[Music] [Lucas O'Keefe] Welcome to this session of Adobe MAX 2024. My name is Lucas O'Keefe. I'm a teacher and content creator, and I'll be leading you through this session on Enhancing Reading Visualization with Adobe Express and Gen AI. And when thinking about how I wanted to start off this presentation, I thought what better way to show the importance and what Gen AI can do for students today than by showing some actual activities that students in my classes have done with Gen AI. So first up, to show that Gen AI can help my students proudly share their learning superpowers, this is an activity I gave for back to school. The prompt was using Text to Image and some hero themed templates, create an All About Me poster or intention for the new school year. This is meant to remind students that every one of them has a unique set of skills that make them, them. And when given this activity, this is what former student Grade 3 Aliyah typed into the Text to Image prompt box. She said, "I am a super reader! I'm a hero with curly brown hair, a blue mask, a cape with book pages, and I am confident I am a friend." And this is the lovely poster we put up on the wall for the entirety of the school year after she made it. When I asked Aliyah how this project made her feel, she said, "I can't wait to show my mom." Moving on to Grade 8, getting a little bit older, Gen AI can help my students brainstorm solutions for healing our planet. This is another activity I gave where after completing research about sustainable communities and how they're designed, students were asked to create their own sustainable community layout. They were inspired to use images, symbols, and, of course, Text to Image generated ideas to map out their community in Adobe Express. And here are some things that Grade 8 Evan was able to generate from his mind, from his own thoughts and learnings on sustainability. He typed in things like the view from above of a large green island with tons of fields for windmills, and we got some windmill fields. We had the view from above, a futuristic city with sustainable living and bike lanes, and all this came together to create Evan's city of tomorrow. When asked about how this project made him feel, Evan said, "I went home and read all about urban planner jobs." I don't hear kids doing that very often for other activities. And my favorite of these three examples, Gen AI can help students open the door to trying out new skills, and this isn't an activity I gave. There's no assignment that I assigned here. Instead, just an awesome original character you'll see there right in the middle of the slide. This is a character named Captain Balloon drawn up by a student Connor and turned into an ever expanding comic book series. Now when I talk about and introduce Connor to you briefly, I've got to say that Connor was a self-proclaimed writing hater, his words not mine. But seeing his characters come to life with Gen AI truly inspired him to write and write and write during our free writing periods in class. So what Connor did was he used Text to Image, drew these pictures of Captain Balloon, not feeling the most confident in his own drawing, he put Captain Balloon in as a style reference or a composition reference in Adobe Express Text to Image and generated this lovely digital art here on the right to really bring his character to life. As a result of all this, Connor is not only writing more, he's drawing more too, and he's finding that seeing these examples of his drawings coming to life digitally is inspiring him to refine his own style and expanding his creativity and it's largely thanks to Gen AI opening that door for him. When asked about how this made him feel, Connor said, "I hate writing, but I like making comic books about Captain Balloon." And there's obviously some writing involved in there, but we might not tell Connor about that just yet.
Moving on, what can we learn from these students? What can we learn about Gen AI from these examples? Throughout your career as a teacher, you're going to teach or have already taught your own Aliyahs, Evans, Connors, and hundreds of other learners who are all unique in their own way. One of the most powerful ways we can celebrate the uniqueness of each of these students is through creativity, and I hope these examples you see here reflect that. By putting them in the driver's seat and allowing them choices and options to show their learning, we make education engaging and valuable, and all the different examples you see here definitely reflect that for me. So let's learn how to do that in today's fun activity, and I hope the little sneak peek is already hinting at that. We're going to learn how to do it through one of my personal most difficult subjects to get students engaged with, and that for me is reading. So I find that getting students to buy into reading, to enjoy reading is still one of my challenges, especially around the age 10 to 14 age group, students either love it or they want nothing to do with it. Hopefully, this activity will show you that there are ways to open the door and get students of all reading interest levels excited to read and to hear you read and to pick up a book on their own. What we're going to be doing is using Gen AI to help students practice the reading comprehension skill, a super important one of and one of my favorites, visualization. And we're going to do it all with a little help from our friend The Flufflewump and allow me to explain just what that means. So today's lesson, a quick little road map of what we'll be doing. The lesson is called All About Flufflewumps! The activity is we're going to make guided reading fun by reading a passage of text that describes an imaginary creature, that would be the Flufflewump. We're going to draw it from how we visualize the text. I always love visualization in terms of reading comprehension because it encourages students to take the ideas that they're hearing and imagining and gathering in their mind and put it onto paper, especially for our visual learners who love to draw, who love to have hands on activities. Visualization shows them that reading can use those skills. It's not just decoding words on a page. So we're going to draw the Flufflewump based on how we visualize the text and then we're going to use Text to Image in Adobe Express to bring our drawings to life for a media related project and I hope you can see on the road map how fun this is going to get if we look on the far right.
So what is visualization? Visualization is the way we create mental images in our mind and it happens all the time that we're reading. I want you to hear hear me say these words and read this passage and think about what you visualize. The clouds in the sky were pink, fluffy, and shaped like elephants. Elephants made of cotton candy. Now I know I have an image here generated with Text to Image that you see on screen, but a student hearing that with no visual guide, they might be encouraged to make stronger connections to what they're reading as they visualize and paint that picture. Maybe their elephant would look very different than what I've generated here, and that's the power of reading and also allowing us to visualize our own unique ideas and experiences of the text while we're reading. So visualization is key for helping readers make those connections and helps them remember and comprehend important details. Nobody's going to imagine and visualize a cotton candy elephant and forget all about it. I think that's going to be much more memorable than your average run-of-the-mill elephant. It also makes reading much more fun for reluctant readers and that's what I'm really trying to highlight today.
So what we're going to do is I have a guided reading passage called all about Flufflewumps. This might be a passage that you would read for your students. You could read it aloud, you could have them read it on their own and circle and highlight important aspects of the text, but here's what we're going to do. As we read the following passage, I want you to take notes about how you imagine the Flufflewump might look. So on the next slide, there's a passage describing these imaginary beings, these creatures called Flufflewumps. I'm going to read it. I want you to take notes about how you imagine this creature to look. There's going to be a lot being described in the text. So the goal is not to get it all. It's not to describe the perfect Flufflewump because, spoiler alert, there's no such thing. But the important thing here is to think about what stands out to you as you listen to the reading and visualize your own unique Flufflewump. I hope you can see how this would be such an exciting activity for students to think about what their classmates and their peers were attached to or drawn to from the descriptors or from the passage and to compare it to their own, and Gen AI is going to make this super fun. So as I'm reading this in a moment, and I hope you've gotten a pen and pencil, and paper to take notes as we're doing this, but you might want to write down some keywords or descriptors or maybe you'd rather just listen and not write anything down and just see what sticks in your memory. Any of these options are completely fine for the next activity. Without further ado, let's read all about Flufflewumps. "In the middle of the Whispering Woods, under the bright moon, lived a funny monster called the Flufflewump. This creature was strange but not scary. It had fur in bright colors like pink, orange, and purple looking very cheerful. The Flufflewump had big, shiny green eyes and ears. It always wore a big, happy smile. Its thin legs ended in small feet, which it used to dance around the forest, making the leaves rustle softly. What stood out most was its tail, full of colorful feathers that looked like a fancy cape. It could change the colors of these feathers to show how it felt or just to look pretty. The Flufflewump was friendly and loved to play, running around the meadows and playing hide-and-seek near the laughing streams, always ready for fun." That is all about Flufflewumps written by myself.
So now inspired by good old Connor and his Captain Balloon drawing from the beginning of this session, we're going to draw our own sketch of a Flufflewump. We're going to take the words that were on the page I just showed you and hopefully now either in your notes or in your memory, and we're going to turn them into drawings. So if you did take notes or if you have certain things that do stand out in your mind and in your memory we're going to use all that we remember and all that we've kept track of and we're going to draw a Flufflewump. Remembering, of course, there is no such thing as a perfect Flufflewump drawing. I'm going to give you five minutes to do it, you're going to draw your own image, hopefully you have something to write with and something to write on, and as you draw, if you finish early I would like you to take a picture of your Flufflewump drawing because that's going to be useful in the next step where we're going to incorporate some Gen AI in Adobe Express, and if you have Adobe Express that you can open either on desktop or mobile that'll be read, that'll help you prepare for the next step. So I'm going to leave it on this slide which gives instructions, but again you are drawing your Flufflewump sketch using what you remember from the slide that I'm not going to go back to and give you some extra details from. Whatever you remember about the Flufflewump, whatever you wrote down about it, draw what this creature looks like. I'll give you five minutes to do that.
Okay. I hope you have your Flufflewump drawings ready. I'm going to show you how mine turned out. So based on the description that I shared, this is what I visualized a Flufflewump to look like.
This is it. I took a photo of it, and I sent it to my computer because I'm going to now use Text to Image in Adobe Express to bring this to life. And this is really where I see Gen AI being so much fun for student engagement, really getting students to buy into reading, to be able to take a passage of text and words, which could be intimidating or daunting to students. They're going to draw something of their own creation inspired by the text, and now we're going to put it into technology to make it really pop. So, again, this is my drawing. I took a photo of it. I'd like for you to do the same. Take a photo of your drawing, send it to your computer, have it on your mobile app somewhere where you can use it because we're going to obviously use this drawing to inspire what we generate with generative AI. I'm going to do a demo of how you can use this drawing to generate something very much like it in Adobe Express, but I've also attached instructions as well. So if you're following along with just the slides, the next slide will have all of those instructions. But I'm going to go to Adobe Express and show you what we can do to generate this Flufflewump drawing into a digital masterpiece that we can use some fun media projects with.
Okay. So now we're in Adobe Express. I have a project that I'm going to be using for some fun media activities, but we have to bring my Flufflewump sketch to life. So here's how we're going to do that. From my project, I'm going to go to Media and I'm going to select Text to Image. Click on that. It's going to ask you select the dimensions you want. For the purpose of this, because it's a typical 8.5x11, sheet of paper or worksheet, I'm going to select portrait. And as you can see it ends up in the middle there, where I can increase the dimensions, I can drag it around. I'm going to make it big just so we can really see what we're working with to the full extent. Now just to keep this all in one window, so I'm not jumping around too much for you, as I enter my prompt, which is just going to be right here on the left where I'm going to describe my Flufflewump. I do have the notes that I took from the text right here on screen to copy and paste into the prompt box. Again, just so I'm not switching around too much for this demonstration. But the prompt I wrote about what a Flufflewump looks like to me is. A Flufflewump is a bright and colorful rainbow creature in a forest with a cape of many colorful features, two different types of ears, one pointy and one round, a big smile, and long thin legs. And maybe some of these things weren't even in the text, maybe I added things from memory just after I reflected on the text, that's what's going to create a different Flufflewump for just about everybody. So I'm going to copy and I'm going to go to my Text to Image box here and I'm going to paste it into the prompt box.
So there is my prompt. It's going to be describing the Flufflewump I want to create. Now if I were to just hit Generate down here, I would get some pretty good Flufflewumps but I did do an image to support this and I do want to make sure and students will want to make sure just for more fun, that the image is being added into the generation here. So to make it a little bit more precise, what I'm going to do is I'm going to use Reference Images here, and specifically I'm going to use a Composition reference because I want to make sure that that Flufflewump is going to be matching the drawing that I did. So just right here, this is why I asked you to take a photo of it, click on Composition, find the drawing, find the image photo, and you're going to add it to the design here. So now when I hit Generate, I could add some other features like the certain style I want, but I like to just keep it blank, keep it simple, and see what it gives me. We have my text prompt using the words that I helped visualize as I read, and we have my composition reference here, and let's see what we come up with. Let's see what Adobe-- Let's see what Text to Image powered by Adobe Firefly here is going to generate for my Flufflewump.
And there we go. So you can already see we've got the different ears being generated. We've got the eyes. We've got the rainbow colors. But if I look at my prompt and my drawing, there are some things that I don't think this first example really matches. I want longer thin legs for example, and this one doesn't quite have that. But you can see in my example that the ears are pretty much an even match. The cape in the back made of feathers or features looks like it's lined up with the design that I put in there. And let's go through some other options here to find one that really matches the Flufflewump I visualized. I mentioned that the thin long legs were something that I felt was missing from my example, so let's go ahead and click on this one, and I like that one. That's already starting to have a little bit more of what I visualized. But the idea here that's really fun about this feature is you can see how they all have a very similar pose, a very similar stance, because of the composition reference that I used to inspire what was generated. And this is what's very fun for students to really just see something that they drew, to see the origins of their drawing come to life digitally right here in front of their eyes. There are so many things I can do with this and play with it and design right here in Adobe Express, but I'm going to hop back to the slideshow to show you some examples of different assignments or extension activities that I would do with this. So coming out of that demonstration, again, I just have the instructions and the steps that I followed that are here for you on the screen, but that is just breaking down in detail what I did. And this is another example of a Flufflewump that I generated. So I've, of course, had Flufflewump fever over here, but looking at just the different ways it uses the composition reference to really just decide what to show me and what to generate for me. So, of course, visualization is a great way to get students inspired and encouraged to read, having a lot of good excitement to go with that, but it doesn't end there. We can also incorporate Gen AI into media projects and that's where our Flufflewump adventures are really just beginning. So Adobe Express, of course, has tons of poster templates that make a variety of media projects extremely easy. This is a great way to get students having a critical lens towards media that's all around them and to work on some creative and design skills that could take them to their careers or their pathways in the future. So here are just three quick examples of how I would use some Adobe Express poster templates to make some quick extension activities. So the first one, the prompt might be, "The Flufflewump just arrived at your local zoo! Create a poster introducing this friendly creature and explaining why guests should come check it out." If you do want to search this up, if you go into Adobe Express and just search in in the templates bar search for "Zoo Poster," you'll get some really creative ones that you can just put that Text to Image Flufflewump image right into there and design from there. Another one, the prompt is, "The Flufflewump stars in a children's book!" The activity would be, "Create a book cover for a children's book that is starring the Flufflewump as the main character." Templates to search for this in Adobe Express, type in, "Children's Book Cover," and you'll get tons of good starting points. And finally, "How to take care of your Flufflewump!" This activity is my favorite of the three and it involves creating a list of instructions for how someone would take care of a pet Flufflewump including its food and routine," that it needs, and if you want to find some good templates for this type in "Checklist Poster" in Adobe Express. Here are examples of all three. We have the introduction for the Flufflewump being added to the zoo. We have a children's book cover featuring Dancing With The Flufflewump, and we have the So You Want A Flufflewump? poster about caring for a pet Flufflewump. It's super easy to add the generated Flufflewump image to all of these projects and it is for you and your students as well. The next step is really just endless. Have them get into the tool, have them doodle, have them listen, and let their ideas shape where their creativity goes from there with a little bit of fun from Gen AI. I'd love to see what creations you come up with or how you modify or extend on this activity, but I hope you've learned some great ways to get started with Gen AI and enhancing reading in your classroom. Thanks for tuning into this session. [Music]
