Earn your Sequoia Storytelling digital badge

This opportunity promotes TRANS-LITERACY, or literacy across platforms. This includes listening to podcasts, looking at art, understanding infographics, vetting social media, reading non-fiction, and more.

What is the Sequoia Storytelling Society?

Having come to the Library Media Center from the English classroom, and even more recently the digital photography/journalism classroom, I know the importance of Project-Based Learning first-hand. I relied on the Adobe Creative Suite in my Media Arts classes, which was always just a tad too complicated in the English classroom setting, where students weren't expecting to create digital art.

When the Sequoia English Departmen reckoned with the true meaning of Summer Reading pre-pandemic, I stepped in to encourage students to consider how they engage with content across platforms. In a post-pandemic atmosphere where we encouraged students to reject their screens, one thing became clear. We need to form a community of engaged thinkers on campus, and summer is a great to time to kick it off. But how would I, the library media specialist, track projects from hundreds of students?

Enter Adobe Express, a perfect introduction to the creative industry with an inherent application in our curriculum. It is intuitive yet advanced to satisfy a true digital creative. The Adobe Express app has even more options at your fingertips, like animating audio for your camera-shy folks, and one-click translation to be sure all students feel seen.

Students using Adobe Express are on the right track for industry employment, since the majority of professional design studios use the Adobe Creative Suite. Buy why Adobe Express, you ask? Students find that using Adobe Express elevates their digital art-making experience with built-in tutorials for self-guided learning.

Some of my favorite implementations of Adobe Express include alter-ego creation to kick-off community building in any classroom. I particularly love using the gen AI features with our emerging language learners, as they practice parts of speech and descriptive vocabulary while building their likeness.

More exciting than ever is the new roll-out of Adobe Express classrooms. As the library media specialist without a roster of students, current Sequoia students can join my Adobe Express classroom and create a piece for the Storytelling Society, starting from an array of templates. Featured below, you will find students combining quotes from their favorite books/authors with images, a book review template, and a book talk template, all to build and grow our community of readers.

So what are you waiting for? Challenge yourself this summer by Dive into the Sequoia Storytelling Society to complete one of the many options. I look forward to celebrating your creations!

by Elizabeth Snow | MLIS