It was delightful to work with a number of students and teachers from Tintern Grammar on Tuesday December 4 and share with them the value of digital creativity with Adobe tools.

Tintern Grammar is unique because it runs a parallel program with boys and girls in seperate parts of the school for most subjects until Year 10 when they mix. As stated on their website …

The provision of both single-gender, and mixed classes on a co-educational campus- a best of both worlds approach- creates the optimum learning environment for students.

Most of the day was spent with the Year 6 students, introducing them to the Adobe Spark apps.

Their challenge was to produce a poster with Spark Post and feature the poster in a Spark Video focussing on their passions – what they love doing in their spare time.

In the afternoon, Brian Chau (Adobe Solution Consultant) and I worked with the Tintern Art  and IT teachers to help advance their skills with the more professional Adobe applications in the Creative Cloud.

The NSW Institute of Industrial Arts Technology Education (IIATE) had a strong involvement with Adobe at their annual conference this year.

On Thursday November 29 Adobe hosted a set of all day workshops for over 50 members of IIATE at the Sydney office. Adobe Education Leader Jason Carthew and I ran a series of workshops focussed on video production, composting & animation with Adobe After Effects, Premiere Pro, Character Animator and the new Premiere Rush.

Later that evening the IIATE hosted a dinner cruise on the beautiful Sydney Harbour.

On Friday November 30, I had the privilege of doing the opening keynote in front of about 300 IIATE members at the Sydney Masonic Centre.

All the resources I shared throughout the conference are available on the Adobe Education Exchange via – http://bit.ly/adobe-iiate18

Ben Forta (Adobe’s Senior Director of Education Initiatives) completed his 2018 Aussie tour with a visit to Strathcona Baptist Girls Grammar School in Melbourne on November 26.

We worked with the Year 5s who had already experience Adobe Spark Page so we introduced them to Spark Post and Spark Video.

Each student was challenged with the task to create a Spark Post about their passions. Then to add their posts into a short Spark video that they would be happy to share.

It was lovely to be back at Strathcona where I taught for 13 years from 2000 to 2013 and see the way the school is enhancing digital literacy skills among their students and staff.

Special thank you to Eleni Kyritsis, the Junior School Leader of Digital Learning and Innovation, for making this day happen.

Later that afternoon, Ben and I (with the help from Brian Chau from Adobe) ran an Adobe professional learning event for Victorian educators at Swinburne University.

Eleni Kyritsis

On November 23 Ben Forta and I worked with a number of teachers and students from TAFE NSW at their Enmore campus in Sydney.

We began by sharing about the impact Adobe (in particular the Adobe Spark) is having in education around the globe.

Then we spit everyone into three workshop groups. Ben ran sessions on Adobe Spark, I ran a session on Photoshop and then a session on Adobe XD and Character Animator. Adobe Education Leader (and TAFE NSW educator) Craig Daalmeijer-Power) ran workshops on Adobe Dimension and Acrobat.

The New South Wales Department of Education InteractED roadshow hit Coffs Harbour in northern NSW this week and it was a pleasure for Adobe to be involved again, this time with Ben Forta and myself.

The wonderful Joachim (Jo) Cohen (Schools Technology Innovation Lead) and Mark Greentree (Director, Technology for Learning) from NSW DoE kicked off the event. Jo did a great job with his usual enthusiastic hosting style.

Google Australia’s Engineering Community and Outreach Manager Sally-Ann Williams, did a wonderful keynote presentation titled Preparing students for careers of the future.

Among a range of interesting facts and figures, she told us that 80% of all new STEM jobs in the US are in computer science but only 8% of STEM graduates are from computer science courses.

She also said that according to code.org, computing jobs are the number 1 source of new wages in the US and that there are currently 500,000 computer science related jobs available in a wider range of industries.

Sally-Anne shared some research from LinkIn.com stating that soft skills that 57% of leaders are looking for include leadership, communication, collaboration & time management.

In between the keynote sessions were a range of hands-on workshops and presentations from the NSW DoE Info Tech Department (ITD) and four key ICT partners Apple, Google, Microsoft and of course Adobe.

Ben Forta and I ran a session on Acrobat & Spark Page for the School Leadership Stream, an overview of the Creative Cloud in education for Technical Coordination Stream and a session on Adobe Spark for the Using Technology Stream.

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We also had the privilege of doing the final keynote session for the day titled: Focusing on creative problem solving skills to enhance employability in the age of automation.

Most of the resources we shared throughout the InteractED event can be found on the Adobe Education Exchange via – http://bit.ly/adobe-Coffs18

Tim Kitchen, Kim Maksimovic, Anthony England & Ben Forta. Anthony is holding Ben’s new book about how to use Adobe Spark in the classroom.

Adobe’s Senior Director of Education Initiatives, Ben Forta began his 2019 Aussie visit with a visit to Pymble Ladies College in Sydney on Tuesday November 20.

Ben lives in Michigan, USA but spends most of his time visiting teachers and students all over the globe with a focus on improving the Adobe experience for education. Ben has been part of the Adobe Spark product team in recent years and he loves sharing the value of the Spark tools.

Pymble Ladies College is a large independent girls school with over 2000 students from K to 12. They have an extensive ICT program and were very keen to show Ben the way they integrate a wide range of Adobe’s creativity & productivity applications throughout the curriculum.

Using Adobe Illustrator to design objects cut via a laser cutter

Pymble are obviously big fans of the Adobe Spark tools

One of the highlights of his visit to Pymble was being interviewed about his work and experiences for one of their podcasts.

A group of young filmmakers from Glenwood High School and Ryde Public School visited the Adobe Sydney office to work with me on a video production Masterclass on November 15.

These students were selected as part of the 2019 NSW Adobe Have a Voice project which aims to provide NSW students (in Years 4 to 9) with an opportunity to collaborate, and have a voice (through video or animation) about something that is important to them and enhance their 21st century communication and creative problem solving skills.

During this masterclass event the student shared the videos that they had made during the year with each other and we chatted about what was great about them and what could have been done to possibly make them even better.

We also looked at a range of video capture and editing techniques that will help enhance future video projects.

Then we introduced the students to Adobe’s amazing new video editing app Premiere Rush

Here are some of the videos that were shared …

Ryde Public School

Game On

Get into sport

Glenwood High School

This video is rated PG – not recommended for primary age students.

A special congratulations to the 15 NSW Department of Education schools who were involved in the Adobe Have a Voice project this year. We are looking forward to having you involved again in the future.