Adobe Creative Cloud: Developing creative skills within schools

With the start of a new academic year fast approaching, we take a look at how Adobe Creative Cloud can be used effectively across the entire school curriculum and explain what licensing options are available.

Adobe Creative Cloud: what is it and why use it?

Creative Cloud (CC) is Adobe’s suite of over 20 creative apps, including Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, Acrobat and many more.

As well as creative professionals using these industry-leading apps to produce professional standard images and graphics, art and designs, videos and so much more, schools are also using Adobe CC to develop their student’s creative skills and digital literacy. By using the very best tools available throughout their education journey, the skills developed by students become transferrable as they embark on their future careers.

How Adobe CC can be used within schools

Given its name and the nature of the apps within it, it’s perfectly natural to associate Creative Cloud with art and design subjects. While it’s true that Adobe CC is a perfect fit for these creative subjects, it also offers great benefits across the wider school curriculum.

For example, in English classes, rather than have students write stories and simply hand them in for marking, instead, they can fully engage with their work by presenting these stories using Adobe CC’s animated presentations and graphical posters. Not only will they develop essential writing skills, but all-important creative and communication skills too. The same applies to book reports, poetry and any other work.

Adobe CC can also be used to reinforce students’ learning in maths and science classes. Teachers and students can create graphical flashcards and other infographics to make learning those difficult-to-memorise equations and formulas more hands-on and interactive.

Meanwhile, geography is a subject that should set students’ imaginations free. By using Adobe CC to create and edit images, students can learn about other countries and cultures all around the world visually with eye-catching photos and creative images.

And it’s not just students who benefit from Adobe CC. Teachers can use these apps to bring lessons to life with exciting and informative videos, making their job more fun and their classes more engaging. Plus, admin staff can create and send consent forms and have them returned completed within minutes using Adobe CC’s e-signature capabilities.

So, as you can see, schools can use Adobe CC across their entire curriculum to help develop their students’ creativity, collaboration, communication, critical thinking and creative problem-solving skills; skills that are essential in today’s digital world.

Adobe Education Exchange

If you need further inspiration for creative lesson ideas or need help, tips, tricks and tutorial videos on using Adobe CC apps, head over to Adobe’s Education Exchange.

Right now, you can access over 8,000 free teaching resources including ready-to-go back-to-school resources such as building connections from day one with creative ice-breaking activities, multi-day classroom collaboration projects and simple, fun challenges to get students to set meaningful goals for the year ahead.

Licensing your devices or your users – which is best?

This really depends on the access and flexibility you want to give to your students and staff, and luckily, with Adobe’s heavily discounted K12 packs for schools, there are very affordable options for both scenarios.

Adobe’s Shared Device Licenses (SDLs) cover specific shared-access school devices, such as in computer labs and classrooms. You only need to license the devices you want to access Adobe CC, regardless of the number of users who will be accessing them.

Meanwhile, Adobe’s Named User Licenses (NULs) cover specific users, whether they’re students, teachers or other staff. These users can access Adobe CC anywhere, whether that’s on school devices or on personal devices at home, and they also include access to mobile apps.

In fact, you don’t even have to choose one over the other. A popular approach for schools is to have a combination of both, with SDLs allowing access for all users in school and NULs being issued to staff and older students who will then also have Adobe CC access to work from home.

Pugh Computers: we’re here to help

As an Adobe Education Elite Partner, Pugh are your trusted Adobe experts. For more information and to discuss your options, please get in touch with our friendly team of Adobe experts on 01974 200 201 / sales@pugh.co.uk.