This week (6/10-6/14) I attended the Adobe Education Institute virtual conference, which focuses on using Adobe Creative Cloud applications in higher education to make learning more exciting and engaging. While I don’t teach an academic course, I do lead training sessions for academic classes, and one of my main training focus areas is on Adobe Creative Cloud applications, so I registered for the conference so I could get some new ideas for content to include in training sessions. It’s definitely been a helpful and enjoyable conference to attend!
While I couldn’t make it to all the sessions this week, I’ve been able to make it to three live sessions that I think will be helpful when I work with faculty to develop training for their students. As part of these sessions, we got the chance to experiment with different tools in Adobe Express as well as other Creative Cloud applications to create different types of projects, and here are some of the projects I made as part of each session.
Designing Presentations with Adobe Express
In this session, we had the chance to explore the Presentations tool in Adobe Express, which enables you to make visually exciting presentations with ease. For example, students (or anyone who needs to present information!) can create a presentation in Adobe Express that demonstrates their knowledge of a specific topic and use Adobe’s extensive image and asset library to help create an engaging presentation. During the session, attendees experimented with creating a title slide for a presentation and editing an existing presentation – and since my cat Hannah was camped out in my lap during the sessions, I decided to use her as the subject for my example projects.
For an example presentation, check out this presentation on ice cream for cats that I made during the session. (It’s a little silly, yes, but I was having a lot of fun with the idea!)
Storytelling with Video
This session focused on using video to supplement lesson content in courses that have an online component. As the video development coordinator at IT Training, I’m always looking for more ways to use video to help make course content more engaging, and in this session we experimented with the Animate from Audio tool in Adobe Express to create videos using an avatar that’s animated based on your recorded voice. Participants also learned how to export a video from Adobe Express and edit it in Premiere Pro, including creating a transcript and captions. (Adobe Express also has a captioning feature, too! You can find it in the Quick Actions menu in the pop-up that appears when you click on the Create New button.)
While the Animate from Audio tool was pretty bogged down during the session (after all, over 200 people were trying to render video at the same time!), I took some time to experiment with it after the session wrapped up. It’s very easy to use, and you can take the video created in Animate from Audio and edit it in the Adobe Express video editor, or import it into Premiere Pro to use it in a more complex video.
It took me about 5 minutes to choose a character and background, record the audio, and let the audio process – and a few more minutes to add the little lower third graphic and apply animation to it. It’s a lot faster than creating video using Adobe Character Animator, but you’re not able to customize the character you choose, so if you want more customization options, you may want to work with Character Animator. Still, if you want to make something quickly without a lot of fuss, Animate from Audio works well!
Create Graphs and Visualize Data
I had a lot of fun in this session! We explored using the chart element in the Adobe Express editor to add charts to a flyer, as well as one of my favorite tools in Illustrator: the graph tool! (I feel like not enough people know about the graph tool – it’s a great alternative to making charts and graphs in Excel, especially for folks who are already familiar with working in Illustrator.) Having additional tools that can help make attractive data visualizations for projects and presentations is always good, in my opinion.
Following are the example projects I made as part of this session:
Final thoughts
The Adobe Education Institute conference really showcased just how much you can do with Adobe Express. I’m really pleased to see how much Adobe Express has grown over the past 8 years since its initial release as Adobe Spark, and after attending this week’s sessions, I feel like I have a better idea of its capabilities and where it might be helpful in academic courses. While I’ve already taught some workshops on Adobe Express, mainly on how to create web pages and flyers, I’m hoping more IU faculty request training sessions for their students on other aspects of Adobe Express, like Animate from Audio and presentations. I especially like the Presentations tool, and feel like this could be a good alternative to PowerPoint for those who want to create presentations that really grab a viewer’s attention.
All in all, I’m glad I took the time to attend these sessions. I feel like I know the tools available in Adobe Express a lot better now, and am already thinking of ways to incorporate them into my work – both with designing training and as a topic to teach!
If you haven’t used Adobe Express before, you should check it out!
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