Adobe Spark is a free graphic design app that allows students and teachers with no design experience to create impactful graphics, web stories, and animated videos. With a goal of encouraging creativity and meaningful communication without requiring a degree in graphic design, Adobe Spark allows users to integrate text, photos, original fonts, video, audio, professional themes, and icons into simple-but-professional projects that communicate ideas cohesively and quickly. Project templates include social memes, mini websites, narrated tutorials, presentations, reports, posters, how-to videos, and more.
Adobe has a Spark Page, Post, and Video -- providing three technology in the classroom ways to tell a story. Just pick the one best suited to your communication style. The desktop app gives access to all three in one spot while a mobile device requires the download of three different free apps. It works equally well on your desktop, laptop, Chromebook, Mac, iOS device, and mobile device, and syncs between all with ease. Technology in the classroom projects can require as little or much typing as you want, making this app perfect for youngsters as well as high schoolers.
Where lots of programs differ significantly depending upon whether you access them via the desktop or an app, that's not true for Adobe Spark. It looks and acts the same (for the most part) however you get there.
Spark includes a variety of beautiful fonts, many more than the traditional choices included in most word processing applications.
Adobe Spark videos can be downloaded and saved as an MP4.
Spark at present has no premium options to confuse what you get for free and no charge for hosting content.
Here are eight ways to energize your use of Spark in the classroom:
Pick a photo and add quick text. Then, publish to your social media or save it as a file or a screenshot. Easy.
Switch from PowerPoint to a quick-to-create, professional-looking, all-inclusive Spark video. Pick a goal (such as "Explain a concept"), add a background, follow the prompts for what is included in a successful presentation, add your voice, video, text, icons, and more. When done, save it as a video (not a slideshow file) that can be played anywhere.
Collect images from a field trip or class event into one scrolling slideshow-like file. Add text, videos, icons, and more to each slide. Then, publish.
Start with a photo. Add your voice, icons, a professional soundtrack (included in the Spark library), and turn your pictures into an inspiring video.
Instead of the boring, conventional, word processor-based book report, mix visual pieces with narrative, images, icons, videos, and other multimedia to better communicate knowledge and excite other students about reading the book.
Replace uninviting file folders that you click-click-click through with one Spark document that displays all student work for a grading period or a year. Students select a theme, add a table of contents that they update with each new project, provide a brief author bio, and then display each project on a separate page. These are fun to view, reflect the pride students have in their work, and are easily shared with teachers and classmates.
Where these used to take hours to create, now you can build one quickly from a Spark page. Create a cover, add as many slides as you need mixing text, images, video, and more. Before publishing and sharing (as a link or QR code), try out different easy-to-use themes to see what fits your topic best.
These are colorful one-page posters that share important information in a highly consumable, visual way. Select a template and a theme, add the pieces you want to communicate your message (text, images, icons, videos, and more), and then distribute digitally.
***
If you use a boatload of different webtools to create videos, posters, explainers, infographics, cover pages, and more, you'll be excited about this one-stop-shop tool. Next time, just open Spark and start. You won't be sorry.