Here’s the Spark You May Have Been Looking For! Update
If you have tried to use Adobe Spark, you probably have encountered a student log-in conundrum. The user guide states that children under the age of 13 are not allowed to create their own Adobe ID and so they will need to sign in with an account created by and supervised by a teacher or parent.
Originally, I thought we were fine with our student Google accounts… sadly, I was wrong. If we try to create accounts with our GAFE accounts, students still are prompted to supply a birth date. It seemed like we would be able to circumvent this age requirement as we were using District supervised emails, but that was not the case. A misinterpretation on my part, I admit. Wanting to model good digital citizenship (not lying about our age!), I had to do some thinking about what the user guide was implying…
First Solution: create a generic Gmail account. This Gmail is used to create an account at Adobe Spark. Essentially, it is a class account that all students will use. Since the Gmail is supervised and controlled by the teacher, the teacher’s birth date (or year of the school’s creation) may be used for the creation.
The tricky part to this solution: Can a whole class log into this one Adobe account simulataneously and create a Post, Page or Video? We started to try this solution out with a few of us adults, making a new Video project at the same time. It seemed to work. We thought it may be prudent to either stagger the students as they began the initial save of each “file” as to not crash the account. The classroom teacher I am working with on this inaugural project even agreed to make the files ahead of time so that students would just access/open the files as they all logged in.
However, not wanting to waste valuable student learning time if everything went awry, I started to investigate another solution…
#2: Use the old Gmail hack trick to create student accounts. (Thanks to my colleague, Marianne Butterline, for reminding me about this one as I haven’t used it in years. The reason? Our individual student Google accounts with so much access to Google services.) In a nutshell, the Gmail hack is that you create a Gmail account and then add +1, +2, +3, etc. to the address when you sign up for a service.
Hypothetical example: the original account is MsSandersonsClass@gmail.com. Therefore, when I go to Adobe Spark, I create an Adobe ID by setting up a teacher demo account with MsSandersonsClass@gmail.com. When asked about the birth date, I can supply my own. From there, I would proceed to create more accounts for each student in the following manner: MsSandersonsClass+1@gmail.com, MsSandersonsClass+2@gmail.com, MsSandersonsClass+3@gmail.com, etc. until I had enough accounts. All of these accounts would receive their notifications to the original MsSandersonsClass@gmail.com email address that I am monitoring. I would be able to access them all, and they were created by a supervising teacher (satisfying the Adobe user guide).
Overall, an important reminder in all of this: keep an eye on what your students are doing. No great tool replaces the watchful eyes and guidance of a teacher!
I would love to hear your thoughts on any of our trials and tribulations.
Oh, and here’s Mrs. P’s example for her students.
And some by her students:
Learning objective: Demonstrate how a character has changed over the course of a story.
That was always our guiding light. To quote Monica Burns, ‘Tasks before apps!’