Adobe’s Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer Shantanu Narayen officially welcomed 14,000 attendees (as well as thousands more watching live online) to the 2018 Adobe Max conference at the Los Angeles Convention Centre in California, USA.

Shantanu began his keynote address by sharing that one of the pleasures and privileges of his job is meeting creative professionals and students in all parts of the world and how incredibly moving it is to see the passion they pour into their work. He said it fills him with pride to hear about the role Adobe plays helping to bring their ideas to life.

On a visit to India earlier this year, Shantanu reflected on his own schooling experience and how the importance of education was always instilled in him. He said that basic education resources were often limited and, at best, the curriculum stopped with reading, writing and arrhythmic. Shantanu shared that he really believes that students today who don’t have access to educational resources, especially technology and digital literacy skills will be disadvantaged for the rest of their lives. He reflected that it is a passion of his (and everyone at Adobe) to extend beyond the creative professional and to make Adobe’s creative tools more accessible to more people.

Shantanu said that all disciplines of education can be dramatically improved when they move beyond a test bases assessment to include pictures, video, animation and graphics. He said that Adobe Spark was introduced to address that basic need.

He also said that he was thrilled to earlier this year to announce a partnership with the India ministry of skill development to enable more than a million students to have access to Adobe Spark. From his point of view, a million people addressed in India, billions more to go all around the world

It’s that spirit of creativity, bringing ideas to life and telling stories through technology that lives in not just creative professionals but everywhere, photographers, film makers, designers, illustrators and artists.

You can see the recording of Shantanu Narayen’s keynote and the rest of the first day of Adobe Max day via – https://max.adobe.com/

Make sure you check out the amazing new Adobe Premiere Rush multi platform video editing tool now of the Creative Cloud as well as on iOS.

Also check out Project Gemini all in one drawing & painting tool for the iPad  (to be released next year)

Have you noticed the following new tools within the Adobe Spark apps?

Adobe Spark Page now has a Present tool, allowing Spark Pages documents to be displayed like a Keynote or PowerPoint presentation.

There is also a new Print option allowing Spark Pages to be saved and printed as a PDF. This seem to work best with the Google Chrome browser.

Also note that when you a sharing a Spark Page, Video or Post, you can now link directly to a Google Classroom account

Keep up to date with Adobe Spark in Education via – https://spark.adobe.com/edu/

To cap off an exciting week for Adobe in Education, on Friday 5th October about 16 participants from the 2018 ACCE Conference chose to take part in the Adobe Masterclass Post-Conference event at the Adobe Sydney office.

Craig Daalmeijer-Power (Adobe Canopus Leader) from TAFE NSW and Rob Hurley (Adobe Campus Leader) from Ballarat Grammar helped me run this event.

Craig Daalmeijer-Power

Rob Hurley

Craig, Rob and I ran a series of workshop electives based on the needs and wants of the participants. We covered a wide range of Adobe related topics such as …

• Photoshop tips & tricks for teachers
• Real time animation with Adobe Character Animator
• Working with the free Adobe Spark tools
• Publication with Adobe InDesign
• Simple animation with Adobe Animate
• Multimodal Text with Adobe Spark
• Video production with Adobe Premiere Pro (Beginners and Advanced sessions)

The Royal Randwick Racecourse in Sydney was the venue for the 2018 Australian Council for Computers in Education (ACCE) Conference in Sydney on October 2-5. Adobe was proud to be an affiliate partner for this event and we invited participants from the Adobe Education Summit to be join in.

The ACCE Conference happens every two years in Australia and is hosted by one the state based ICT in Education groups. This year, it was hosted by ICTENSW.

The opening keynote presenter this year was Professor Tim Bell from the University of Canterbury in Christchurch New Zealand.

Professor Bell is well known for his Computer Science Unplugged programme which has been very popular among international mathematics and computer science educators since it was launched in the early 1990s.

Brett Salakas from MLC (Sydney) & Zeina Chalich also keynoted the topic Power up your PLN, sharing the value of the #aussieED network via Twitter

Adobe had a dedicated workshop/presentation space for the conference. Chris Woldhuis (Adobe Education Leader) and Assistant Principal at Northern Beaches Christian School ran a session about multi-camera editing with Adobe Premiere Pro.

Max Schleser (Adobe Education Leader) and lecturer at Swinburne University ran a session about virtual reality & 360 video with Adobe Premiere Pro.

Ross Johnson (Adobe Education Leader) and NSW DoE teacher, presented about doing assessment with Adobe Acrobat DC titled Maximise your feedback with Acrobat.

Clara Galan & I were given the opportunity to do one of the closing keynotes which we titled – Preparing students for the automated workplace

The next day, Brett Kent (Adobe Education Leader and NSW DoE teacher) and I ran a series of workshops including …

• Making Photoshop puppets come alive with Adobe Character Animator
• Make digital posters and turn them into simple videos with the free Adobe Spark Apps
• Digital portfolios with Adobe Spark Page and Spark Video
• Teaching mathematics through animation with Adobe Animate

All my resources for the ACCE Conference can be found on the Adobe Education Exchange via – http://bit.ly/adobe-ACCE18

The APAC Adobe Education Summit is one of three major worldwide events run by Adobe to support the work of their Adobe Education Leaders (AELs) and Adobe Campus Leaders (ACLs) around the world.

Check the recordings of the Creative Catalyst Talks from this event.

This year’s APAC summit was held on October 1 & 2 at the Adobe office in Sydney. It began with a delightful opening reception dinner event featuring a whisky tasting & history lesson from whisky chieftain Juliette Bentley.

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The next morning saw the start of a big day of learning activities and fun which began with presentation from the Global Adobe in Education team. Clara Galan flew in from San Francisco to be with us and Tacy Trowbridge and Matt Niemitz joined us live from the US.

Click here to see Clara’s presentation – Adobe Education Programs overview

Click here to see Tacy’s presentation – Adobe Edu Worldwide Overview

Click here to see Matt’s presentation – Adobe Education Exchange Update

Creative Catalyst Talks

We then enjoyed a series of outstanding short Creative Catalyst Talks about a wide range of education topics.

Max Schleser, Adobe Education Leader from Swinburne University in Melbourne presented the topic Cinematic VR & 360˚ video production.

Craig Daalmeijer-Power, Adobe Campus Leader from TAFE NSW presented the topic Drones, AR, VR, AI, What’s Next?

Sjaani van den Berg, Adobe Education Trainer presented Buzz Words, are we teaching to these standards?

Heath Henwood, Adobe Campus Leader from Rockhampton, QLD presented Transforming students through connecting technology and relationships

Brett Kent, Adobe Education Leader from the NSW Department of Education presented Education strikes again

Kev Lavery, Adobe Education Leader from TAFE QLD presented Essential Graphics & End Screens

We were very pleased to welcome Seiko Koike, Adobe’s Education Marketing Manager for Japan to this Summit and enjoyed her presentation titled Emerging CPS in Japanese Education

Joel Aarons, Adobe Education Leader from the Victorian Department of Education and Training presented Lessons Learned and Lessons Taught – Media Arts in Primary School

Juliette Bentley, Adobe Campus Leader from Mt St Michael’s College in QLD presented Making Sparks Fly

to be continued …

Clara Galan (from San Francisco) is Adobe’s Global Community Lead for K-12 and Higher Education and she has made her first trip to Australia this week for the Adobe APAC Education Summit and the ACCE Conference.

She has meet with a number of key Adobe education customers while in Sydney and earlier today I took her to the wonderful Pymble Ladies College where she was interviewed by the Kim Maksimovic and Anthony England for a series of podcasts they are doing on women in leadership.

Clara is looking forward to meeting about 30 Adobe Education Leaders and Adobe Campus Leaders from around Australia at the Adobe Sydney office next week.

Make sure you tune in live on Tuesday Oct 2 at 9AM AEST to hear from Clara as well as a great set of  Creative Catalyst Talks at the APAC Adobe Education Summit. Click here to download the PDF flyer.

On Wednesday 19th September, I had the great pleasure to meet Adobe Sr. Solutions Architect John Penn II who presented at RMIT in Melbourne. Following being part of the Photoshop product team for a number of years, John developed a passion for how Photoshop can help law enforcement solve crimes. He approached the Adobe CEO with a request to focus full time on this passion and he now dedicates his work to helping law enforcement solve cases with digital imaging technology.

John has helped investigators all over the world solve crimes with the aid of image manipulation. He has a particular passion for working with investigators who focus on crimes against children.

Click here to see a special Adobe blog highlighting his work.