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EdTech
How Digital Art Classes Are Blazing New Trails
Through novel creative applications such as Adobe Creative Cloud, students develop crucial soft skills employers value.
by Jen A. Miller
Schools are finding new ways to take a digital approach to learning
across K–12 subjects. That’s long been true in science, technology,
engineering and math, which have been at the forefront of digital
integration.
But as educational focus expands from just STEM to include arts in a
STEAM approach, teachers are finding new applications for this kind of
technology to encourage digital creativity in their classrooms.
That’s key in preparing students for the jobs that will be available to
them when they graduate. In a recent study on creative problem-solving,
Adobe found 86 percent of educators and 85 percent of policymakers
believe students who excel at problem-solving will have better-paying
jobs in the future.
Researchers encountered a discrepancy in the soft skills employers
want, and the time and software it takes to build those skills. Authors
of the study conclude that globally, 79 percent of educators say
there’s a lack of time designated for creativity, and 73 percent say
there’s a lack of access to software in classrooms.
Art Software Encourages Creative Digital Skills
One solution: Adobe Creative Cloud. The suite has more than 20 apps,
including Photoshop, Illustrator and Lightroom, which give students an
opportunity to flex their creative muscles while building skills using
technology they’ll encounter in the workplace.
“Creative Cloud for K–12 provides a method for schools to deploy
licenses to students of any age in a way that is consistent with the
Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and other data privacy
laws,” writes Sharif Karmally, senior product marketing manager for
Creative Cloud for Education, in an Adobe Blog post. “And, it can be
set-up with a single sign-on so that students and teachers can use
their existing school ID to access Creative Cloud.”
Educators see tools such as Adobe Creative Cloud and Spark for
Education as ways to help students use the arts to build those needed
problem-solving skills. “It’s very important in the 21st century for
students to have the ability to be creative — not necessarily to be
artsy, to have an arts background, but to be creative in approaches to
a problem. How am I going to solve this? What are some of the ways that
we can fix this?” said Claudio Zavala Jr., instructional technology
coordinator at the Duncanville (Texas) Independent School District, at
ISTE 2019.
For example, Zavala has seen students make digital collages using Spark
for Education. The technology can be useful for teachers too, he added,
for projects such as making videos, or creating open-house invitations
and portfolios of their students’ work.
These apps also allow teachers to get a better view of students’ thought processes, and how their projects come together.
“They’ll write, they’ll do their research and then take their research
and they’re able to talk about whatever they’ve learned and make their
thinking processes visible to the teacher,” said Tanya Avrith, Adobe
education evangelist, at ISTE 2019. “It really enables them to talk
about where they were, what they got out of their learning journey, and
where they ended up.”
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