We are now several weeks into the Fall 2023 Digital Gardener Faculty Fellows program, where participants across two cohorts are exploring ways to integrate digital literacy and creativity into their classrooms. Recently, we’ve seen exciting examples of how tools from Adobe Express can enhance teaching and learning.

For instance, Miranda Rodak shared the Teaching Hub she built (in conjunction with Gabrielle Stecher) for the IUB English department. Miranda used Adobe Express, Adobe Stock, and Adobe InDesign to create the resource and its integrated materials. The visually engaging hub houses program resources for instructors. Mary Bourke also demonstrated how she leverages the Animate from Audio feature in Express to teach sampling methods in her nursing statistics course.

Inspired by them, I decided to create my own animated video (view below or click here) to recap learnings so far in the program. I drafted a script, and used Animate from Audio in Adobe Express to create the base video elements. (Animate from audio automatically generates an animated video synced to the narration.)

While the automatically generated video was a great start, I wanted to refine it further. So I imported the clip into Adobe Rush and edited the visuals manually (adding some video inserts, images, and the like). It’s not perfect, but I think I have at least a first draft of an engaging recap video to share across social media!

Integrating Adobe Express animated content with Rush was pretty seamless and allowed for an interesting multimedia creation. Express provides easy audio/visual generation capabilities while Rush offers more advanced editing control. Together, they enabled me to quickly produce a dynamic video (i.e., about 30 minutes of work) that brings some thoughts to life.

As we progress through the DGFF program this semester, I’m excited to see what other creative integrations of these tools the participants will cook up.