlet:
Introduction to Adobe Express for Education
What is Adobe Express?
At its' heart, Adobe Express is a suite of tools that allow you and your students to create stunning graphics, videos, and webpages.
Think of Adobe Express as your digital art box for teaching, brimming with tools that can transform your lessons into dynamic, interactive experiences.
It’s a platform where your educational ideas can come alive, whether that's designing an engaging infographic, creating a compelling video for a lesson, or helping students build their own digital portfolios.
Adobe Express not only provides a canvas for creativity but also inspires communication, collaboration, and critical thinking in your classroom.
Why choose to use Adobe Express?
Adobe Express is user-friendly, adaptable, and caters to a variety of creative needs. It provides an intuitive interface and numerous templates that make content creation accessible to all skill levels.
For school librarians, it’s a practical tool to enhance instruction, engage students creatively, and effectively communicate with the school community.
Where to Start? Explore Guided Activities!
Adobe for Education offers Guided Activities - short, focused projects designed to teach a creative skill in 10 minutes or less. These activities are paired with templates, step-by-step instructions, and video guidance, making it easy for both educators and students to get hands-on with Adobe Express.
Sharing Guided Activities with teachers and students is one of the best ways to seamlessly embed creativity into your school’s culture. With a library of activities that tie into various content areas, Guided Activities are a perfect starting point for anyone looking to foster creativity in the classroom.
Why Use Guided Activities?
Guided Activities are a powerful tool for school librarians looking to empower creative literacy skills and foster instructional partnerships with teachers. Here's why they’re an invaluable addition to your toolkit:
- Adaptable for Any Lesson: Whether you're collaborating with a science teacher on infographics, supporting an ELA class with visual essays, or helping students create historical timelines for social studies, Guided Activities can be easily tailored to fit any subject or grade level. This flexibility makes them ideal for building strong instructional partnerships.
- Scaffolding Creative Literacy: Each Guided Activity provides structured support that helps students gradually develop essential creative literacy skills. Students learn to communicate ideas visually, critically engage with information, and express themselves effectively—all while building confidence in their abilities.
- Skill-Building for Teachers and Students: These activities aren’t just for students - teachers gain hands-on experience with Adobe Express, discovering new ways to integrate creativity into their lessons.
- Ease of Implementation: With step-by-step instructions and pre-made templates, Guided Activities take the pressure off planning, making it simple for librarians and teachers to co-teach or integrate them into existing lessons.
- Fostering Collaboration: Sharing student creations during class or school events inspires collaboration, builds community, and showcases the library’s role as a hub of innovation and creativity.
By leveraging Guided Activities, school librarians can amplify their role as creative leaders, empowering both students and teachers to explore new horizons in learning.
How Do You Promote Guided Activities?
- Monthly Newsletters: Share a featured Guided Activity along with a direct link to the template and ideas for classroom integration.
- Social Media: Post about the activities on your school’s social channels, showcase exceptional student creations, and encourage participation.
- Collaborate with Teachers: Work with educators to incorporate the activities into their lessons, such as creating posters for science projects or visual essays for book studies.
- Library Displays: Highlight student work from completed activities with a rotating showcase in your library or school lobby.
- Morning Announcements: Use announcements to spark excitement and share quick tips or ideas for the week’s activity.
- Learning Management Systems: Post activities directly to Google Classroom, Canvas, or Teams for easy student access.
- Community Sharing Platforms: Create a collaborative Padlet or Wakelet for students to upload and view each other's projects.
- Celebrations: Host a showcase at the end of the year or after a big project to celebrate creativity school-wide.
Access Adobe’s Guided Activities
Guided Activities are available directly in Adobe Express for Education, making it easy to find and share them. Explore the library and find the perfect activity for your class today!
Ideas for Using Adobe Express as a School Librarian
Build Instructional Partnerships
- Collaborative Projects: Partner with teachers to create collaborative student projects using Adobe Express. These could be multimedia presentations, digital storytelling, or interactive reports.
- Curriculum Support: Work with teachers to create engaging, interactive learning materials that align with the curriculum, such as infographics or interactive timelines.
- Cross-Curricular Connections: Use Adobe Express for assignments that bridge subjects, like creating infographics that combine art and data from science experiments.
- Reading Challenges: Use Adobe Express to design creative reading challenges for different classes or grade levels. Share the challenges with teachers and encourage them to participate with their students. Use graphics to create flyers, a website to house links and browsing lists, and videos for the morning announcements.
- Student Portfolios: Teach teachers and students how to use Adobe Express to create digital portfolios showcasing their work and growth over the year.
- Professional Development Workshops: Offer Adobe Express training workshops for teachers to show them how they can use this tool in their classrooms for various subjects. Consider sharing with PLCs or departments for a more personalized look at how Adobe Express can support them.
Library Programming
- Newsletters: Create visually appealing newsletters using the website feature sharing library news, book recommendations, MakerSpace updates, and creative and reading challenges. Template Link
- Social Content: Create eye-catching social media posts or flyers quickly with social media templates to promote library activities, showcase new arrivals, or highlight student work.
- Partner with Student Library Board: Pro Tip - collaborate with your student library board (or ambassadors) to create materials or resources for your library using Adobe Express. It's easy to share and collaborate with graphics! Planning Guide
Information & Media Literacy Skills
- Deconstructing Advertisements: Have students use Adobe Express to recreate an existing advertisement, then discuss the choices they made in terms of images, text, and color. This can lead to a discussion about the strategies advertisers use to influence audiences.
- News Story Analysis: Students can create side-by-side comparisons of how different news outlets cover the same story. They can use Adobe Express to compile screenshots, quotes, headlines, etc., and then analyze the differences.
- Digital Storytelling: Teach students to convey information through multimedia. They can create their own digital story on a chosen topic, combining text, images, video, and audio in Adobe Express.
- Bias in Media: Have students use Adobe Express to create presentations showcasing examples of bias in different forms of media, discussing the impact of bias on public opinion.
- Fake News Detection: Students can create a guide using Adobe Express that outlines tips for identifying fake news and verifying credible sources online.
- Digital Citizenship Trading Cards: Students can create their own digital citizenship trading cards by designing a 'hero card' that presents their advice for being a great digital citizen. Template Link
- Share Research Learnings: Students can create visual essays, information cards, and so much more! Template Link for Research Card
Enhancing Literacy through Creative Storytelling
Ideas for Engaging Readers and Reflecting:
- Book Trailers: Have students use Adobe Express's Video Creation Tool to design a trailer for their favorite book. They can integrate images, videos, music and more to advertise the book to other readers.
- Interactive Displays: Create QR Codes right in Adobe Express to link to digital content about the book. Students can also design posters or creative plot cards that outline book themes.
- Genre Bookmarks: Design bookmarks that highlight specific genres or books. Us the Adobe QR Code creator to link to book collections in Sora or E-Books. Template Link
- Book Cover Design Challenge: Have students recreate or reimagine the cover of their favorite summer reading book.
- Reading Goal Poster: Students can design a digital poster outlining their reading goals for the year.
Quick Win Ideas with Adobe Express
- Animate from Audio Book Talks - Encourage students to select a memorable passage from their favorite book and use Adobe Express’s Animate from Audio feature to create a dynamic book talk. This not only highlights key narratives but also practices oral and digital storytelling skills.
- Book Quote Templates - Utilize Adobe Express’s book quote templates for students to design visually appealing posters featuring their favorite quotes. This activity promotes critical thinking as students ponder the significance of these quotes.
Guess My Book Challenge
- Access the challenge template here to kickstart the "Guess My Book" activity.
- Students can customize the template by uploading images that symbolize the main character, setting, and a pivotal object from their chosen book. They should also include the book’s title, author, and a key quote.
- Upon completion, students can download their poster or share it online with their class, sparking a guessing game that tests their inference skills and book knowledge.
Project Ideas Using Adobe Express’s Webpage Feature
- Visual Essays for Character Analysis - Assign students to create a visual essay that delves into a character analysis. By combining text with images, videos, and other multimedia elements, students can offer a comprehensive view of a character's development, motivations, and impact on the story.
- Interactive Book Reports - Move beyond traditional book reports by having students design interactive web pages. This can include embedded book trailers, audio snippets of dramatic readings, and visual timelines of the plot.
AI & Media Literacy with Adobe Express
Media Literacy Curriculum with CAI & Adobe
The Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) is an Adobe-led community of major media and technology companies (and others) working to combat mis/disinformation by establishing the open-source industry standard for digital content provenance.
High School & Middle School Curriculum: These lesson plans enable teachers to explain how information, including images, can be used to create narratives about people, issues, histories, and communities worldwide.
AI Generated Media Analysis Lesson
Deep dive into AI-generated media and art with this secondary school lesson.
Generative AI Creative Writing Prompts
- Open Adobe Express and start a new project.
- Use the 'text to image' feature under the 'media' tab on the left hand side of the screen.
- Choose one of the following mad libs to create an AI-generated image!
- Fantasy World - "In a land of [adjective], where [noun] fly and [noun]s roam, the [adjective] [noun] seeks the [noun] of legend."
- Adventure Trip - "After a [adjective] journey through the [noun], [name of a student] discovered a [adjective] [noun], guarded by a [adjective] [noun]."
- Science Fiction - "In the year [number], humans live on [planet name or adjective planet]. They wear [adjective] outfits and use [noun] to communicate. Their favorite pastime is [activity]."
- The Mystery of School - "At [school name or generic 'the school'], every [day of the week], the students noticed a [adjective] [noun] that would appear by the [location/place]. The principal believes it's the work of the [adjective] [noun]."
Use an ebook template or the webpage feature to capture student writing using these prompts as their starting ideas.
Bring Literature to Life by Leveraging Generative AI Features
Visualize a Literary Character with Generative AI
- Direct students to use the text-to-image feature to bring literary characters to life visually. This activity enhances understanding of character traits and settings, making the literature more relatable and vivid. Access the lesson plan here:
Recreate Book Covers with Gen AI
- Challenge students to redesign book covers using Generative AI, reflecting their interpretation of the story’s themes and characters. This encourages creativity and a deeper engagement with the narrative.
Generate AI-powered Story Visuals
- Have students generate visuals for key scenes or themes using Generative AI. This can aid in discussions about symbolism, themes, and the mood of various segments of the book.
Next Steps to Elevate Your Creative Superpowers
Join our ACE Facebook Page!
Become an ACE Leader!
Elevate Your Leadership and Technology Skills - Accepting Applications for 2024-2025!
Are you looking to enhance your leadership and technology skills? Join our Adobe Creative Educator (ACE) Leader program! Specifically designed for school librarians like you, this program empowers you to lead and inspire others in the realm of digital creativity while addressing the unique challenges of our often solo roles in schools.
As librarians, we know how essential it is to connect beyond our school buildings to uplift, inspire, and collaborate with like-minded professionals. The ACE Leader program provides opportunities to break through isolation and build a network of supportive creative educators.
As an ACE Leader, you'll receive:
- Advanced Training: Deepen your understanding of Adobe tools and become a certified expert in digital creativity, with resources tailored to support library programming and partnerships.
- Leadership Development: Enhance your leadership abilities by spearheading initiatives, hosting workshops, and mentoring peers within the Adobe Creative Educator community.
- Networking Opportunities: Connect with other leaders and innovators in education across the Southeast and beyond, building partnerships and exchanging ideas to enrich your library and school.
This is your chance to not only master new technologies but also to build crucial leadership skills that will impact your professional journey and contribute significantly to your educational community.