ImpressivE Technologies for Learning
To be truly literate in our world today, our students need to be competent at creating a variety of types of media. This course focused on using Adobe After Effects to create a variety of visual effects. The power create powerful media by our students is growing exponentially. The tools exist…getting them into the hands of the students is the challenge…o
I like when I open an educational door expecting one thing and find something else…completely unexpected, but wonderful. When I registered for this course through Adobe Education Exchange, I assumed it would be focused on Adobe’s iconic image editor, Photoshop. When it became clear the focus was Lightroom—particularly the new web-based Lightroom CC—I’ll admit to being a bit disappointed. I’d worked with Lightroom before. The desktop version is a standard of professional photographers and is a powerful platform for organizing photos, batch editing, and making quick adjustments. Lightroom CC takes that functionality to the Web and mobile devices.
Photography is a true love. With the tools and amazing smartphone cameras of today, we are truly in a golden age of photography. Seems like photo-literacy is a skill that should be built into our curriculum from an increasingly young age. We are educating a generation of media consumers like never before. They should be literate in the media that dominates their world.
Since ancient times, finding a way to keep and share knowledge has been a goal of mankind. From the wet clay cuneiform of the Sumerians, to sheets of papyrus of the Egyptians, to the parchment scrolls of the Hebrews, to moveable type of Gutenberg’s printing press…these methods gave mankind the ability to share ideas with people of their day, and with generations to come. They weren’t, however, tools for the masses. Only the intellectual elite and wealthy had the opportunity to participate in this extended conversation.
The technology explosion of the past 20+ years has opened the sharing of ideas and production of professional quality printing to anyone with a Web-connected device. We teach our students to read and write. In this era, they should also know how to take their ideas and put them into an interesting and compelling format.
This course from Adobe Education Exchange gave me the opportunity to explore some more advanced features of Adobe InDesign. I’ve known this software since it was called PageMaker. It is a truly powerful and flexible tool for creating media not only for print, but also for the Web. I was particularly surprised by the ability to create PDF documents with animation and interactivity. Check out my learning journal from the class to see more.