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

Chapter Two: What is Adobe Creative Cloud and How Does it Work?

Chapter Overview


This chapter has three parts:Part A describes the awesome array of applications included in your subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud.  It explains the matrix below, which you could think of as a kind of “menu” to the entire collection of Adobe Creative Cloud applications.  Each of the first five “things you need to know about Adobe Creative Cloud” in Part B are the more general principles or concepts.  Part C, numbered six-ten are the more practical aspects of operating the software -- particular the menus, tools, interfaces, and workspaces.

Part A: What is Creative Cloud?

If you are completely new to Creative Cloud and don't know much about what it is, then Part A is a good place for you to begin.  If you have some sense of the different applications in Creative Cloud, but are just beginning, then you might want to skip to Part B and Part C.  

Adobe Creative Cloud is a collection of connected software applications.  Think of Creative Cloud as a toolbox for making media for others to experience and interact with.  You've probably heard of Photoshop, which edits photographs.  Illustrator creates graphics and drawings, Premier Pro edits video. Spark makes it easy to create things for social media, such as quick video clips or memes. 

In Chapter One, you saw the matrix below, which is like a menu for the most widely used Creative Cloud applications. This menu/matrix is the heart of Chapter One because you want to focus on the first column to get started -- you want to focus more on the intellectual work you want to accomplish rather than the individual applications themselves.  The purpose of Adobe Across the Curriculum is critical digital literacy, which means that you learn more about how meaning and media work as opposed to functional digital literacy, which is more about which buttons to push.  Critical digital literacy explores why you want to "push the buttons" in the first place, whereas functional digital literacy is only about how to operate the software. Critical digital literacy is a capacity that you continually develop as a lifelong learner. Functional digital literacy is skill that you learn once that doesn't evolve much.



The menu/matrix is organized 

in which each row is a different media format for sharing your work.  Each row is covered in a different chapter in this resource, which cover a number of different applications from which to choose to get your work done.  Each column I
 

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