In this post, I will cover a great course I am working through on https://adobe.com/learn that prompted me to create this Instagram reel I showed in my last post where I wrote about the very cool AI song creation tool, Suno.
First – if you are interested in learning more about Adobe products, check out the courses at this URL which is the adobe.com/learn site. – Screenshot is below.
The difference between this site https://adobe.com/learn and the https://edex.adobe.com site which is the education exchange that focusses on teaching resources for classes to use, is that it is a site to develop your creative skills on a variety of Adobe products as shown in the screen shot above. Both are great sites.
The course I am working through and strongly recommend is social media content creation which although aimed at students, I recommend all of our teachers with any kind of content creation or digital literacy responsibility should take. Some of you might say that the Australian Government is blocking social media sites from access by kids under the age of 16 – so why encourage people to do a course on social media creation? Many reasons.
Social media creation skills are also synonymous with good content creation skills for communication and promotion. Think reports, business pitches, resumes, branding and more.
While the bullying and algorithms that push viewers to extreme corners of the internet are good reasons to control access to social media for young folk, we need to provide opportunities to develop multimodal content creation so students and teachers can use the underlying media skills to create content that may look like social media posts, but can be used in the multitude of professional use cases that require these skills.
Whether it is brand definition, style guides, mood boards, audience or market definition – these terms are just as valid in a marketing, sales, training company as they are in an Instagram post and the fact that many large companies use social media to promote their products and services through campaigns means that our students need those skills.
Another point is that content creators have a better mental well-being disposition than those who only consume content. If we remove the ability for young people to have a platform to create and share content through legislation, which I do agree with, we need to provide alternative, non-agenda or algorithm driven solutions where students can create and share in positive environment with guardrails to keep them both safe and responsible. Dare I say it again – an environment that is FAIR… Fun Aspirational Inspirational Respectful.
The following links are from the course and are great resources in their own right – just some of many that are contained in this great course.
- Social Media Marketing Ideas for Businesses | Adobe Express
- 7 types of short Instagram captions and 75+ examples to use today
- The ultimate guide to Instagram hashtags for 2023
- Boost Your Content Creation Speed with Top Strategies | Adobe
- 600+ Instagram Captions to Go With Any Post
I cannot recommend this free course highly enough and I will be referring back to it and the links to the great lists that cover everything from hashtag lists to how to create your audience and much more. It has inspired me to think more about what my “brand” is which in my case for Learnshifting.com is linked to SMOOTHIES episodes aimed at delivering “Short Multimodal Online Opportunities To Help Interested Educators Succeed”
So, based on the SMOOTHIES acronym – my target audience are “Interested Educators“
What is my “product” or “service”? Short Multimodal Online Opportunities (because that is part of the acronym of SMOOTHIES) it requires a little simplification. So “live education technology webinar episodes supported by blog topics” might be a clearer description of what the offering is – but I can’t make an acronym as nice as SMOOTHIES from that mouthful.
As Learnshifting.com and SMOOTHIES are essentially two names for the same destination and content yet they currently have two different logos as well as names, I need to work on what the future holds. To me, SMOOTHIES are the live, but recorded episodes that live in the Learnshifting repository. The tag line for Learnshifting.com has been and is “Shifting the way we learn”.
In both cases the purpose is to “Help Interested Educators Succeed” by “Shifting the way we learn” – The “we” is you, me, other teachers, students and even includes parents and caregivers which was why this publicly accessible site was initially established outside the locked down sign-in-required environment of the education department.
I haven’t have got to the assignment part of the course yet, and I hope it gives me a chance to work on improving and consolidating my brands.
Breaking News! Well – I submitted my assignment and within an hour I had my Credly certificate which I share here.
Finally, my two other blog sites that include ultralight aircraft flying stories (Pilotographer) and my travel blog (Xsymetrix) provide lifestyle stories that combine technical production of multimedia posts into a published blog environment serving as examples of real-life stories created using common hardware and software we use in our schools. It means that many of my shared examples are personally lived and not a retelling of someone else’s experience. I will be able to share this lived experience with other teachers and students this year, showing real websites and accepting real feedback.
How long did the course take? I spent at least two hours on the course as I read through the additional material and also played with express using some of the features I don’t normally use like video captioning in Adobe Express as I usually use Premiere Pro for that. I submitted the Instagram reel I included in my last post