Author: kbeddes

This month's focus is Global Collaborator. This ISTE standard focuses on students using digital tools to broaden their perspectives and enrich their learning by collaborating with others and working effectively in teams locally and globally. Teachers can use Adobe Express to enhance their students' global collaboration skills effectively.

In Adobe Express, teachers empower students to create engaging digital content—such as graphics, web stories, and short videos—that can be shared with peers around the globe. This platform supports real-time collaboration, enabling students to work in teams, both locally and internationally, fostering an environment of shared learning and cultural exchange. Through these collaborative projects, students develop essential skills in digital literacy, critical thinking, and cross-cultural communication, setting the foundation for their future as adept global collaborators.

Check out this article "How Students Can Meet Their Peers All Over the World" from Becki Cohn-Vargas on Edutopia that has a bunch of resources if you want to connect your classroom to the wider world and get your students collaborating!

Once you've connected your students, you can use Adobe Express to create posters to illustrate their learning, or collaborate on get-to-know-you video, or design a webpage to underscore their new understandings of different cultures!

This month we want to focus on helping students become Creative Communicators, where students communicate clearly and express themselves creatively for a variety of purposes using the platforms, tools, styles, formats and digital media appropriate to their goals.

Adobe has many different tools that students can use to create - starting with the basics in Adobe Express and working their way up to more advanced programs like Adobe Audition, Premiere Pro, or Photoshop. Regardless of the tool used, there are some key elements that are at the heart of any communication - like connecting with the audience.

Check out this blog post from Adobe Express about storytelling in video for some inspiration on how to help your students start to share their stories in creative ways!

The ISTE student standard for February is Computational Thinker: "Students develop and employ strategies for understanding and solving problems in ways that leverage the power of technological methods to develop and test solutions."

Adobe Education Exchange has a great series of short, self-paced "lightning learning" courses. Here is one on creating Infographics in Adobe Express.

One of the components of Computational Thinker standard is having students "collect data or identify relevant data sets, use digital tools to analyze them and represent data in various ways to facilitate problem-solving and decision-making," so having students design infographics and analyze data can help them be more critical thinkers and better communicators!

Check it out!