Creative Cloud Free to TGS Students
All Gregory School students, faculty, and staff have an exciting new resource available to them: access to the Adobe Creative Cloud on up to two devices! The Creative Cloud is a collection of applications for photography, design, video, and more that photography teacher and professional photographer Amy Haskell describes as “the industry standard for creative fields.” While the Adobe Creative Cloud was previously available on school computers in our digital design lab, the school-wide upgrade brings extraordinary possibilities across the curriculum.
The first place the upgrade will be obvious is in classes that already rely on Adobe, such as digital design and photography. Now that students will have the Creative Cloud on their personal laptops, director of technology Andrei Henriksan explained, “It lets teachers cover more content, so instead of going into labs and learning how to mouse and go to certain menus, teachers can actually assign some of that work for home and then focus on content. It allows students to do things at home that before they could only do on the lab computers.”
Digital design teacher Stephen Krohn agreed that having the Creative Cloud at home will be an asset. “We were limited to a couple of hours a week using Adobe software. Now my students can work on their own projects in their free time. I am so excited to see where their imagination takes them outside of the class time.”
New access to the Adobe Suite will also have a dramatic impact beyond the classes that traditionally used it in the TGS lab. For example, Sean Morfin ‘21, photography editor of the Gregorian Chant student newspaper said, “I’m super excited to have access to the Creative Cloud because it will allow the Gregorian Chant to take our photos and graphics to the next level.”
Teachers who have traditionally used Adobe applications with students in the lab are already imagining where school-wide access to the Creative Cloud might lead. Mr. Krohn estimates that at least 20% of our Upper School students have taken a digital design class at TGS and the number continues to grow. Now, “They can design a poster for biology class or an infographic for a novel,” Mr. Krohn said. “After teaching this course for some years now, I am interested to see how former digital design students will use the software in other academic avenues.”
“Having access to this creative suite gives our students an amazing opportunity to use what the professionals use, and learn the gold standard from the ground up,” Amy Haskell said. “The applications are endless, and I cannot wait to see how it is put to use across all disciplines.”
