Social Studies with Adobe Spark Video

This post was originally written for the @HeathcoteTech blog and first appeared at http://blogs.scarsdaleschools.org/heathcotetech/2019/06/20/social-studies-with-adobe-spark-video/

Adobe Spark is a great platform we've been experimenting with this year. Adobe Spark has a few great benefits including being cloud based so students can use any connected device and access their work anywhere, and it gives you 3 options; Spark Post, Spark Page, and Spark Video. We used Spark Post earlier this year to create poetry graphics.

For the 3rd grade Cultural Universal and 5th grade Immigration units we used Spark Video.
For each grade the students had some basic guidelines

• No more than 6 words per slide
• No more than 6 seconds of narration per slide
• Choose music that fits the tone of your story/narrative
• Choose a theme and color scheme that fits the tone of your story/narrative

The goal of using Adobe Spark Video was to get students to think differently about their presentation. They are adept at Google Slides and very competent at WeVideo. Adobe Spark falls somewhere in between and posed them challenges to figure out; challenges in what they wanted it to do or be like WeVideo while also showing them the possibilities beyond Google Slides.

For both the 3rd and 5th graders they wrote their narratives first, then turned those into a script, which became the narration and the visuals. There was lots of editing, revising, practicing, fine tuning, and ultimately amazing final projects.



This is a demo template of a script organizer:

Here are the final project playlists:

3rd grade cultural universal projects

3D Cultural Universals


3L Cultural Universals


3M Cultural Universals



5th grade Immigration Projects

5C Immigration 


5E Immigration