Back-to-school is here and as you’re busy planning your classes or getting ready to hit the books yourself, we’ve been busy improving Adobe Spark for students and educators. A few months ago we released Adobe Spark for Education. Since then, we’ve introduced important enhancements to Spark, just in time for back to school. Here’s what to expect this school year and beyond.
Google Classroom Integration
Google Classroom is used by millions of students and their teachers to share, communicate, and collaborate. Adobe Spark (on web and Chromebooks) can now share directly to Google Classroom. When students have finished their work (in any of the Spark formats) they click Share and then click on the Google Classroom icon to share their Spark creations. Teachers can create assignments, ask questions, and make announcements, and students can easily turn in assignments.
Yes, sharing to Google Classroom is now as simple as a click!
Printing and PDF Creation
Spark Page creates beautiful web pages in minutes. Professionally designed layouts, elegant transitions and motion, and magazine-style themes ensure that stories created in Spark Page always look amazing on every browser and device.
But if you need that amazing story offline, perhaps printed for handouts or to adorn refrigerators and scrapbooks, well, then the content looks less than amazing. The truth is that modern responsive web pages, which is what Spark Page stories are, were just never designed to be viewed outside of the browser.
Until now, that is. We’ve worked our Spark magic behind the scenes so that your beautiful web pages look good in print, whether printed or saved as a PDF file. You’ll obviously lose the transitions and motion, but you won’t lose any of your precious story.
A few important notes:
- This is supported in the web version of Spark Page only.
- You’ll need to use Chrome, or a Chromebook.
- When you open your Spark Page for editing, click Share at the top of the screen and you’ll see the new Print option. You can then print or save as a PDF.
- PDF creation is a great option for those of you who have been looking for a way to save Spark Page stories in digital archives or require students to submit work that can’t be modified after submission.
Google Drive Integration
All three Spark formats let you include images from a variety of sources, including Adobe Creative Cloud, Lightroom, and Dropbox. And now we’ve added the image source most requested by educators: Google Drive.
Effective immediately you’ll see Google Drive as one of the available options when adding images. You, and your students, are now able to browse and search for images in the Google Drive, and then simply select them to add them to their Pages, Posts, and Videos. This allows students to use more of their own images in the Spark creations.
Google Drive is currently supported on the Web version of Spark (which means it works on Chromebooks, too).
Simplified Login Experience
This next change is unique to Adobe Spark for Education, and it is an important one. When we launched Adobe Spark for Education earlier this year, we wanted to get it into students’ hands as fast as possible. Unfortunately, this meant taking a few shortcuts, and as a result we ended up with a login screen that some students found confusing.
So, to eliminate student (and teacher) frustration, we’ve created a new login screen just for our Adobe Spark for Education users. You can get to the new login screen here, and we’ve put a convenient link to it at the top of the Spark screen, too. This new login experience will significantly simplify things for your students who can spend less time getting started and more time creating their masterpieces.
New Spark K-12 Resources
One last goodie. Educators are an inspiring bunch, but even the most inspiring educators sometimes want a little, well, inspiration. Educators love learning from other educators as much as we love seeing how they use Spark in the classroom, which is why we’ve created a new Adobe Spark Teaching Resources page to showcase all sorts of classroom inspiration.
The Adobe Education Exchange is chock full of great classroom content, and on the new Adobe Spark Teaching Resources page we’ve cherry-picked some of our favorites to share with you. We’ve highlighted content suitable for a variety of subjects and grades, and plan to regularly post additional inspirational content. You’ll find exemplars, student content, lesson plans and more, all free for the browsing and using.
Happy back-to-school! Tweet @adobespark to let us know how your school year is going with Adobe Spark!