Spark is about making cool, classy digital visuals for online use.
It's designed to be streamlined and simple, limiting your options but almost guaranteeing good results. Its 3 components, Post, Page, and Video, give you tools to make a variety of things.
Before we get into the possibilities, though, there are a few cautions you should know:
1. You'll need to sign in using either a Google, Facebook or Adobe account (which is free). The good news is that in April, 2018, Adobe decided to give free access to "Premium" stuff to schools, teachers and students!
2. Until/unless your school Adobe account administrator sets up the account for Spark, you'll have a Spark watermark on everything you make.
3. They store all your content on their servers. That's mostly good news, but it could make for some security or access issues in some odd cases.
4. I ran into some trouble when I was using AdBlock Plus and had to disable it for the Spark site. Not a big deal, just a note!
The first Spark component:
POST
Post lets you make an image using ingredients like photos, graphics and text. Here are some examples...
Those are just a few examples of what journalism teachers and students might want to use Post for. It's simple, stylish and has a short, gentle learning curve. It has templates for all sorts of social media formats.
If you start into Spark using Post, it'll ease you into the whole Spark application.
And now FOR Page...
For starters, this page was made with Page. It's great for making things like this: you don't need a website since Adobe hosts it and just you link to it.
It's great for online journalism too. Here's a sample I whipped up from a story that my students did on the March 14 March For Our Lives event.
Here's a great story done in Spark Page by Caeli Chesin.
This page is another way to use it: photo-centric package that is flexible and let's you do a variety of things.
Last, this is a little Page I made to talk to students about "not seeing the forest for the trees." The main reason I'm including it because all the images I used were free ones I found in Spark through a quick search. There are tons of great photos available.
And THen there's: Spark Video
The best way to explain Spark Video is...a Spark Video! Have a look!
- The Adobe Spark education site
- The Adobe Spark education blog
- Webpage for school system admins (IT) to get the school/district licensed
- Hardware requirements for Spark
Credits:
Created with images by PublicDomainPictures - "black bright burn celebrate celebration christmas fire"