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Screenshot by author of Adobe Express website
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Adobe Express: Generative AI and Digital Literacy Resources

by Miguel Guhlin
written by Miguel Guhlin

Need resources on how to best blend generative AI into your middle or high school classroom? Want to foster creativity and media literacy among your students? Then you will want to explore Adobe’s newest generative AI resources. These offerings focus on using Adobe Express for AI education. What’s more, they include media literacy resources available on their education website.

The Adobe Education Exchange

Before you start exploring the new AI features, a quick question: Are you aware of Adobe Education Exchange’s K-12 Resource Hub? The hub offers a wide variety of resources for celebrating holidays and special events, including Earth Day and National Creativity Month. You’ll also see ways to get students started with drawing through three activities: reading a map, the stages of mitosis, and color theory. The exchange provides a host of teaching resources and four ways to support students in getting started with generative AI in multiple subjects with these activities:

Give the K-12 Resource Hub a walkthrough. You won’t regret it! Now, let’s take a closer look at Adobe Express’ generative AI enhancements.

Adobe Express and Generative AI

Are you familiar with Adobe Express? It’s a free platform for teachers and students that offers tools to create classroom visuals and other content. Here are some examples of generative AI features you might find useful:

  • Text effects. Transform basic text into art with a description. You only need to describe the desired graphic style, theme, or texture. Students can create “All About Me” posters or classroom quote posters for digital or print use.
  • Text to image. Students can type in written descriptions and generate high-quality images. Use these AI-generated images inspired by student writing for a variety of purposes like alternative book covers, report illustrations, presentations, or writing anthology art.

On the site, you will find a variety of quickstart guides for how administrators, parents, educators, and students can use generative AI in Adobe Express.

Screenshot of Adobe QuickStart Guide for Students
Screenshot of Adobe QuickStart Guide for Students

Here is an overview adapted for readability from the Middle and High School Educators’ guide:

These educational materials offer an introduction to generative AI. They explore critical questions, including: How does generative AI affect me? How does it affect others? What are some of the challenges and concerns about generative AI? How can I use generative AI in safe, ethical, and effective ways?

Lessons encourage students to think in a critical way about topics covered. Supplementary readings appear, deepening their understanding of AI’s impact on their lives.

These lessons…equip students to think about their relationship to future technologies.

Middle school students build on what they already know about generative AI. They identify questions that arise from their studies, and reflect on their learning. High school students are further led to identify topics formorel exploration. They reflect on issues related to generative AI. Students consider the benefits and drawbacks of this new technology.

You can even take a thirty-minute course to introduce you to Adobe Express’ new generative AI tools. The purpose of the course is to broaden your awareness of how to best use AE’s AI tools for teaching and learning.

Screenshot by Emily Horn | Adobe Education Exchange |
“Generative AI in the Classroom with Adobe Express” Course

Media Literacy with Adobe

In addition to these generative AI resources, Adobe offers a variety of lessons on media literacy in their Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) Media Literacy Curriculum. You can find them organized by middle school, high school, and higher ed. These can assist students in developing critical thinking skills and develop necessary skills to fight mis/dis-information:

Media literacy is a key component of addressing mis/disinformation. These curricula help students develop critical media and visual literacy skills. This is so they can better navigate the ever-changing digital information landscape. Each curriculum includes a foundational unit as well as lessons. Use the lessons in social studies, the arts, and English & language arts (ELA). Media literacy lessons and themes appear integrated throughout all components.

The Adobe-led Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) plays a significant role in this effort. You can learn more about its efforts online.

More Adobe Express Benefits

Adobe Express is extremely versatile when it comes to creating and sharing visual media. While you’re exploring its resources and generative AI capabilities, be sure to take advantage of the following additional benefits:

  • Premade templates. Find the starting point for your next poster, graphic organizer, or presentation. Teachers can find lesson templates and self-paced videos, too.
  • Collaboration opportunities. Set up activities that enable, if appropriate, students to work together on projects.
  • LMS integration. Use a popular learning management system? Adobe Express may integrate, enabling you to assign and manage projects within the LMS itself.
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animate your voice
AdobeUncategorizedWeb 2.0 Tool

Ahoy, Mateys! Animate Your Voice

by Miguel Guhlin
written by Miguel Guhlin

Ready to create an animation that will engage viewers? You may want to take advantage of a new tool from Adobe that makes voice-based animations easy. Let’s explore this new digital tool from Adobe.

First, though, let’s take a quick look at how animations can engage K-12 students. Engagement, while the final destination for learners, ensures you capture student attention.

Flipping Interest Levels

Students may not find the content interesting. Without an engaging story, anecdote, video, or movement-based activity, students ask, “Why?”

Learning something new is often exciting for the learner. Novel experiences cause a rush of dopamine. This not only makes learning seem exciting, but also makes you want to repeat the experience.  (source)

To hook student learners into a dopamine stream, you want an engaging activity. Animation can be that activity. Some of the ways animation works best for K-12 students include:

  • Ensuring a clear understanding of abstract ideas
  • Use of short, attention-grabbing animations to cover specific, relevant content
  • Make learning interactive and participatory
  • Enable experiential learning

While there are more benefits, this short list demonstrates the value. Let’s take a look at how the free, Adobe Express tool can help.

Introducing Animate Your Voice

This tool makes it easy to:

Make an animated character from your own voice recording using Adobe Express.

There are only three simple steps:

  • Choose a character from those available.
  • Upload your audio file or record your dialogue.
  • Preview the audio and animation, making changes to the character or background as you see fit.
  • Save or share your animation with others.

Let’s take a look at each of these steps in turn. Ready? Let’s go.

Animate Your Voice

Step 1: Choose a Character

As you can see from the image above, there are ample choices of characters. Choose from any of those available, and see them appear center screen.

For fun, I chose a character resembling me and decided to upload the audio I recorded. That’s an option available in addition to recording your audio via the website.

It was the beginning of a free story I found at Kids Love To Know. The story is that of “Captain Silverhook’s Symbol of Strength” (PDF). You can save it to your device or read it online for free.

Here’s a little information about it:

Captain Silverhook’s Symbol of Strength is a 600-word short  story. It is suitable for children of all ages. Kids in second grade or higher may be able to read the story on their own. The story is about a pirate  with a problem to solve. Captain Silverhook must replace his ship’s destroyed, nautical figurehead. That’s the shape carved on the front of his ship. He must  come up with a new design before he loses the respect of the other  pirates.

Using Audacity, a free open-source audio editor. I read the first paragraph of the story with a little flair:

Then, I uploaded the audio file for processing to Adobe Express’ Animate Your Voice site:

You can see the finished product below:

Step 2: Preview the Animation

You can make changes to the animation you’ve recorded, cropping the audio as needed. It’s not too difficult, and you can bring this process to a close if you’ve done your editing in Audacity or a similar tool, which I recommend.

Step 3: Save or Share Your Animation with Others

Click the Download button, and if you aren’t logged in with your free account, you will need to create an account. The process is easy if you use Google Authentication (which I did). Adobe offers access to other authentication schemes, so creating an account isn’t hard.

To share your animation, you will save an MP4 video formatted version. You can watch my creation below:

Once you’re done saving video to your device, Adobe will prompt you to buy their $54.99 Creative Cloud All Apps plan which includes Character Animator.

Final Reflections

Animate Your Voice is an easy-to-use tool, and I can definitely see my third-grade students and older students using it. Give it a go!

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