San Francisco Unified School District fosters love of learning and creative self-expression with Adobe Express

Daniel Frost wants every teacher and student in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) to feel confident about their creative abilities and the value of their stories. A Program Manager for SFUSD, Frost helps lead the introduction, integration, and adoption of technology districtwide. He identifies tools teachers can use to create breakthrough moments of learning, while giving students opportunities to engage in ways that reflect their perspectives and personalities.

Frost describes his four must-haves for a new tool as adhering to student data privacy standards, being fun, being easy to use, and supporting personal creative expression. He tested out Adobe Express during the pandemic with his kindergarteners and first-graders. “Pretty quickly they were building and making things. It was incredibly fun,” he says. Frost felt sure the software would be a hit with SFUSD teachers.

Building on the foundation

Frost wants SFUSD teachers to have access to the latest and best technologies. “I give teachers an opportunity to share their experiments and experiences and learn from one another,” he explains. Teacher-librarians and artist-makers like Julia Maynard, who runs the maker space at Willie Brown Middle School, help drive implementation. She focuses on building capabilities, for example by showing a teacher how to create a lesson plan using Adobe Express.

Maynard appreciates how Adobe continuously evolves the software, adding Adobe Firefly-powered AI features. To familiarize students with AI, Maynard created a project for students to describe a historical figure without using that person’s name. She teaches kids how to do this by generating images of people using descriptive prompts in the Text to Image feature.

“It’s a great exercise for building students’ literacy and writing skills.”

-Julia Maynard

Willie Brown Middle School student, Legacy Bean's final Health class video project created in Adobe Express.

Becoming collaborative creators

One of SFUSD’s site digital leads, Joanna Szeto, is also a fourth-grade bilingual teacher at Gordon J. Lau Elementary School. In 2020, she started using the 90-Second Newberry Film Festival to inspire her class to write and create stories. Students make movies on their own computers using Adobe Express. “My students do it all themselves,” says Szeto, “and they learn so much more that way.”

Adobe Express helps Szeto fulfill her desire to create richer student learning experiences and deeper engagement. Moviemaking also helps students learn how to collaborate, a core SFUSD instructional priority. Students work in groups, with a focus on communicating ideas and working together to make creative choices.

Gordon J. Lau Elementary School student Jayden Du's Multilingual Stories project created in Adobe Express.

Gaining equitable access in education

Equitable access is also a core instructional priority for SFUSD. It’s about creating opportunities for teachers to discover students’ interests and backgrounds and offering students choices for giving input and for expressing themselves.

Peter Lu is a math teacher at Hilltop High School, a 9th-12th grade alternative school. He loves the joy of discovery and creation and wants that experience for his students. Adobe Express helps students do just that. “It really gets kids into that flow state where they’re trying to design something that communicates their ideas,” he says. Lu observes that when students create something to demonstrate what they have learned, they more fully own that knowledge.

Lu also likes how Adobe Express helps his students — many of whom are still learning English — overcome their anxiety about speaking the language. Using the Animate from Audio feature, students can record and re-record their voiceovers to perfect their pronunciation. Working in Adobe Express removes self-consciousness and lets students practice in a way that feels safe.

Engaging with content in new ways through Adobe Express helps Lu’s students retain more of what they learn. It also supports greater collaboration. Before using the software, Lu says most student assignments were written and shared only with him. “Now when students study something new, they’re excited to get on the computer and create a poster or a video to share what they learned with the school community.”

Mastering the basics while preparing for the future

Zachery Coleman, an Algebra 2 teacher at San Francisco International High School, knows his students often face multiple challenges, including language barriers and lack of access to technology. So, Coleman looks for opportunities to help them acquire math, language, and digital literacy skills.

For example, expanding on SFUSD’s “Algebra in Art” project, Coleman’s students mastered more than math. They also learned how to save online images as files, upload files to the cloud, work with images in Adobe Express, and later, print their final work.

San Francisco International High School 11th Grade student Fernanda Melo Moreno's Algebra in Art project, created in Adobe Express.

Coleman discovered that students respond well to projects that they share with others, and so he started the Algebra in Art “gallery walk.” Students create a hallway gallery of their projects, where they can view and discuss their own and their classmates’ work.

“I’ve never seen students so excited — and using so much math vocabulary in context.”

-Zachery Coleman

Algebra in Art gallery walk.

Empowering each person — and a community

Frost is pleased that the use of Adobe Express is growing across SFUSD. During the 2023-24 school year, students and teachers created more than 35,000 projects with the software. Monthly, on average, 5,000 students use Adobe Express.

“As part of our expanded understanding of literacy in the 21st century, we want our students to not only be consumers but also creators and evaluators of digital media,” says Frost. “Adobe Express is a perfect tool to help students create and become better at evaluating other digital media work.”

Today, the SFUSD Digital Learning and Enablement team is building a baseline of technology literacy and helping students prepare for college and careers. Frost and his team have catalyzed a community of educators and leaders across SFUSD to create a safe digital environment where Adobe Express amplifies the voices of the district’s teachers, who in turn inspire students to amplify their voices too.

Learn more about using Adobe Express for Education here.