To kick off O-Week at Swinburne University, on February 24 Brian Chau and I had the pleasure to meet with Swinburne’s new Adobe Creative Campus Coaches. These are Swinburne students who are being employed by the University to share the value of Adobe tools throughout the campus.

Now that Swinburne is Australia’s first Adobe Creative Campus, and all staff and students have free access to the Adobe Creative Cloud, the University is very keen to ensure sure as many staff and students are aware of what they have and how it can be used to enhance digital literacy & creativity skills throughout all faculties.

Click here to find out more about Swinburne’s as an Adobe Creative Campus.

The Adobe Digital Literacy Hub is currently being set up in the University library. This is where the coaches will be timetabled each academic week to help support students and staff with their Adobe software access and questions.

Throughout Swinburne’s orientation week, the coaches (as well as Adobe staff) have been based at a special booth in the University atrium with an aim to let new students know that they have free access to the Adobe Creative Cloud.

Brian Chau and I enjoyed meeting the coaches and we are looking forward to continued engagements throughout 2020 and beyond.

On Thursday 20th March, the Adobe Make It roadshow came to Melbourne’s Telstra HQ.

The guest customer speaker was Professor Duncan Bentley, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) of Swinburne University.

Professor Bentley shared how proud he is of the fact that his university has become Australia’s first Adobe Creative Campus. This means that every Swinburne student and staff member gets free access to the Adobe Creative Cloud thanks to the agreement they have with Adobe. Click here for more information.

He described how important this decision was in terms of encouraging Swinburne students and staff to develop their creativity, collaboration and problem solving skills.

I recently interviewed Professor Sarah Maddison, Pro Vice-Chancellor Academic Innovation and Change about this initiative during one of out Adobe Creative Jam events.

Importance of Creativity in Education and Design with Dr. Tim Kitchen – Adobe

Click here to listen

I was interviewed by Rashan Senanayake from Inspired Design to kick off season 3 of their podcats series.

On Wednesday 19th February, I had the pleasure to visit East Doncaster Secondary College in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs to work with some of their media and art students.

I was very pleased to meet with Media teacher Brett Lamb and see some of the great work he is doing to enhance digital creativity and communication skills at his school.

Character Animator and Premiere Pro where the two main applications that I demonstrated and work-shopped. The student picked up the basics and some of them displayed considerable talent.

The Victoria Department of Education are in the process of providing access to the most recent Adobe Creative Cloud applications to all of their secondary schools. So it is a pleasure to share the value of these tools throughout Victoria this year and see students and teacher make the most of them in the curriculum and beyond.

During this event, I also deomstarted Fresco and Aero and gave one of the students about 5 minutes to do a quick Fresco sketch. This is what she came up with …

She also showed me what she had recently created with Photoshop …

Another great example of when you give students the tools, time and encouragement they can produce incredible results.

On Tuesday 18th February, Adobe took over the Sofitel Hotel in Brisbane for another Make It event.

It was great to have a large number of graphic designers, video producers, UI & UX experts and educators mixing together to see what is new in the world of Adobe applications.

A large number of educators had a special session with me that focused on Adobe resources and apps that are used by educators around the globe.

We went through a range of desktop & mobile tools including Character Animator and Spark.

We also went through some of the research behind the importance of creativity in education and shared the value of the amazing Adobe Education Exchange.

The participants were encouraged to create a Spark Page to document some of their leanings during this session. Click here to see what Erin Raethke from TAFE QLD produced. She also had this to say about the event …

I really engaged with all of the presenters and content – everyone did an exceptional job. The section of the presentation that dealt with building a 3D object in real time with imported custom textures was really interesting and has inspired me to want to experiment in my own time. Tim’s session: I enjoyed the enthusiasm of his presentation style (not just because I got a sticker). Although I have used all of the products he demonstrated before, I found the challenge of creating a ‘blog’ style page about the event in real time an engaging challenge… and I appreciated the risk in giving people your ‘blessing’ to play with their phones during your presentation. I guess if people are going to look at their phones anyway, might as well direct their attention to engaging with the content!

Most of the resources that I shared during this event can be found here on the Adobe Education Exchange.

On Monday 17th February, I was invited to run a 2hr digital creativity workshop with about 30 doctoral students representing a number of facilitates throughout the University of Queensland.

The brief for this event was to share a variety of Adobe tools that will help these student creativity present their research. The obvious solution was Adobe Spark.

It is always a pleasure to see how the Adobe Spark tools are able to engage such a wide variety of people from primary students and teachers through to PhD students and university professors.

A number of these students also had access to the full set of Adobe Creative Cloud applications either through their faculty or they are taking advantage of the student discount. So, I introduced them to Premier Rush as well as a few Photoshop tips to help advance their presentation and creativity skills.

Special thanks to Dr Anna (Anya) Phelan, Director Global Change Scholars Program, Research Fellow at the UQ Business School for organising this event for her students.

On Thursday 13th February, the Adobe Make IT roadshow hit the Adelaide Convention Centre .

Adobe’s ANZ solution consulting team have been traveling around Australia throughout February sharing some of the new features of the Adobe Creative Cloud applications that were announced at the last Adobe Max conference in LA.

During most of the Make It events, we have been running an education stream to highlight how Adobe apps are making such a positive difference to primary, secondary & tertiary classrooms around the globe.

Most of the resources that I shared during this event can be found here on the Adobe Education Exchange.