Juliette Bentley

Adobe Education Leader and Adobe Master Teacher for the APAC region.

How do you consider the kinds of text, and how do you understand them?

Using Spark tools, she shows students that they can engage with content and present their thoughts and understandings in a way that is visually dynamic. Through this process, she encourages her students to think about how they present their information, and my extension those students can become more critical of resources they use.

Another important aspect of Spark that she highlighted for student use is that the concept of attribution of photos, music and other resources in projects is embedded into the Spark interface.

A visual text is very powerful... [you can] find responses to them that you might not otherwise have found.

By combining tools to leverage knowledge, she gives her students a richer, more fully contextual experience in learning. Below, see an example of how she used satellite views from Google Earth to contextualise for students where actual locations in Germany are during a reading of The Book Thief.

Using Spark video, Juliette points out that students can develop their verbal (and oral) communication skills without really thinking about it. This is a fascinating point, as they are so focused on the fun of creating the project and pushing their ideas into reality that they are less conscious of the process of, for instance, adding a voiceover. This allows them to develop a multi-context understanding and skillset in media and presentation skills.

I like putting challenges in [to projects]

If students want to do more, challenges give them an opportunity to extend themselves naturally from where they are in their learning process.

Challenges allow people to explore new skills, such as this teacher discussing how she actively learned Adobe Rush for a project along with her students to engage and create new learning opportunities for skill and creativity building.