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Regular readers of my blog and those who have seen me speak know how much I love a decent app to support learning. A staple of many a classroom for some time has been the brilliant Adobe Spark Video (previously Adobe Voice). Essentially, Spark Video is a slide driven presentation tool which turns your slides into a video. Then, rather than ask users to populate slides with lots of content, it asks you to use minimal content on your slides so that you have to talk over the top of your slides. For me this makes it an awesome educational app. Rather than worry about whether or not a presentation is full of plagiarised text, you can hear directly from the pupil themselves explaining their understanding of a topic.

Adobe Spark Video got an update today which enables users to not only upload their own images to slides along with the thousands of commons free images, icons and music but to also be able to upload video to the slides too! This works both in the iPad app and when you use Adobe Spark Video in browser on your laptop/MacBook/Chromebook etc.

As you can see in the example video below about the rather awesome Osmo tool for iPad, you can easily combine a variety of slide types, layouts and media including text, image, icons and now video. It is superb (the app, not necessarily my video!).

So with this new update, I thought I'd share some ideas with you about how you can use the app in the classroom to support learning both with video and without.

Whether it is in the making of a pizza, an experiment in Science or a stop frame animation, there are lots of times when children will take photographs of or film the various stages of a process in the classroom. To explain their activity or to demonstrate their understanding of the process they've been examining, why not ask children to add that content straight into Adobe Spark Video whereby they can simply record their voice over the top in order to achieve that aim.

Children love writing for a purpose they believe in. Why not ask the children to use the app to develop a brilliant end product which can cover a lot of different curriculum areas, particularly around writing (a script) for a persuasive TV advert for a product. This could be something that they are developing as part of a STEAM project (one school I work with recently used it to promote T-Shirts that a class were making as part of a project). You can see a short example video below made by their teacher. This one doesn't contain video as it was made before the update but a few well planned videos could make their way into the advert in really powerful ways.

Due to its ease of use and cross platform availability, Adobe Spark Video is great to bring together media content generated across the course of a project. Of course, the final video would then look great at the tail end of a bigger document made as a book using something like Book Creator, but the features of the app mean that it creates a really well-polished final version which would sit well at the end of any kind of project.

Not necessarily Sports Day but any performance related video footage can easily be combined into the app to make a brilliant short video showcasing the highlights of a sporting, drama or other performing arts activity. Simply upload the various video elements into Adobe Spark Video, arrange them into the order you desire and then record your commentary over the top and then #boom - you've got a really polished looking summary of the fixture or event.

Lots of different subjects in school are practical and require pupils to demonstrate that they can undertake the different activities correctly. From using a knife correctly to chop an onion to serving a tennis ball to finger positioning when typing, there are lots of scenarios where you will require pupils to demonstrate their skills. Why not ask them to put this content into Adobe Spark Video and unleash their voices in recording themselves explaining what they have done.

Creating professional looking resources for pupils in a flipped learning environment is a tough ask. There are lots of great tools available however due to its simple interface and professional finish, Adobe Spark Video is a great tool to support you as a teacher looking to create flipped learning resource videos. In the alternative, you could even ask the pupils to make the videos for the class instead of you. How's about that for lazy ICT?

The only Adobe Spark Video app is on iPad, the update for which is being released today however as mentioned above it does work in browser on keyboard driven devices too. As mentioned in other blog posts you can use this tool (and the Post and Page tools too) via the Adobe Spark website - the update is live on there right now!

If you like my ideas and would like to work with me then please get in touch via the contact page. I'd love to hear some ways that you're using Adobe Spark Video in the classroom too. If you have some great examples to share then please let me know. I'd love to include them on the site in this post if that is possible. Just let me know and get in touch through the comments or via Twitter.

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5 ways to use Adobe Spark Video in the classroom

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Regular readers of my blog and those who have seen me speak know how much I love a decent app to support learning. A staple of many a classroom for some time has been the brilliant Adobe Spark Video (previously Adobe Voice). Essentially, Spark Video is a slide driven presentation tool which turns your slides into a video.

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The Learning Designer suite of tools enables teachers to share their good teaching ideas. It is intended to help a subject teacher see how a particular pedagogic approach can be migrated successfully across different topics. There are sample patterns to browse and edit, or you can design your own from scratch.

‘Browser' offers a collection of pedagogical patterns, which you can redesign for your own teaching practice.

‘Designer' presents the pedagogical pattern template to help you describe your own teaching idea for a session (e.g. student preparation, class activities and homework).

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Adapt/Create

The Browser screen catagorises existing designs according to pedagogic approach, education sector, topic area, and project needs. You can also search by keyword. When you select a design and turn editing on it becomes yours to edit and adapt, stored in 'My designs'. Or you go to the Designer screen to design from scratch.

Analyse/Review

As you design each step of the session you can specify the type of learning activity, duration, group size, teacher presence/or not, online/or not, synchronous/or not, and any resources to be attached. The 'designed time' is tracked, along with pie charts and bar charts showing the nature of the learning experience you're designing, in the Analysis tab. This helps you review and revise your design.

Share/Publish

Once drafted, you can share your design by sending its url to a colleague, or publish it by placing it in 'My designs public space', or export it to Word to share it with colleagues and students.

Try it out - see how you're supporting your students' learning

The pie-chart shows the relative study time proportions for the 6 types of learning you have designed into your session. They are derived from Laurillard's Conversational Framework (see Guide). The more types of learning, the more different ways students process the concepts and skills.

Ways of expressing the learning experience you created for your students

You build up your design for a set of intended learning outcomes, deciding for each step on the type of learning, its duration, the group size, teacher presence/or not, online/or not, synchronous/or not, the resources that need to be linked, and the guidance to the student.

Export to Word and share your design with colleagues

If you export the design to Word it is easy to discuss with colleagues, or give to students to show them what's coming, or invite their feedback on how it went - use the Notes in each panel, to ask them to comment on that part of the design.

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The Browser screen catagorises existing designs according to pedagogic approach, education sector, topic area, and project needs. You can also search by keyword. When you select a design and turn editing on it becomes yours to edit and adapt, stored in 'My designs'. Or you go to the Designer screen to design from scratch.

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Search, moderate and display tweets as a Twitter Wall. Make your events go social.

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Free twitter wall & Instagram stream for events

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Bring social media into your event with Activity Walls to show twitter messages and Instagram photos. 100% free, no ads, and completely customizable.

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Wall of Social - try for free Tweet Wall

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Use Wall of Social, as a Twitter Wall to show Live Tweets and Instagram on a big screen at conferences, events, shows, concerts and offices

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Free Open Source Toolbar to add that you can use to change fonts and screen overlays on web pages etc

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What is ATbar?

ATbar has been created as an open-source, cross-browser toolbar to help users customise the way they view and interact with web pages. The concept behind ATbar is simple: One toolbar to provide all of the functionality you would usually achieve through the use of different settings or products.

ATbar is free and allows you to change the look and feel of webpages, increase and decrease font sizes, have text read aloud, use coloured overlays, readability and a dictionary to aid reading. Spell check forms and try word prediction when writing. It is a simple tool which is available for most popular browsers.
ATbar can increase the accessibility of a website and offer a personalised user experience.
It is designed for those who may not have their assistive technologies to hand and need a quick way of accessing text on the screen with magnification and/or text to speech etc. It can help those with low vision, dyslexia and other reading difficulties, as well as those who may wish to just reduce the glare of black text on bright white backgrounds. It is not designed for regular screen reader users who need their assistive technology to access the computer as well as their browser.
There are three versions of the ATbar:

The download version stays available when you move between web pages and is made up of the standard functions.

The lite version acts in a similar way to a bookmark or favorite and has to selected each time you visit a new web page - it also has the standard functions.

The marketplace version allows you to build your own ATbar, by choosing the plug-ins to suit your needs then save the custom made bar as a bookmark.

Other software is available on a USB flash drive with an accessible menu system as a Portable Accessibility Toolkit and there is a desktop version of the ATbar on the download page.

Funded by the Mada Center

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ATbar has been created as an open-source, cross-browser toolbar to help users customise the way they view and interact with web pages. The concept behind ATbar is simple: One toolbar to provide all of the functionality you would usually achieve through the use of different settings or products.

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Useful for creating Multi Media Posters

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PG Skills ( Including Academic Posters etc ) PILOT

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PG Skills ( Including Academic Posters etc ) PILOT

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Academic posters are a highly effective way of communicating information to a wide variety of different audiences. Poster competitions are held within particular Universities, mainly at postgraduate researcher level, at conferences, and at national or international competitions. Whilst they have traditionally been seen to be important for postgraduate research students, many experienced researchers also present their work in this way.

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For drafting tweets so they don't go over the limit ...

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Original Twitter character counter for Twitter messages and tweets

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Wall of Social - free Twitter Wall solution

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Wall of Social - free Twitter Wall solution

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Wall of Social - try for free Tweet Wall

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Use Wall of Social, as a Twitter Wall to show Live Tweets and Instagram on a big screen at conferences, events, shows, concerts and offices

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Free twitter wall & Instagram stream for events

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Free twitter wall & Instagram stream for events

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Free twitter wall & Instagram stream for events

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Bring social media into your event with Activity Walls to show twitter messages and Instagram photos. 100% free, no ads, and completely customizable.

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twitter wall instagram facebook crowdconvergence hashtag 3d

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ShowTweets is a free Twitter Wall visualizer from Crowd Convergence. Enter your hashtag to display a real-time stream of Tweets from the Twitter universe. ShowTweets is perfect for big screens at conferences, weddings and events.

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An ever growing list of more than 21 websites & apps that you can use to create fun avatars. Some allow you to save the finished creation as a jpg for free. If not, then use the print screen button to copy the screen, paste into a paint program, crop and save as a jpg.

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10 Awesome Twitter Analytics and Visualization Tools

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10 Awesome Twitter Analytics and Visualization Tools