Adobe Creative Cloud Across the Curriculum: A Guide for Students and Teachers

Chapter One: What Do You Want to Create Today?

Everywhere, All of the Time helps you use powerful digital literacy tools to create and share outstanding academic work in any class, in any discipline, anywhere across the curriculum.  As discussed in the Introduction, the best way to accomplish this, the best way to get your work done, is to focus first on questions such as: Once you have a sense of what you want to accomplish, then you need to consider the best way to get your work done.  What genre or format might be best?  What mode or media to use to develop and communicate your ideas effectively?  What are the expectations of my audience, readers, or viewers?  Can you find models or examples of other work that have succeeded in what you are trying to accomplish?

These fundamental questions begin with a focus on goals and outcomes -- this approach focuses on the ends before the means, on the results before the approach.  Once you have an initial sense of your destination, next you can plan a route to arrive there.

Notice how the first column in the adjacent table is organized according to the kinds of publications or products you might create, rather than according to the names of an Adobe application you might use.  This table is designed to help you select the right tool for the job, after you have figured out the job in the first place.

As you will discover throughout this book and particularly in Chapter Two, the Adobe Creative Cloud suite of applications is enormously powerful and diverse -- these tools can do almost anything you can imagine, and many things you won’t even begin to imagine until you begin actively creating with Adobe Creative Cloud.  You do not have to use the applications as listed in the table, because there so many ways to use them.  But, as a way to get started, the table matches each application with its most common use -- to produce creative solutions to assignments in any class and everywhere across the curriculum.