Kevin's Blog

If you manage Adobe Express in a UK school, here's a scenario that might sound familiar. A teacher logs in, can't find the Classrooms tab, and reports that something feels "off" about their account. A quick check reveals they've been provisioned as a student. Frustrating — but fixable. Here's what to look for. The Symptom The teacher either can't see the Classrooms tab in Adobe Express at all, or their account is behaving like a student account — limited controls, no ability to create assignments, and no visibility of student work. The Classrooms feature is only available to users identified as educators, so if the system thinks your teacher is a pupil, they simply won't see it. The Most Likely Cause: Directory Sync If your school uses Google Workspace Directory Sync or Azure AD / Entra ID (SCIM) to provision Adobe accounts, the most common culprit is the teacher being pulled from the wrong group or OU — one that Adobe is treating as a stude...

 If you’re working in a school and haven’t looked at Adobe Express for Education recently, now’s a good time. The platform has moved well beyond being a simple design tool. There’s now a fully fledged Classrooms feature built in, and if your school is set up properly, it can make life genuinely easier for teachers — without creating more work for IT. Let’s walk through what it is, how to get it set up, and — importantly — how to make sure your student data flows into it automatically rather than someone having to type everything in by hand. What Is Adobe Classrooms? Adobe Classrooms is a digital space teachers create inside Adobe Express to organise students and assignments. It brings everything together in one secure environment where teachers can manage work, provide feedback, and track progress in real time. The key thing for teachers is that you can monitor student progress in real time and leave comments on student work as soon as a student starts an assignment — not j...

...  But They Don't Tell the Whole Story Either There's a lot of noise around Microsoft 365 Copilot right now. Microsoft's marketing machine is in full swing, and the headlines look impressive. But if you peel back the numbers, the reality is a bit more nuanced — and frankly, more interesting. The headline figures Microsoft 365 now has more than 450 million commercial seats worldwide, yet Microsoft 365 Copilot has reached roughly 15 million paid seats — that's around 3.3% conversion. Seventy percent of Fortune 500 companies have adopted Microsoft 365 Copilot, but for most, adoption means pilots and phased rollouts rather than enterprise-wide deployment.  The market signal is clear: Copilot adoption is broad but shallow. Enterprises across industries are testing the waters, but few have fully committed. The biggest blocker isn't cost or capability — it's governance. Since Copilot can access data from across the M365 tenant — SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, and E...

  Adobe Express Add-ons for K-12 — The Rollout Has Moved to 6th April Kevin Sait  ·  March 2026  ·  Adobe Technical Evangelist If you have been keeping an eye on communications from Adobe about the K-12 add-on collection for Adobe Express, you will have seen that the original rollout date was 23rd March 2026. That date has now been pushed back. Adobe has confirmed the new date is  6th April 2026 . What is actually changing on 6th April? From 6th April, the Adobe Express K-12 add-on collection will be enabled by default for all users in existing K-12 organisations. This is a curated set of add-ons designed specifically for K-12 students and educators, and includes integrations such as OneDrive, Google Drive, Quick QR Code, Google Photos, Dropbox, SharePoint, and a range of creative tools including a Contrast Checker, Creative Coding tools, and an Equation Generator. Students will only see the K-12 curated collection. Educators will see the full collection in...

With the recent launch of the Macbook Neo, I was on the verge of getting my first Apple device, just to experience the world of Mac OS. Why you may ask?, well as I have written about before Windows 11 is going through a bad patch. January & February were not good for Windows Updates. It was hit and miss for Windows users, you may have lost your wi-fi, had issues with Outlook Classic or simply lost access to your device. Windows 11 has continued to be the vehicle to continue to ply CoP ilot to every user on the planet. Microsoft has been struggling with CoPilot revenues (along with other major AI players) and at the end of the day we just want Windows 11 finished with a half decent user experience. So really that is why MacBook Neo really appealed to me, however since having a look at the Neo in my local store, Windows OEM's have reacted it seems to Apple's full frontal attack on the market, and I thought I would let you know about it. The disrupter £599 for a MacBook Pro  O...

  Adobe Express on Chromebooks — Are Your Students Actually Logging In Properly? If your school has Chromebooks and you are using Adobe Express, there is a question worth asking your IT admin this week. Are your students logging in seamlessly, or are they hitting a wall asking for an email verification code they can never actually receive? I have been speaking with a number of schools recently and this comes up a lot. Teachers set up their Adobe Classrooms, share the class code with students, and then nothing works quite right. Students can't join, or they get stuck in an email verification loop, or everyone ends up sharing one account just to get anything done. If this sounds familiar, the issue is almost certainly how Adobe Express has been deployed, not anything the teacher has done wrong. The root cause When Adobe Express doesn't recognise a student as a properly provisioned user, it falls back to email verification to confirm who they are. For primary school students, ...

 If you are an IT admin in a school, college, or business that uses Adobe Express, there is a date you need to have in your diary right now. On 23rd March 2026, Adobe is enabling the K-12 Add-on Collection for Adobe Express, which means a whole set of third-party add-ins are going to become available to your users automatically. Let's take a look at what that means in practice, and crucially, what you can do if you don't want all of them showing up in your environment. So What Are Adobe Express Add-ins? Add-ins in Adobe Express are essentially integrations with third-party services that sit right inside the Express editor. Think of them a bit like browser extensions, but baked into your creative workflow. Things like QR code generators, stock image libraries, video tools, background removers from third-party providers, and productivity connectors. For a lot of users these are genuinely useful. A teacher building a classroom poster can pull in resources from connected servic...

If you've been following the wild ride that is AI image generation over the last year or so, you'll already know the name Nano Banana. Yes, it really is called that. And yes, it really is as impressive as it sounds ridiculous. Google's Gemini-powered image model made quite the splash when it first landed in Adobe Firefly, and now the next generation — Nano Banana 2, running on Gemini 3.1 — is here and available right inside Firefly today. Let's take a look at what's new, what it can actually do, and why I think this matters for anyone working creatively with Adobe tools. Wait — What Even Is Nano Banana? Good question. Nano Banana is the slightly bonkers internal codename for Google's Gemini image generation model. When Adobe integrated partner AI models into Firefly back in 2025 bringing in the likes of OpenAI, FLUX, Runway and others alongside its own Firefly models Google's offering got labelled Nano Banana in the Firefly interface, and the name stuck. Th...

Well tomorrow is the 11th March 2026 and that means you can go into to an Apple store and but yourself a MacBook for £599.00.   The MacBook Neo is officially available tomorrow, which I think will truly open the Apple eco system to more people.  A Mac for Everyone, Finally Starting at £599 in the UK — the MacBook Neo is the most affordable laptop Apple has ever sold. Let that sink in for a moment. For years, the cheapest way into the Mac line-up was a £999 laptop. Apple has essentially cut that price nearly in half, and the result is a machine that I find genuinely impressive for what it delivers at this price point. Even the wallpaper spells out MAC (if you look closely) With its beautiful and durable aluminium design, stunning Liquid Retina display , Apple silicon-powered performance, and all-day battery life, this doesn't feel like a budget device. It feels like a proper Mac — because it is one. Lets not get away from the fact that this device is not a replacement...

  Windows 11 in 2026: A Rocky Start for Quality Control As a Windows 11 user you may have noticed that 2026 has not been plain sailing. In fact it's largely picked up where 2025 left off. January kicked off with what many are calling the "January Crisis". Update KB5074109 stacked new errors onto existing ones from late 2025. The most severe was the UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME error, which triggered a wave of Black Screens of Death (BSOD).  This primarily hit devices that had previously rolled back from the December 2025 update; the January patch tried to fix low-level components on systems already in an improper state, essentially bricking the boot process. Even the "lucky" users who could still boot faced a frustrating bug with Outlook Classic . The app would get stuck as a "zombie" background process, failing to open—a bug that particularly plagued those with large PST files or POP accounts February’s Mixed Bag (KB5077181) Roll on February with KB50771...