Go Back to School with Adobe Express! What’s New with Adobe Express for Education
Back-to-school is here and as you’re busy planning your classes or getting ready to hit the books yourself, we’ve been busy improving Adobe Express for students and educators. A few months ago we released Adobe Express for Education. Since then, we’ve introduced important enhancements to Adobe Express, just in time for back to school. Here’s what to expect this school year and beyond.
Adobe Express Google Classroom Integration
Google Classroom is used by millions of students and their teachers to share, communicate, and collaborate. Adobe Express can now share directly to Google Classroom. Adobe Express and Google Classroom collaboration works via:
- Adobe Express on the web (through your browser)
- Adobe Express on Chromebooks
When students have finished their work (in any of the Adobe Express formats) they click Share and then click on the Google Classroom icon to share their Adobe Express creations. Teachers can create assignments, ask questions, and make announcements, and students can easily turn in assignments.
Yes, sharing to Google Classroom is now as simple as a click!
Printing and Adobe Express to PDF Creation
Adobe Express creates beautiful web pages in minutes. Professionally designed layouts, elegant transitions and motion, and magazine-style themes ensure that stories created in Adobe Express always look amazing on every browser and device.
But if you need that amazing story offline, perhaps printed for handouts or to adorn refrigerators and scrapbooks, well, then the content looks less than amazing. The truth is that modern responsive web pages, which is what Spark Page stories are, were just never designed to be viewed outside of the browser.
Until now, that is. We’ve worked our Adobe Express magic behind the scenes so that your beautiful web pages look good in print, whether printed or saved as a PDF file. You’ll obviously lose the transitions and motion, but you won’t lose any of your precious story.
A few important notes:
- This is supported in the web version of Adobe Express only.
- You’ll need to use Chrome, or a Chromebook.
- When you open your project for editing, click Share at the top of the screen and you’ll see the new Print option. You can then print or save as a PDF.
- PDF creation is a great option for those of you who have been looking for a way to save web stories in digital archives or require students to submit work that can’t be modified after submission.
Adobe Express and Google Drive Integration
All three Adobe Express formats let you include images from a variety of sources, including Adobe Creative Cloud, Lightroom, and Dropbox. And now we’ve added the image source most requested by educators: Google Drive.
Effective immediately you’ll see Google Drive as one of the available options when adding images. You, and your students, are now able to browse and search for images in the Google Drive, and then simply select them to add them to their Pages, Posts, and Videos. This allows students to use more of their own images in the Adobe Express creations.
Google Drive is currently supported on the Web version of Adobe Express (which means it works on Chromebooks, too).
Simplified Adobe Express Login Experience
This next change is unique to Adobe Express for Education, and it is an important one. When we launched Adobe Express for Education earlier this year, we wanted to get it into students’ hands as fast as possible. Unfortunately, this meant taking a few shortcuts, and as a result we ended up with a login screen that some students found confusing.
So, to eliminate student (and teacher) frustration, we’ve created a new login screen just for our Adobe Express for Education users. You can get to the new login screen here, and we’ve put a convenient link to it at the top of the Adobe Express screen, too. This new login experience will significantly simplify things for your students who can spend less time getting started and more time creating their masterpieces.
New Adobe Express K-12 Resources
One last goodie. Educators are an inspiring bunch, but even the most inspiring educators sometimes want a little, well, inspiration. Educators love learning from other educators as much as we love seeing how they use Adobe Express in the classroom, which is why we’ve created a new Adobe Express Teaching Resources page to showcase all sorts of classroom inspiration.
The Adobe Education Exchange is chock full of great classroom content, and on the new Adobe Express Teaching Resources page we’ve cherry-picked some of our favorites to share with you. We’ve highlighted content suitable for a variety of subjects and grades, and plan to regularly post additional inspirational content. You’ll find exemplars, student content, lesson plans and more, all free for the browsing and using.
Happy back-to-school! Tweet @AdobeCCExpress to let us know how your school year is going with Adobe Express!