New Tech High School Students Become Filmmakers with Adobe Premiere Rush

Schools today have a challenging task—preparing students to succeed in a rapidly changing, technology-dominated world. As visual communication becomes the norm at home, school, and work, it’s more important than ever for students to learn how to tell their own stories through videos and images.

Video has become an important tool for learning at New Technology High School (NTHS) in Napa, California. It’s part of the school’s unique project-based approach and its commitment to helping students develop skills for problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, and transliteracy—key capabilities for success in the 21st century.

“Transliteracy is about more than reading and writing,” explains digital media teacher Lisa Gottfried. “It’s about understanding different media and how they work together to carry a message to the world. Students need to understand how to craft a message, speak to a camera, write a blog, produce a podcast, and more.”

Teachers at NTHS use Adobe Creative Cloud apps to teach these crucial skills, giving students access to industry-leading tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and 20 other creative apps. Adobe Premiere Rush is the most recent addition to Adobe Creative Cloud, now available for $5 per student, per year with a minimum purchase of 500 licenses for school sites and 2,500 licenses for multi-site districts. Adobe Premiere Rush is generating a lot of excitement in NTHS classrooms with its easy to use video editing experience that let students create videos on their smartphones, laptops, and desktops, going between Windows and Mac devices with ease.

Video in the classroom, made easy

As a champion of Adobe Creative Cloud and other digital tools at NTHS, Gottfried was one of the first teachers to bring Adobe Premiere Rush and the power of video into class.

“In my Intro to Digital Design class, we cover video as a basic skill that students need for other classes, whether it’s English or Chemistry or the Makers Program,” says Gottfried. “As a society, we communicate through so many different channels and mediums, it’s really important for students to understand how to create their own content and communicate their ideas in the most effective ways.”

Adobe Premiere Rush is an easy way for both students and teachers to start tapping into the power of video. A drag-and-drop interface and in-app tutorial make it simple to get started, and students can dive into projects using their smartphones—devices that are part of their daily life both in and out of the classroom.

Learning by doing—empowering students with video

In the Visual Arts class at NTHS, students produce videos that demonstrate their knowledge of film concepts, exploring how images convey emotion or how a story might be told in only three shots. With the advanced features of Adobe Premiere Rush, students are creating compelling work.

“Students should be both consumers and creators of media. I want them to learn what makes an image or story work. Teaching students to communicate and be literate in multiple forms of media is very important to me,” says visual arts teacher Keenan Hale. “It’s inspiring to see what students create through Adobe Premiere Rush—their work is informed by their own interests and creativity, and they have advanced tools to make it look professional.”

Adobe Premiere Rush makes professional editing features easy for students to use. For example, the auto-ducking feature allows students to combine music and voiceover tracks in the same clip, automatically balancing audio levels so viewers can hear both simultaneously—all with one click of a button. With multiple video and audio tracks and professional transitions and filters, Adobe Premiere Rush allows students to experiment with their footage and learn how to achieve film effects they see on the big screen—in just minutes.

Adobe Creative Cloud in History, Spanish, and beyond

NTHS’ investment in Adobe Creative Cloud is transforming its classrooms. Students in the Makers Program used Adobe Premiere Rush to document their bridge building projects. Students in a Spanish class were asked to express something they struggled with in class by creating posters and using QR codes to link to videos they had produced. History, English, and Chemistry are also all moving to incorporate more video into learning.

Gottfried explains how video is just one of the ways general education teachers use Adobe Creative Cloud in their classrooms. “I recommended Adobe InDesign to a Spanish teacher looking for tools to create a bilingual school newspaper,” she says. “A few days later, the teacher told me she had found a basic tutorial on Adobe InDesign, and now her class is off and running on the newspaper. The key is that she dove in—and now students have the tools they need to succeed.”

_NTHS uses Adobe Creative Cloud and its video editing capabilities to inspire learning and build visual communication skills in the classroom. Learn more here.
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