Google announced a new integration with Adobe that allows schools to easily distribute the Adobe Express platform on Chromebooks for students.
Adobe Express is a free, cloud-based authoring application that provides basic content creation tools for images, videos, and more. Google hopes that students and teachers will use the software to incorporate more digital art into their assignments.
“I have three kids and one of my favorite activities every year is the science fair in the gymnasium,” said John Maletis, Google’s VP of ChromeOS product, engineering and UX. “I envision an Adobe Express powered science fair where you have more compelling ways to explain the experiment or project.”
In general, licensing a third-party app for a fleet of student Chromebooks is a challenging, multi-step process that requires purchase orders, schedule updates, and the like. “It takes a lot of perseverance,” said Govind Balakrishnan, Adobe’s senior vice president of Creative Cloud products and services for that system.
Starting today, Adobe Express is available directly in the Google Admin Console. An IT admin just needs to turn it on to allow a school, class, or class to access it. They can also choose to pin Adobe Express to their Chromebook’s shelf (which is the equivalent of the Windows taskbar).
Teachers can also now assign, comment, and grade Adobe Express projects in Google Classroom. Students can collaborate on Adobe Express projects, just as they would in a shared Google Doc.
ChromeOS is well known and widely used in education, but its lack of compatibility with certain popular third-party software that Windows users can access continued to be a problem for some potential customers. The former has recently picked up several new apps in the creative space, including LumaFusion in February and the Google Photos editor in March. The Figma prototyping platform has also recently become widely available on education Chromebooks, both inside and outside the US. The push for better third-party support has gone beyond the artistic realm: Minecraft exited the early access phase on ChromeOS a few weeks ago.
The Adobe Creative Cloud — the industry standard for content creation and a suite of software widely believed to be in Windows and macOS territory — could help build the Chromebook case for educators looking to assign creative projects. Handy for Adobe, a shelf icon can also prompt students and teachers to use Express when they would otherwise have jumped to something else.
However, Balakrishnan hopes that the integration will inspire teachers to incorporate new creative elements into their curricula.
He sees the integration as “the first step in many we plan to bring to market to make it significantly easier for teachers and students to blend creativity and productivity,” he says. “We’ve long seen them as separate pillars and we’re increasingly seeing opportunities to bring them closer together.”
“We’ve just seen this shift in how teachers teach their students — they’re constantly looking for more creative methods,” says Maletis.
The integration was part of a series of announcements Google made at the ISTELive 23 Edtech conference in Philadelphia. The company also announced a number of other features for Google Classroom, including integration with the Read Along feature, shareable links to classroom templates, a comprehensive Google for Education App Hub, and more data controls and privacy switches for Chromebooks.
