Enter to win a gift card of your choice by reading this month’s posts and filling out this short form.
Putting a lot of time and energy into building relationships with my students and working hard to create a classroom climate where they feel safe, ready to learn, and accepted is the most important piece to teaching for me. This is the foundation that I build everything else upon because it makes it so much harder to make learning happen without it. Naturally, finding the right tech tools for my students is a priority.
A tool I have fallen in love with and use in both my personal and professional life is Adobe Spark. This unique and free online and mobile graphic design app allows users to create Instagram posts, videos, images, and more to tell their stories, their way. Infusing my classroom with Adobe Spark has ignited creativity and focus and established the first floor of learning effortlessly.
 | |
|
Getting a student to open up is not always easy, so after recently reading, “We Wear the Mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar and viewing Chimanda Adichie’s TedTalk, “Danger of a Single Story”, where both author’s sparked powerful conversations about implicit biases, stereotypes, power, and soul searching, a window of opportunity opened and a breeze blew in the brilliant question, “Who am I?”- and the opportunity to explore identity whirled around the room.
So what better idea than to put their lives, cultures, and stories together using an Instagram post layout via Adobe Spark? Students could not only share who they are and where they come from, but they could also create a close knit climate and fine tune self-awareness during a time of uncertainty with crazy COVID-19 lingering. Access to Adobe Spark was simple too-desktop, cell phone, tablet, or iPad. This meant zero excuses for creating and following through. Sometimes, getting caught up with the right and wrong way of doing things can kill the learning mood, but with Adobe Spark, there is never a wrong way to share an idea or tell a story. Students could express themselves and share a piece of their identity with everyone in the classroom and become a tight knit community that values diversity and builds relationships inherently.
Written by Kris Miller, Ben Davis Ninth Grade Center Teacher