10+ Ways to Use Adobe Express in the Classroom
Hello there, fellow knowledge-seekers! You’re about to read a transcript that’s been generated by the AI in Adobe Premiere Pro and then me. I’ve gone through these lines like a cat chasing a laser pointer. But, even the best of us can be caught napping. Spot a mistake in this transcript? Help this teacher out and shoot an email to vicki at coolcatteacher dot com. Thank you for being helpful! – Vicki, your podcast host and friendly fellow classroom teacher.
Transcript
Vicki Davis
So excited today to be talking with Jesse It’s long overdue. We’ve been talking for a couple years about getting together and he’s an education evangelist for Adobe. But today, Jesse, we really want to talk about what teachers have accessible for free honestly, a lot of teachers are losing access to a lot of different tools that they may have had available in the last few years. And there’s still some awesome free ed tech tools that they can use.
in the classroom and one of those is Adobe Express, which is free for all schools. So this is a really cool creative tool that can be used by anybody.
Jesse Lubinsky
And you know, I agree with you. We work with districts all around the country. We hear all the time about schools losing access to these tools. And I know that when people think of Adobe, they tend to think when we ask, you know, PDFs, Photoshop, or our creative cloud tools, which are really, you know, pricey creative tools that industry professionals use. And that’s not necessarily something that every classroom is going to use. So what does the teacher in their classroom do?
to get access to stuff that’s going to allow them to empower their students through creativity. And so Adobe Express is our solution to And so I’m really grateful for the opportunity to come share some ways that Adobe Express can actually help teachers empower their students through creativity.
Vicki Davis
Okay, so teachers, we’re going to talk about 10 awesome free ways that you can use these different tools in your classroom. So Jesse, what’s your first really cool way of an idea that teachers can use?
Jesse Lubinsky
So it was funny because right before we started recording, I was jotting these down really quickly to like, which are my favorites? What are the 10 different things I see teachers doing the most? And
one thing that I know that teachers have been using a lot is one of our quick actions, which is called Animate from Audio. And Animate from Audio is actually based on one of our Adobe tools called Character Animator, where it allows you to simply pick a character, pick a background, and then record. And when a student is done recording,
animate the character based on the inflections of the student’s voice and how they’ve spoken. And so it seems like almost like you’re an animated character. And there’s so many ways to use that from an instructional You might not think of it right away, but if you think about it, for those creative students who want to create animations, they can actually get multiple characters in there using some tricks and create, you know, animated scenes. But even for something as simple as student reflection, it’s one of my favorite tools.
an image of the work you’ve done and have a student simply take that quick right or that end of lesson reflection we would typically have them do and turn it into something more creative. We find that when students have a creative opportunity to engage in their work, they’re more likely to get a creative outcome. And so this is actually a really great way to do that.
Vicki Davis
Okay, so I love character and used it forever. Our school is an Adobe school and we have all the bells and whistles. But one thing I’ve always loved about it is that the kids who don’t really like to go on they have these really cool, like they can be a goldfish or they can be a parrot or they can be whatever. And like, you know, I’ll have you know, explain how the internet works in the animated character of your choice. And…
Jesse Lubinsky
Ha ha.
Exactly.
Vicki Davis
they do these funny voices and all that, but you’re saying that that’s available for free, that anybody can do that. Cause see, that’s really cool and kids of all ages would love that.
Jesse Lubinsky
for free. Anyone can do that. And it doesn’t require the mechanics of a character animator where you actually have to show how you want the character animated. We have preset characters that we add every month. A lot of them are thematically based on whatever’s going on that time of year. You can even have transparent backgrounds and add it into our editor so you can add your own So there’s a lot of, again, it gets…
For the beginner, it’s easy, but for the expert who wants to some, a lot of work with it, they can actually do that.
Vicki Davis (
Oh, that’s a lot of fun. And you could probably do that with most ages. Is this web based?
Jesse Lubinsky
It’s totally web based. So if you have a Chrome browser, it’ll work.
Vicki Davis
Ah!
Oh, that’s awesome. Okay, so we can animate from audio. That’s really cool.
Okay, what’s your second?
Jesse Lubinsky
So this one kind of goes hand in I was mentioning before you could like design your own background. Well, Vicki, I don’t know if you know this, but generative AI is kind of a buzzy thing right now. Everybody’s talking about it. Are we right? We also actually thank you so much for the segue. So for those of you who don’t know Firefly is Adobe’s version of generative AI and Firefly actually shows up in Adobe express for So it is, uh, we have several different functions within. Um,
Vicki Davis
Uh, yeah, like Adobe Firefly. We’re using it all the time. Yep.
Jesse Lubinsky
Adobe Express and one that pops out to mind right away is text to image, which allows you to simply take text and turn it into an And so, you know, from an instructional standpoint, from a pedagogical standpoint, I think we’re moving from this paradigm of having students search for content to creating content. And so rather than the time that students would have to spend searching online for an image, if they could think of it, and if they can use their critical thinking and reading, writing skills to create.
the prompt, I know we talk a lot about prompt generation, or they’ll be able to create that image. And so that is built into Express as well. And so I mentioned that with the animate from audio in the sense that I can have a character with a transparent background and then I can make that background if I don’t have one in the gallery I want. But there’s a number of different ways that we’ve seen people use this from an instructional standpoint. One way that actually one of my colleagues talked about the other day was in teaching idioms.
Vicki Davis
Yeah.
Jesse Lubinsky
and having students to use text to image. If you’re searching for like, you know, standing on pins and needles, chances are you’re not going to find an image of people literally standing on pins and So the internet is a wild and strange place, but that’s a great way to do that, right? Is have them use their words in creative ways to generate images that they wouldn’t be able to find online.
Vicki Davis
Well, and it’s such an incredible tool. We actually have the AI art awards that we’ve had in my classes for some time And the amazing thing about Adobe Firefly that people may not realize is, yeah, you can generate the background, but you can also, when you have a student, I had a student she wanted to create empathy for those who are outside in the cold, in this very cold weather. So she was literally sitting on a chair in the classroom.
and she took herself and put herself in the middle of the winter on a park bench in New York. And she changed her clothing and she changed her hair. She changed everything. And it was one of the ones that won in our AI art contest because everybody was just like, where, where did you take this? And she’s like sitting in that chair in the computer lab.
Jesse Lubinsky
And you actually mentioned another feature that’s a generative AI feature, which has become pretty famous for being in Photoshop, but it’s actually in Express as well, and that’s generative fill. So that’s not creating an image from a text prompt, that’s just taking an image I have and maybe there’s something I want to add or change about that image. So maybe, Vicki, you’re wearing a blue hat, but you need to be wearing a red hat or you want to be wearing a formal dress instead of a sweater. Well, you can literally highlight those areas and just with some words,
Vicki Davis
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Jesse Lubinsky
change something or add it to an image. That’s another thing that’s built into Adobe which is again, free for all educators and students.
Vicki Davis
It’s really cool. and you know, of course we all know the only place that AI can struggle is hands. Hands are just crazy. That’s where we’re like, oh, Miss Davis, I have eight fingers. And it’s like, yeah, let’s just work with it. And you know, it’s coming around.
Jesse Lubinsky
So it’s been getting better.
The Wild West of generative AI has been crowdsourcing prompts from audiences. And I actually had a crowdsource prompt the other day that was giraffes in Germany wearing tutus. And even as I was typing it in, I was like, well, on a giraffe, does a tutu go on? Like, where does the tutu go? And it’s funny because we had a few different variations of that. So.
Vicki Davis
Yeah, exactly.
That’s funny.
Jesse Lubinsky
It’s learning, it’s getting better all the time. Even the latest version of Firefly is so much better than earlier versions, but just being able to see what students are able to do with And I will share one quick story. A school district we worked with did a vocabulary lesson in seventh grade where they were having students create visualized images of the words they were studying. The teacher had half the class do it using a traditional image search and half the class do it using Express. And what they found was that the students who were
Vicki Davis
Oh yeah.
Jesse Lubinsky
creating rather than searching were not only more likely to complete the lesson, but almost all of them exceeded expectations based on the standards of the assignment. But my favorite part of that story is that halfway through like 30 minutes in a student raised their hand and said are we going to do work today or are we just doing this? But they were doing the lesson like they were doing the work. It’s just it was it seemed too fun to be the work.
Vicki Davis
Ah.
Yeah.
Yeah, it is. It’s very Okay, so we’ve only gotten to number two. We got to speed up
here, don’t we? get to number three.
Jesse Lubinsky
Okay, going to, we’re going to skip also a third This, a teacher in New York City recently showed me this, but she’s been using our all-in-one editor to do stop motion animation. And what’s great about Adobe Express is the, you know, we have tools that do image editing, we have tools that do video editing, but our editing all happens all in one interface. So it’s an all-in-one editor. And so that allows you to do a number of different things, right? You can simply change an image to a,
to a video simply by adding an animation, but you can go back and forth. There’s a lot of flexibility to allow for creative opportunities where teachers don’t have to focus on the tool, but can focus on the outcomes. So stop motion animation is one of my favorite use cases of that I’ve seen I’m going to move a little faster.
Vicki Davis
Excellent. And see, I have a science teacher right now who wants to do stop motion animation for cellular mitosis. So I’m going to say, okay, let’s go there. Okay. Yep.
Jesse Lubinsky
Right, and if you think about it, it’s as simple as duplicating a scene, moving, and just making it simple, but now it’s web-based and we’re not worried about downloading a video editing suite to do that.
Vicki Davis
Yeah. I can see we’re BYOD. So some have Chromebooks, some have PC, some have Macs. She just doesn’t ever, some have iPads. So that’s really cool. Yeah.
Jesse Lubinsky
Right, so,
okay, next thing, since you’re familiar with Adobe Creative Cloud, you might know Adobe Fresco, which is an illustration tool that allows for drawing. Well, there’s now a drawing component built in there as well. So even for those students who want to draw or want access to those types of brushes they would use in a more advanced illustration tool, they can do that as And there’s a number, the nice part about that is you can add drawing components to your images and videos. So it’s not just simply a matter of choosing
stock imagery or stock videos or whatever you can find, it’s being able to add those illustrative components as well. So there’s a number of different ways you can connect that to curricular work. One way I know sometimes when we talk about these tools, any tool, world language always, or, you know, ENL classrooms, ELL classrooms, sometimes get left out of the conversation.
One particular workflow that I have loved is the ability to take a video that I’ve already made, caption that video
and translate that into multiple languages. having, and as a teacher who’s always looking to communicate with parents, and I know that I started my teaching career in New York City, sometimes my classroom had six or seven different languages being spoken at the homes of my students and communicating with those parents. For me to be able to now record a video, caption that, and then send it in those native languages to the homes with one click, incredibly easy. But think about the English, the language learner.
Vicki Davis
Hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Jesse Lubinsky
language learner who sometimes needs another partner to be able to have a conversation with, well, they can simply record a video of them speaking about a prompt and then translate that to see, well, what did they actually just say? So it’s now this way of kind of doing self-assessment of the work they’re doing as well. Right. Exactly.
Vicki Davis
to double check. Oh, that’s fascinating. That’s great. So that would be great for And that is, what’s that? That’s built into which…
Jesse Lubinsky
Yep, so we have a caption video quick action that’s in Express, and the translate tool is built directly into the editor itself.
Vicki Davis
cool, crap So that’s our number five, huh? Cool. Yeah, with a translate. Okay, let’s go.
Jesse Lubinsky
Yeah, technically it could have been five and six with the translate, but we’re going to keep yeah.
You know, this idea of remixable templates, I’m the type of creative person that I, it’s funny, I work for Adobe and we’re the creativity company, but I don’t know if I’d call myself a creative by trade, because if you hand me a blank piece of paper, I freak out, like I need to have some starting place for my creativity, and I know it’s the same for a lot of students, and sometimes we just kind of say, okay, now go. Well, that’s really hard to do. So.
Vicki Davis
Yeah it is.
Jesse Lubinsky
The idea that teachers can find content and create remixable templates. it’s not just, I know a lot of, there’s a lot of content out there that provides a starting point, but what we allow you to do is take that starting point, tweak it, and then now use that as a starting point for your students, all with one click. So that’s a nice way for teachers to find starting points.
And a great place to find some of those starting points are through our monthly creative challenges, which again, are…
part of our tool, they’re on our education exchange, but when you’re an educator, there’s an educator resources button in our product that gives you access to thousands of templates and resources, but our creative challenges are things that happen every month on social. If you look at the Adobe EDU creative hashtag, you’d see them, but every month we a thematic, a thematic idea of what’s happening in the education space. We create a template and provide that as a starting point for educators to launch into their own creative activity with their students. And what’s great about that is,
We’ve seen how subject area or grade levels have modified and tweaked those to fit their own needs, right? So something for creative identity to tell me about your creative self could be adapted by an English teacher to be about a character from a book or historical figure an English class or a history class. Or my favorite in a math class, rather than being a person, it was a cylinder and it was the properties of that cylinder all around it. So, you know, teachers are the greatest creatives around because they’re always able to find new ways
Vicki Davis
Yeah.
Jesse Lubinsky
to innovate and reimagine these type of activities in their So that, we’ll make that a six and seven because I know we’re short on time here.
Vicki Davis
Yeah. And then education exchange is fantastic. I’ve written some things for Adobe Rush for several different tools. I’ve got content in the education exchange, free templates. And I know a lot of teachers like me have shared free templates in the exchange too. It’s fantastic.
Jesse Lubinsky
Right.
And we have thousands of lesson plans that are great. And they all include remixable templates that are great starting points. Look, we know no teacher pulls stuff offline and use it exactly as it is. It’s a starting point. And that’s what we want to provide is let you know, you’re not alone. You have starting points, you have support. We’re here for you.
Vicki Davis
Yeah.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
That’s awesome. Okay, let’s go.
Jesse Lubinsky
Okay, number eight we’ll say is collaboration. And that’s the idea that, you know, we’re all used to the idea of a collaborative document, but what about the idea of a collaborative video that’s web-based where
Now, all these things I’ve been talking about, even the generative AI projects and the animate from audio, well, I can have multiple students in these projects together working on them at once. So now that allows us to kind of open up the possibilities for what it’s like to actually engage in a creative endeavor in the classroom.
Vicki Davis
And so if they’re doing the stop motion example of mitosis, then you can have two or three kids in there editing, which is fantastic. Yeah.
Jesse Lubinsky
Exactly. And I could have some students working on like the adjustment piece, whereas others are working on the scene. So it now takes these projects that would normally take in an individual days, a group of students, a matter of an hour.
Vicki Davis
Yeah.
Yeah, and that’s the way we want to work in anyway. That’s fantastic. Okay, what’s next?
Jesse Lubinsky
Exactly.
Number nine, voiceover. This seems like something so simple, but it is the one thing I will tell you that my team in particular has advocated for teachers and for students. And Vicki, you touched on it before. We have a lot of students who don’t want to be on camera or who don’t feel comfortable having themselves out there and image of themselves. And so we talked about animation, but voiceover is, you know, we talk about voice choice and agency as entry points for empowering students in the work they do in the classroom. And the truth is,
Student voice is the easiest way to just tap into that by saying, just let me hear you talk about the work that you’re doing or share. And oftentimes the best way teachers can understand the work their students are doing in the classroom is by hearing students talk about it. So while we have stock, you know, music and videos and all the, you know, and images that are in there from powered by Adobe Stock, we also have the ability to allow students to add voiceover to any piece of this.
Vicki Davis
Mm-hmm.
Ah.
Jesse Lubinsky
So to allow for narration to a story, or what’s better than hearing students read that story that they wrote, that creative writing piece. I mean, you’ll never hear more excitement in a student voice than when they’re reading their own characters, saying those So it’s just really, or even something as simple as a reflection that gives us as the teacher more insight into their level of understanding and allows us to kind of help them along that learning journey. So that’s another really great feature.
Vicki Davis
Mm-hmm.
Jesse Lubinsky
And the last one, I know you’re like, this has gotta be the best one.
Vicki Davis
Okay.
Jesse Lubinsky
Are you ready? This is another quick action. QR codes, baby, we do them. And the reason I bring up QR codes, which seems such a silly thing to bring up at the end, but how many of you have ever gone to make a QR code and you’re definitely on some website that you’re like, this is some weird website that definitely is going to give my computer a virus and I don’t know if this website’s going to go away tomorrow. Well, guess what? Adobe Express is not going anywhere. You can keep all of your QR codes in one place, knowing that they’re safe and being able to design
Vicki Davis
already.
Oh yeah.
Oh nice.
Jesse Lubinsky
the actual code itself. So you’re not beholden to kind of like the site you use. You can design the color, the style, and then add those to any project quickly. And there’s a million other things. I mean, again, we could have talked for an hour and a half, the websites, the Glideshow in particular, which is one of my favorites. There’s so many things, but I know teachers out there are really struggling to find free tools to empower their students with creativity, given the constraints that are on districts now. And I also know the teachers often feel like they have to be the…
Like if I don’t know the tool, then I can’t give my students a project with the tool. And the great part about Adobe Express is I always feel like I do PD on a tool that doesn’t really require PD. So teachers can feel secure knowing they can design instruction around this and not feel like they are going to have to be the keeper of all the knowledge.
Vicki Davis
Yeah, it’s really cool.
And I, and I really am hoping you’re willing to give us a free bonus 11 of something that’s in beta right now. That looks incredible. Are you able to talk about it with us or not?
Jesse Lubinsky
Wow, so I will, this is, I’m going to talk about this separately from Adobe Express, this is just a separate thing that you should feel free to check out. Yeah, I knew Vicki would draw me into this, so she knows we, so this is not something I would say right now, this is not something I would use with my students right now, this is something for you to just check out on the, it’s in public beta, but Adobe Podcast is one of my absolute favorite things. You can find it at podcast.adobe.com,
Vicki Davis
Yeah. So this is like a separate, yeah. Okay. I can’t help it. I’m a podcaster. I have to talk about it. Yeah. And AI.
Jesse Lubinsky
really designed to kind of empower every student with the ability to tell stories. So, you know, if you think about the way you’ve edited audio in the past with those waveforms, it’s even for veteran podcasters like Vicki and myself, it is a chore, a labor of love for sure. But podcasts is really looking to reinvent the way we empower students through storytelling. So I would definitely say check it out. It’s like I said, it’s in public beta. You can check out Adobe Express at express.adobe.com.
Vicki Davis
Mm-hmm, stuff.
Yeah.
But basically it’ll take the whole recording and do, so we’re editing the show now here in Adobe Premiere Pro because what it does, and that’s a paid, obviously an expensive paid tool, but what it does is it takes all of our text and it even recognizes the two speakers. And then we’re able to edit by editing the actual words on the screen, like we would edit a word document or any kind of PDF or whatever that we would edit.
Jesse Lubinsky
I was just about to say that, yeah.
Vicki Davis
And so what you’re talking about is bringing that type of feature to, you record the voice, you see the words, you edit the words, and then you have an edited piece of audio.
Jesse Lubinsky
Right. Yeah. So I love I love actually showing people the And I know we can’t show it on the podcast, but it really has wowed everyone who’s seen it. And again, it’s still it’s still work in progress, but I think it just shows our commitment to making sure that students have every type of creative entry point possible.
Vicki Davis
Yeah.
Jesse Lubinsky
And you know what? I’m going to give one bonus 12 because you mentioned it just a second ago. I can’t believe I forgot to mention this in my 10.
You can do full PDF editing in Adobe Express. If you just drag a PDF into the browser window, it’ll actually open the PDF and allow you to edit it. So for all those teachers who are like, I don’t have a full version of Acrobat to do my editing, you can do it right in Adobe Express. So it really is our creative, right? Can you believe I forgot that one? I’m like, that’s a good one to end on. But there’s so many things we didn’t even get to, but I think that…
Vicki Davis
Oh, that’s great one. That should have been number one. We should have listed that, cause that’s a big issue for teachers. Yeah.
Jesse Lubinsky
The idea here is, and I’m glad to see, it’s not just Adobe, but it’s other companies that are out here have recognized that, there’s no more important commitment we can make than commitment to our students and our teachers and the education system. So, it’s been really heartening for me to see how many educators have found their way into kind of big tech and have been able to add their voice to the conversation and provide that voice for teachers and students.
Vicki Davis
That’s right.
Mm-hmm.
Jesse Lubinsky
So it’s really nice to see some of the changes that have happened as a result of that. And I think companies have really listened and are really putting their best foot forward to make sure that teachers and students have what they need to design the future that they envision for themselves, especially our students.
Vicki Davis
Yeah. And, you know, I’m absolutely passionate about us providing a variety of many different tools to our students from many different companies. I want my students to have access to all of it because we don’t know what they’ll be needing or using for their future. And so, you know, these are free tools that you can go and ask your school to activate and turn on for your school. And it just has a lot of a lot more
Jesse Lubinsky
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Vicki Davis
creative options for kids. So thanks for coming on the show, Jesse, and for sharing all this free stuff. I know, it’s just how it goes. Yep.
Jesse Lubinsky
Thank you so much for having me. I can’t believe it took so long for us to get together. This was like, we’ve known each other forever. But thank you so much. If anyone needs any more information, you can check out express.adobe.com. Or Vicki mentioned our education exchange before. That’s edX.adobe.com. You can find out information about all of our curricular resources and support for educators there.
Vicki Davis
Thanks for coming on the show, Jessie.
Jesse Lubinsky
Thanks so much.
