Adobe offers schools Creative Cloud licenses for $5/year
Budgets are a common barrier to giving kids the tech tools they need.
Adobe has been slowly moving its apps and services to the cloud since 2013. If you use any of the company's creative products — like Photoshop, Illustrator or Lightroom — you probably already purchase them via a subscription, which can run anywhere from $10 to $83 per month for an individual. Now, Adobe is making the full suite of Adobe Creative Cloud apps for K-12 schools to $5 annually per license (with a minimum purchase of 500 licenses per school or 2,500 per district).
Adobe already offers Spark for Education, a set of storytelling apps for K-12 and higher education for free. Creative Cloud for K-12 can be implemented in a way to comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and can also be set up with a single sign-on so teachers and students can use whatever school ID they already have to connect to Creative Cloud. The advantage of having a cloud-based version of Photoshop, for example, is that it lets students sign into the app from anywhere and any device, including tablets or phones at home. That will let them work on projects outside of computer labs, which can lead to better educational outcomes. Adobe is also planning to provide more professional development to teachers via a partnership with Edcamp; if teachers know the apps, they can better help empower their students.
