Hello once again readers, for this week I bring you yet another ICT tool: Adobe Spark. (spark.adobe.com)
This free online tool allows the creation of visual content from posts to videos, being these last ones the ones that I will focus this entry on. The video creation tool included in Adobe Spark has a unique feature: it allows the recording of voice for each slide you create (it has slides to later transform these into a presentation), so this is ideal for putting into practice the speaking skill for English language learners. Below you'll find a material I created with the tool for the practice of this skill. The topic is "describing your hometown".
As you can see, the result in this video presentation that is previously created by a teacher, which later will include recordings of students answering the questions posted. Each student would have to firstly receive a link from the teacher or creator in order to start recording to later handling this one to the teacher once finished. The process of delivering the created content is very simple since the website provides many places to post the presentation such as Google classroom, a direct link or an embedded one.
After interacting with Adobe Spark, I can assume that the tool can be of relevance in language learning, especially for the speaking skill of the English language, since the video creation feature, as I stated before, has this voice recording option available. For approaches that goes along well with the tool, I can say that the Flipped classroom model would work well since students, at outside classroom time, could make use of the tool to record themselves speaking about a topic previously stated by a teacher, to then being discussed or deeply reviewed during classroom time. Task based language teaching is the second approach I consider could make good use of Adobe Spark. This is due to thanks to the tool, complex or meaningful tasks can be developed for students. With Adobe Spark you're not just commanding students to speak between them, but making the speaking skill practice much more attractive, including technology and visuals the website provides. For students, for instance, teenagers or high schoolers, I would promote language learning with the tool by focusing on the visuals. They are not many but they server the purpose of creating a more attractive material rather than just plain text. This voice recording option from Adobe Spark could also serve to attract the students into the tool since it's similar to Whatsapp's voice recording method, something that is probably well known by teenagers. The limitations and/or disadvantages I could observe while using the website is, at first, the limited resources to use in the video presentations. A lot of basic tools such as changing the color of the text or its size are not available, leaving the user with a poor variety of cosmetics to use in the creation of material. The other limitation is followed by the last one, and it's the fact that this is a free tool. Because of this, Adobe offers a paid version with more features such as more personalization for the material as well as other tools. One good news about this is that teachers and students can get this paid version for free if the school makes the contact to Adobe.
As always, to summarize and close, Adobe Spark is an online free software which both students and teachers can use to create visual material. Here I talked about its usage in the practice of the speaking skill, stating that it can be used to visually attract students to participate in activities. Even though limitations exists in the tool, it can be suitable for teachers to create activities for their students that foster the use of ICT. Thank you for reading and remember to follow the blog to stay tuned for more reviews. Until next week.
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