East Carolina University (ECU) was founded more than 100 years ago with the important mission to serve people through education and improve the quality of life in the region. While ECU sees innovative education and research as cornerstones of its mission, it also emphasizes the importance of creative skills.
As an Adobe Creative Campus, ECU demonstrates a commitment to teaching creative communication and digital literacy to all students. “Today digital literacy is a basic job skill for any of our students, whether they’re working in art, design, STEM, music, or medicine,” says Grant Hayes, provost. “By teaching our students to work with Adobe Creative Cloud apps, we’re fostering creativity, communication, and critical-thinking skills that are highly sought-after in the job market.”
All faculty receive free access to Adobe Creative Cloud apps, and students are provided licenses when using Creative Cloud for a course. “As a Creative Campus, we provide equitable access for students to industry-standard Adobe Creative Cloud apps,” says Dr. Wendy Creasey, director of Digital Learning & Emerging Technology Initiatives, ECU. “We’ve received a great deal of support from Adobe to help us learn how to use Adobe apps in the classroom. We’re teaching our students how to enhance their work and become leaders in the digital age.”
ADOBE & DIGITAL LITERACY
Build digital literacy at your school.
Telling stories through science
When Dr. Siddhartha Mitra attended his first Adobe Creative Cloud bootcamp, he knew nothing about Adobe applications. But as a professor in the Department of Geological Sciences and director of the Integrated Coastal Sciences Ph.D. program, Dr. Mitra knows the importance of using science to tell stories.
“My research deals with using organic chemicals to tell the story of the Earth,” says Dr. Mitra. “It might involve understanding the water quality off the coast or looking at how historical climate change may have affected wildfires. We use science to understand these stories, but the next step is knowing how to share those stories with others. That’s why I wanted to learn more about using Adobe Creative Cloud apps in the classroom.”
In his Mathematics for Geoscientists class, Dr. Mitra decided to incorporate lessons on social justice and creative communications into one project using Adobe Express (formerly known as Adobe Spark). “Even though I teach geology, it’s important for students to think about the struggles of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color) minorities,” explains Dr. Mitra. “Many people who have made important scientific and mathematical discoveries are minorities, and their contributions are sometimes overlooked by the scientific community due to their background.”
Dr. Mitra assigned each of his students an important figure in mathematics or geosciences who also happened to be a person of color. He instructed each student to create a Adobe Express presentation sharing their research about the figure, including their contributions to their field and how issues such as racism or sexism affected their professional careers. Student Nicole Cataldo created a dynamic Adobe Express webpage centered around the life and career of Mary Jackson, the mathematician and engineer who helped pave the way for women at NASA. Another student, Mikayla Dixon, combined music, narration, still images, and video to create a four-minute video explaining the accomplishments of geophysicist Dr. Estella Atekwana.
“Students enjoyed the opportunity to learn about some overlooked contributions to their field,” says Dr. Mitra. “I chose Adobe Express because it’s so easy to learn. It’s a huge improvement over PowerPoint for presentations, which has become somewhat of a crutch for teachers and students. With Adobe Express, we can make dynamic presentations faster, easier, and better looking than ever.”