Getting Started Resources

How students and teachers benefit from Adobe Creative Cloud

Classroom engagement

Integrate digital skills across disciplines and throughout your curriculum to help your students master their subject matter, stay immersed in their learning, and improve their learning outcomes.

Soft-skills development

Develop your students’ essential soft skills like creativity, critical-thinking, creative problem-solving, and collaboration.

Employment advantages

Ensure that your students learn skills that attract the attention of hiring managers and remain relevant well beyond graduation.

Making the most of Creative Cloud at your school

Outcomes > Tools

Focus on the skills and student outcomes over the tools themselves. We're proud of what we've built at Adobe, but we also know that some of our products have more features and complexities than the average student needs. Our "getting started" resources are here to help you cut through some of the features, and put the student at the center. You can learn just enough of the tool to feel comfortable bringing Adobe into the classroom and empower your students to learn more.

Process > Perfection

This resource you're reading was created in Adobe Spark, and it's a fantastic tool. Spark is a great place for faculty and students to get started with Adobe. You'll be creating beautiful web pages in seconds.

But to realize the full value of Creative Cloud and the digital literacy skills students can build, we hope you'll push outside the comfort of Spark and explore more apps and education use cases. Here are a few ideas:

• Premiere Rush: Students can quickly create professional quality videos for final projects, documentaries, or 1-minute introductory videos. Adobe's newest video product is designed with beginners in mind, so faculty and students can focus on student outcomes and skills, rather than learning a more complex video editing tool.
• XD: Easily prototype professional quality interactive applications, websites, and user experiences for any device. Your students will be able to quickly bring to life their ideas in a new medium.
• Audition: Produce professional quality audio recordings. Podcasts are emerging as a mainstream communication medium, and what better way for students to understand and critique the medium than to create their own?
• Photoshop: Create and enhance images and artwork for communications projects, final presentations, and more.
• InDesign: Create professional quality infographics, publication layouts, or resume templates.
• Illustrator: Students can design custom logos and icons for presentations, business ideas, or graphics communications.

Todd Taylor from UNC Chapel Hill brings the power of multi-modal creation and criticism to life for his students. Todd asks his students to explore a single subject through five different media: website (Spark), journal (InDesign), magazine (InDesign), podcast (Audition), and documentary (Rush). He said that students quickly found that changing the media actually changed the story they told.

Measuring the impact of Adobe on Campus

Here are a few ideas on how to track the impact of digital literacy on your students and at your institution.

• Pre/post student surveys measuring engagement, course satisfaction, comfort with key skills
• Quantitative evaluation of number of faculty reached, number of students reached, disciplines impacted
• Longterm impact on employability of students, especially in non-design careers

Sharing your work

We encourage you to share your work within your discipline but also with your peers in the broader digital literacy community. Here are a few ways to get started:

• Forum for sharing work internally with faculty and students involved, or a larger showcase of work
• Share curricula examples on EdEx for other educators to get inspired by the great work and new use cases you've explored
• Share student examples on an Adobe Behance, Portfolio, or Spark page and bring that content to your internal media relations or communications team
• Propose your success stories to Creative Campus, EduMAX, EDUCAUSE to share the outcomes of your initiatives