Every year tools that we love get updates, especially during the Summer when teachers are on break. Adobe Spark is one of those tools. For a quick review, Adobe Spark is a tool that allows students and teachers to create and share impactful visual stories using three media types, Video, Page and Post.

I’ve used it for my Favorite Quote Friday’s, which is now Motivational Mondays, which you can find on Instagram @beardedtechedguy or my website https://www.beardedtechedguy.com 

When you ask Adobe what each part of Spark is, this was their response:

Spark Video allows you turn your story into a captivating animated narrated video in just minutes. Presenting a report, explaining a concept in class, or telling a personal story has never been easier. Starting with a blank slate, or using gentle prompts as a guide, teachers and students use Spark to talk through their story one line at a time. Pick from thousands of beautiful, iconic images (or use your own) to illustrate your ideas and add icons and your own video clips. Select a design theme and supporting music. Spark automatically incorporates cinema-quality animation; just tap play and view it on any device or browser. Then, share with friends, family, and the world.

Spark Page allows students to create an interactive website with easy to follow prompts. You can turn stories into modern, professional, attention-grabbing web pages. With Page, teachers and students can bring words and images together in fun ways, turning essays, assignments, reports, and more into engaging visual stories. Play with a variety of layouts and add text. Use your own photos or pick from thousands of free online images (with appropriate filtering applied). Simply tap on one of the professional themes and beautiful fonts, and magazine-style design and motion transforms the story. The result is a modern, responsive web page, one that looks great on any device and any size screen.

Spark Post enables you to create stunning graphics in seconds. Start by remixing a design or start from scratch to create a unique masterpiece. Either way, add an image, provide text, and beautiful typography will be applied on-the-fly. Transform your creation by applying design filters with a single tap. Each tap gives you new layouts, color palettes, typography styles, and photo filters – no design experience required. When you’re done, save your creation, print, and share.

Once summer came to a wrap Adobe had announced many new updates to Spark including adding more templates, that range from new stickers to new fonts. Any way for you and your students to be more creative sounds awesome to me, more choice more creativity! Another new feature is the ability to collaborate! You can finally share Sparks with classmates, which will allow for group projects to now take place using Spark. What was also pretty awesome from ISTE this year is that some of the Sparkers who spoke discussed some upcoming features to Adobe Spark like better commenting for great feedback, co-editing like in Word or PowerPoint, and project sharing through mobile apps!

With these great improvements you might ask yourself, “How can I use this with my Students?” Well, keep reading partner!

Spark gives you the ability to flex your creative mind, which students will love. First you need to think about what you want your students to create as an end product. My thoughts for video would be suited for some sort of oral presentations, the type of storytelling that you may have used PowerPoint for. A page is a visual text-based story, so you can think about doing some sort of character site (like a fan site for) of some sort of project that students would have a few pictures. For posts, think some sort of social media type post. Another thought would be using it like a poster.

Many teachers have posted on Twitter and Instagram different projects they have done with Spark, from what I have found here are a few ideas that other teachers have come up with:

• Sight words 
• Narrative Prompts
• Creative storytelling
• Story starters 
• Video book reports
• Research papers
• Photo Essay
• Class Reports and Blogs
• Marketing for a book talk    
• Rhyming Games

You can go to edex.adobe.com and spark.adobe.com/edu get even more ideas on what you can do in the classroom.

Here are a few of my favorite Sparks that I have created!

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