Teaching with Adobe Spark Video Guide

Adobe Spark has been rebranded as part of Adobe Express. It includes all the same great functionality and content as Adobe Spark, plus so much more. Here's the Adobe Express User's Guide.

Webinar Archives and Resources

CCC Digital Learning Day 2019 event archive and resources:

    • Session: Making Creativity SPARKle in Teaching and Learning

    • Session: Adobe Spark: Demo and Create Challenge

Accessibility

Students who use a screen reader to navigate digital content will experience problems creating a video with Adobe Spark Video due to accessibility gaps in the tool’s interface and the visual nature of videos. We suggest providing Adobe Spark Video as one option for students to use to demonstrate their learning or have an alternative prepared for students who require accommodation. For more information, refer to the Adobe Spark accessibility report.

Tips for Designing Student-Generated Video Assignments

If you plan to have your students create videos and share them with the class, design the project into manageable chunks to reduce your students' cognitive load and make the project more clear and manageable. Chunking will help your students and will also improve the quality of the submissions, making your assessment of them easier.
Here are some recommendations for designing your assignment:
    1. Clear instructions. A few of the important things to include in your instructions are:
      • Learning objectives. What objectives will your students demonstrate through the creation of the video?
      • Length. 
      • Due dates for each step/deliverable listed below (items 2-7).
      • Examples for each step/deliverable. Examples will ensure your expectations are clearly communicated to your students and ease anxiety some of them may experience.
      • Rubric. How will you grade the videos? Develop a rubric with clear criteria. You may wish to use or adapt this sample video rubric.
    2. Identify the topic. Due on _____
      You may wish to have your students select from topics or select from key questions that they would respond to in their video or the story they will tell in their video.
    3. Submit a storyboard. Due on ______
      A storyboard is a plan for the video. It includes the plan for the images that will appear in the visual track and the transcript of what will be said in the video. Here is a storyboard template in Google Docs. You may give the link to your students and they may copy it into their Google Drive (select File/ Make a copy) or they may download and edit it (select File/ Download as/ Microsoft Word Doc).
    4. Record and Caption the video.
      To ensure your students have equitable access to the videos that are shared, identify the number of peers videos that you will instruct your students to view and ensure that the same number of videos are closed-captioned. For example, if your instructions are for students to choose 2 videos shared by other students to view and respond to, ensure at least 2 videos have closed captions to provide equal access. Consider offering extra credit for this step. 

      • To add captions, students may download videos from Adobe Spark, upload them into YouTube, and then upload their transcript (saved as a .txt file) and YouTube will auto-sync the captions.
      • If your institution offers captioning support, include that as a resource too.
    5. Submit the video. Due on: ______
      Post the link to your video in the appropriate discussion forum in Canvas.
    6. Reply to peers. Due on: _____
      Select at least __ videos by your peers, watch the videos, and reply to each student. In your reply, respond to the prompt, ___________.

Tips for Creating Instructional Videos

Instructional videos you create with Adobe Spark Video (or any other video tool) must include closed captions to comply with federal accessibility laws. For an accessible Adobe Spark Video workflow, we recommend:
    1. Identify your topic. What is the objective of your video? What will your students learn? This should be clear and succinct.
    2. Create a transcript or storyboard of your video.
    3. Keep it short. Ideally, your video should 1-3 minutes and each image should appear on the screen for no more than 10-seconds. If you need more time to cover your ideas, consider chunking your topic into smaller topics.
    4.  Record your video from a computer or iOS device with Adobe Spark Video.
    5.  Download your video. From your computer, log into Adobe Spark and download your video as a .mp4 file.
    6. Host your video online. Upload the video file to YouTube or (3C Media Solutions if you are a CA Community College employee).
    7. Caption your video. 
      1. On YouTube:
        1. Edit the auto-captions and then removing the auto-captions track or
        2. Upload your transcript and auto-sync the captions (this step only works if the video’s audio track is in the same language as the transcript).
        3. Note: If you have pauses in your video in which music plays but you do not speak, make sure to include the sound cue [music] in your captions to identify these background sounds.
    8. Copy the embed code.
    9. Embed the video in Canvas.