Week 7: Technology Proficiency Assignment

Educational Technology Tool: Adobe Spark

Explanation of the use of this tool in the educational environment:

As the Professional Development Curriculum Manager of the Acquisition Internship School at the VA Acquisition Academy (https://www.acquisitionacademy.va.gov/), my responsibilities include all our professional development courses. These individual courses are taught in a face-to-face learning environment at our academy in Frederick, MD. The length of the courses ranges from one to two hours.

The way I see using Adobe Spark is to create synopsis/reflection video for each course. The created synopsis/reflection video would then be played for the course participants at the end of each face to face course. By doing so, it would give the participants an opportunity to be reminded of the learning and then reflect on the learning materials covered.

I decided to test the idea of using Adobe Spark to create a synopsis/reflection videos for each class by using FLD134: Leadership Principles for Contract Specialists. This course is a two-hour face to face course. I begin the creation process by having available the Instructor Guide, Student Guide, and PowerPoint Presentations for the course. Next, I outlined the key takeaways of the course.

Adobe Spark is a cloud-based story-telling app. I loaded up the app in my browser and began the creation process. Adobe Spark is very easy to use although its creative freedom is quite limited. It is a great program to make a short synopsis/reflection video, but I would stick with Adobe Premiere Pro for any complicated projects.

Adobe Spark has in-app access to Pixabay, and so you can select Creative Commons pictures to use without leaving the app, which I think is a great feature. To create the synopsis/reflection video, I choose the caption I wanted to remind the participants of from the class, choose a picture which best represented the message, choose the timing of the slide that was appropriate, and then went onto the next slide and repeated the process. After it was complete, I choose music that was available inside the app to act as background music.

The attached is a sample of what can be created with Adobe Spark.