Getting Started with the Adobe Education Exchange
You’d have to have been hiding under a rock for the past twenty years to not know about Adobe and their suite of software. They’ve been the market standard for digital design, editing, and publication for years now, despite attempts by other open-source software to compete with their products.
Adobe products are so ubiquitous, in fact, that one of their applications has become a neologism à la Google, despite Adobe’s insistence that the word be respected as a trademark, and not a verb, noun, or slang term. It doesn’t matter what software I use to edit an image nowadays, I call it “photoshopping.”
But how do you become proficient in using these different softwares when you need to use them for an assignment? How do you familiarize yourself with their intricacies and secrets if you’re not taking a class dedicated to learning the skills?
You might want to take a look at Adobe Education Exchange, a free resource from Adobe that offers workshops and tutorials in using Adobe software. The target audience for Adobe EdEx is educators and students, and their content focuses on using the software in classroom settings. This means that it’s very accessible and requires very little pre-knowledge before starting a workshop or tutorial.
I’ve done several different courses with the Adobe, including a general “Getting Started with Adobe in the Classroom” course, a “Supporting Humanities and English” skill-building course, and my favorite so far, “3D Design for Educators.” And I’ve worked through parts of several others to help boost my Adobe software skills.
Each course consists of a few major components. First, there are the weekly workshops, which involve watching a few videos and reading through the explanatory material. Usually, unless you’re working through one of their Train the Trainer courses, there will only be two to three weeks worth of workshops. Every week will also have a Live Class, where one of the Adobe Educators offers a live demonstration of the software and answers questions in real time. These are archived and available after the live broadcast so you don’t have to watch and participate live each week.
Then after the readings and videos, there is a short weekly assignment that will use the main software focused on within the course. These assignments may build upon each other, so you may have to use Adobe Illustrator to create a sample project one week and then in the next, record a video of yourself actually narrating the process of doing the project. The final part of each assignment is to write a reflection of the week’s work in your Adobe Spark Learning Journal. The learning journals are created using Spark Page, and can include thoughts on the software you learned to use, how you might incorporate the skills or work you did into your own classroom or class experience, the successes and obstacles you faced in working with the Adobe products, and more. And they’re a great tool for really thinking actively about how you can improve your educational experience — either as a teacher or a student.
Finally, once your assignment is done and submitted, you’ll participate in a peer review process, and look at the work of three other students in the course. Adobe asks that you leave a comment on the work of at least three people, encouraging them, praising their work, offering helpful constructive criticism, and more.
If you complete each week of the course, your work will be reviewed by the Adobe educators and you’ll receive a certificate of completion. But more than the certificate, you’ll come away from the experience with new skills and sample work showing that you are proficient with these advanced software products. It’s a great way to prepare for a large project, to boost your resume, or even just to learn something new for the fun of it.
