One of the more interesting questions I have been asked over the years is how do instructors help ease student anxieties over working in and with digitally creative technologies. It is, in all honesty, a fair question as students, like faculty, have all manner of affinities with and apprehensions for digital technologies. Just because they have grown up in a world inundated with digital media, does not mean they are all perfectly fine to just jump off the deep end into editing a documentary with Adobe Premiere. Thus, we need to be mindful of the anxieties that students bring to class, which range from matters rooted in competency to those rooted in access. And while I do not purport to have a perfect mode for all students, I have found the following practices can help mitigate these matters: ground them in the personal, focus on building better feedback loops, celebrate failure, craft learning experiences (not simply tutorials), and remain flexible.

For more on these practices, visit my Adobe Spark page at: https://spark.adobe.com/page/NZAiUUjDfqSNQ/