Week 3: Community Videos with Adobe Voice – Social Posters with Adobe Post

The Preps were finally at the level that they were comfortable using Adobe Voice that I gave them a project to do relating to important members of their community. The grades 1-6s all did Adobe Post posters relating to their Inquiry. I’ll discuss the Preps and then go into what I did with Post.

COMMUNITY VOICES

I had four images (below) that I saved on each iPad ready for the Prep classes to use. The idea was pretty simple. I wanted them to import the pictures, one on each slide, and then record a comment on who that was and what their role in the community was. I modelled this pretty explicitly, with a student coming to help me. We all discussed each one first so the kids had a good idea before they started their project. They have been discussing community members in the classroom, so this is – in effect – another piece of assessment the Prep teachers can use when assessing their understanding of their Inquiry.

I was glad that I did spend so long getting the kids used to the app. The technical part of the project proved no problem for them, and most got done quite quickly. They finished by getting photos of themselves for a front page, and choosing a design and music to go with the project. Here are a couple of examples.

The one issue I had was that some kids took their finger off the RECORD button a little too quickly, meaning that their audio was a little clipped. I tried to get them used to playing back each slide to check, but not everyone did. It’s a good thing to reinforce straight away.

SOCIAL POSTERS WITH ADOBE POST

With the students now familiar with the way Adobe Post works, it was time to put it to more meaningful use. The app is designed to create images for social media, after all. Obviously our students aren’t on social media, but they can still work at conveying an important message.

I discussed this project with each grade level (1-6) and what they were focussing on class dictated what I wanted them to create. So, it worked out that:

• Grade 1  – Space
• Grade 2 – Fictional Characters / Adjectives
• Grade 3 – Persuasive Posters
• Grade 4 – ANZAC Day Posters
• Grade 5 – Environment Day Posters
• Grade 6 – Social Awareness Posters

The Grade 1s were looking space and the solar system. They were tasked with creating some classroom posters highlighting an aspect of space – whether it be planets, stars, satellites, etc. Here are some examples:

The Grade 2s were looking at adjectives and also storytelling. Putting them together for this project, I asked the students to pick a favourite fictional character from books, TV or movies and think of three adjectives that go along with them. Here are a few results.

The Grade 3s just did a whole unit on persuasive writing. Their brief was to think of a persuasive topic they wrote about (or another one they know of) and think of a suitable image and statement that strongly enforces that belief. The Grade 6s did something similar, but with (hopefully) more mature topics.

Here are some of the Grade 3 posters:

And some of the Grade 6 posters:

The Grade 4s did a small unit concerned with ANZAC Day – which (if you’re not in Australia or New Zealand) honours the veterans of the First World War and our soldiers who fought and died in that war. The usual slogan: Lest We Forget – is used a lot in these posters. Here are some examples.

Finally, the Grade 5s were looking at biodiversity and sustainability – a very important topic especially with our school being a 5-Star Sustainable School. With World Environment Day coming up, the teachers decided to hold a competition to see which students could come up with the most meaningful poster about the environment. Here are some great examples.

Next week, the Preps will be doing some drawing on the iPad, the Grade 1 and 2s will be doing some tracing artwork on the iPad, and the Grades 3-4 will be introduced to colour theory and Adobe Illustrator.

 

Week 2: Introducing Adobe Post

The Prep classes this week continued to play around with Adobe Voice, but the Grade 1-6s had a chance to use Adobe Post – a fantastic new app from Adobe that allows the user to quickly and easily create beautifully designed projects. This week is meant to be the introduction to Adobe Post, and for most classes that was the case. But with a curriculum day this week and the ANZAC day holiday next week, grades 1 and 6 had to jump straight into using Post for a project. I will go into that in next week’s post. For this week, I’ll just write about introducing Adobe Post.

CREATING MEMES USING ADOBE POST

I love this app because it really gives you stunning results with minimal effort. The app is mainly used by people to create posters for social media – hence the many templates available for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and so on. In exploring the app, I wanted the students to have a lesson just to fool around with it and get some tricks and design tips from me as they did so.

To this end, what could be more fun than creating memes? I did say to the kids they could do anything they wanted – a poster to celebrate their favourite sporting hero or an inspirational motivational type poster. But most, understandably, went for memes.

I advised them to use Google first to save an image they wanted (one without any text already there) and use that as a basis for their poster. I realise that goes against what we should teach about creative commons, royalty free images, but I am bringing that up later in the unit.

I encouraged kids to look for the balance between text and image. You didn’t want the text to cover or block the focus of the image, but equally, you needed the text to be clear and readable. The background shapes you can apply helps with that. Here are some examples from the grades who did this – the grade 2, 3 5s and 6s.

Next week the students will be making posters again, but relating to what they are studying in Inquiry.

Term 2, Week 1: Intro to Graphic Design

While the Prep classes got a refresher in using Adobe Voice, the Grade 1-6s had an introduction to the new topic for this term, Graphic Design. I’m still working out the beats for the unit this term – which I will post about in due course, but for now, this is how I ran with the intro.

INTRODUCTION TO GRAPHIC DESIGN

I had a PowerPoint for the most part for this, as I asked the kids what they knew about Graphic Design. Most of the answers i got had something to do with making designs on computers, which was interesting. Everyone assumed it was a modern vocation, where in fact the art of laying out images and text to communicate an idea has been around long before computers. Indeed, it stretches back to the time we lived in caves and drew pictures on the walls to tell a story.

Much of my lesson here came from the excellent course on Lynda.com on Graphic Design by Justin Seeley which you can find here. He does an excellent job of covering the fundamentals and the basics. I didn’t cover everything he did in his introduction, but I did cover a little history looking back on the invention of paper, Gutenberg’s movable type press and the Macintosh computer as key moments in the life of modern graphic design.

I talked about how Graphic Design encompasses three main skill sets – visual art, typography and page layout. I showed them a poster where I explained how most fonts fall into two catagories: serif and sans-serif and what that means.

We looked at how matching fonts and matching colours are key design choices. We looked at different kinds of media art – such as advertisements, movie posters, infographics and logos.

I also brought in a very precious book I had in grade four – The Lettering Book. I don’t know if this is something purely from Australia, or worldwide, but before computers, this was the go-to book for design ideas for making posters.

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Finally we had this discussion about classroom posters. I confessed that in all my years of teaching, the posters kids come up with on their own are by-and-large not very good. Some are messy, some are random, and some are just plain confusing. I told them that this was not their fault, because in all their years of schooling, not one teacher would have thought of sitting them down for a class to teach them how to make a poster. We just expect that they can do it. And in some respects, posters are easy. Stick some stuff on a cardboard sheet – done! That doesn’t mean that the poster is any good.

I always came back to the idea that Graphic Design is about visual communication. If your message is unclear, it doesn’t matter about the glittery border, or the fancy fonts. It fails as a poster.

I had a short activity for the kids to do at the end which was to take a sketch book and design a poster. To come up with a plan of how the poster should look, and what it needed, before you go into the cupboard and pick your favourite colour cardboard.

This is one of the examples I modelled for the kids. In my case, I used an iPad mirrored to my TV using the app – Explain Everything.

The boxes with crosses are the pictures. The boxes with lines are for text. I encouraged them to be creative in their designs, but not lose sight of the fact that it needs to flow and make sense. Here are some of the more interesting designs I got from them.

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Haven’t exactly decided what’s happening next week, but you can be sure I will let you know!