On Tuesday 17th September 2019, Swinburne University in Melbourne hosted an Adobe Creative Jam on with a number of their Design students and others interested  in developing their skills with Adobe Experience Design (Adobe XD).

Design at the speed of thought

Adobe Solution Consultant Brian Chau ran a bootcamp on Adobe XD to help those who had little experience and to also provide tips and tricks for those who were experienced usres.

Then we provided the students with the brief for the challenge which was …

To design a platform to connect students and staff at Swinburne to resources on campus and/or in the broader community.

The the students broke into small design groups to work on their solutions.

After about 2.5 hours of planning and designing with XD, each group was asked to present their amazing solutions to a panel of judges who were looking for the following criteria:

• How did they meet the brief
• Creativity & Innovation
• Level of detail
• Design
• Usability
• Presentation solution

Some great prizes were awarded to the winning teams.

Congratulations to all the students involved in this Adobe Creative Jam. Special thanks to Ravi Bessabava and his team, from the Design Factory at Swinburne and Anna Nakao, Sasha McQuade and Brian Chau from Adobe  for putting this event together.

Korowa Anglican Girl’s School in Melbourne’s East hosted an Inject Creativity into the Curriculum event on Monday 16th September.

About 20 teachers from a range of curriculum areas took part including some mathematics teachers who were keen to see what Adobe had to help them deliver their content.

A special thank you goes to Adobe Education Leader Justin de Lacy from Woodleigh School who ran a workshop session on Premiere Pro for teachers who were looking to go further with their video production skills.

Other Adobe applications that were covered during this event included:

• Character Animator
• Photoshop
• Spark Video
• Spark Post
• Spark Page &
• Premiere Rush

Feedback comments included:

Student sessions

During the day at Korowa, I had the pleasure of working with a number of students and teachers with a focus on Spark, Premiere Pro & Photoshop.

One of the great pleasures in my job is seeing how Adobe’s creativity and productivity tools are being used by students around the world to produce outstanding results. Here are a few examples of award-winning films by media students at Northern Beaches Secondary College (NBSC), Freshwater Senior Campus. They are great examples of what students can achieve with Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects as well as other Adobe Creative clouds apps like Photoshop & Illustrator.

An Alternate Road by Lily McElligott

Press Play by Nathaniel Dunwell

Ed’s Adventures by Jack Fairclough

A special congratulations to Adobe Campus Leader Andrew Lai (Multimedia teacher at  NBSC) for working so well with these students and inspiring them to produces such amazing work.

While in Adelaide this week, I had the opportunity to meet the amazing Dr Gill Hicks who was speaking with global education guru, John Hunter at a World Peace Games event hosted by Annesley Junior School.

Dr Hicks was a survivor of the London terrorist Bombings in July, 2005 where she lost both legs below the knees. Today, she is well known as a motivational speaker with a message of tolerance and compassion.

Some of the gems of wisdom I noted from her presentation included:

• We should celebrate our capacity to adapt and learn from over 60,000 years of indigenous wisdom within our own country
• Ideas are really powerful, they connect us and cannot be killed by a suicide bomber or war.
• Design thinking helps us come up with new and greater ideas
• We need to get creative
• Peace can be exhausting, it’s not a nice, soft or easy option. Peace can be very challenging
• Talk with people who have different view to you

  Have a look at her TED talk

It was a pleasure to hear from John Hunter who is doing amazing things around the world with students in a quest for world peace.  Here is his TED Talk …

Congratulations to Luke Ritchie Principal of Annesley Junior School as well as his staff and students for putting on this very inspiring evening.

Thanks to Adobe Character Animator, Rob the Robot was joined (for the first time) by Dr Applesmith from Adobe to help  introduce this professional learning event that I ran at Flinders University on Thursday September 12.

The aim of the event was to introduce a range of academic and support staff to the value of a number of Adobe Creative Cloud applications.

Most of the participants, were not aware of much more than Adobe Acrobat & Photoshop, so it was a pleasure to introduce to them to a whole new world of digital creativity and productivity options.

Adobe Spark was a revelation to many of them and it was great to see how quickly they produced a number of digital graphics and videos with ease.

Other apps that were work-shopped and presented included Character Animator, Rush, Photoshop and Experience Design.

Some of the feedback from  this session included the following comments …

• An informative session
• Learning the new apps was enlightening – I had not used Character Animate, but now I will
• Being able to quickly create using the spark tools while in session
• Tim was warm & engaging
• A good intro to a wide range of apps on the suite. Need to think and read about which are likely to be integrated in my work.
• Being able to create things straight away was a highlight
• I didn’t realise the huge spectrum of Adobe programs, and that some were free and usable on handheld devices so that was really interesting.
• Demonstrate a range of tools and showed some real examples
• This session is very informative and it is great to refresh the knowledge
• Highlight was the animation but overall was a great introduction.

My resources for this event can be found on the Adobe Education Exchange via – http://bit.ly/adobe-Flinders19

It was great to be back at Auckland University of Technology (AUT) to work with a range of academics and support staff to help enhance their understanding and skills with a range of Adobe Creative Cloud applications.

About 20 AUT staff registered for this event. The team from Adobe included John Penn II (Senior Solutions Architect from the US), Jason Grant (Solutions Consultant), Jerry Wong (Customer Success Manager), Myself and (if you look closely at the images above) Rob the Robot (thanks to Adobe Character Animator).

We enjoyed a busy schedule of demonstrations and workshops including the opportunity for a Photoshop deep-dive with John Penn II who started his Adobe career in the Photoshop product team as a senior programmer.

My resources for this event can be found on the Adobe Education Exchange via – http://bit.ly/adobe-AUT19a

On Thursday September 5, The University of Auckland hosted New Zealand’s first Inject Creativity into the Curriculum with Adobe Roadshow event.

This involved about 30 educators from a range of faculty areas within the university and a range of Adobe abilities and experiences.

Character Animator being demonstrated

We started the session with a Character Animator demo and a Rush demo by Jason Grant (Adobe Solution Consultant) with an aim to share some of Adobe’s new tools but also to make the point that Adobe is not just about the high-end, industry standard, professional creativity tools any more. There are a wide range of applications that can be used by every  teacher and student to enhance their digital creativity skills.

Jason Grant showing off Premiere Rush

One of the highlights was hearing John Penn II’s story about how Photoshop is saving lives and making a positive difference in the world of law enforcement.

John is such an engaging presenter. His work and passion is about how Adobe tools can be used to make a positive difference to people’s lives. He shared a number of stories about how Photoshop, Premiere Pro and Audition are being used by law enforcement around the  globe to find and help missing & exploited children as well as to solve other crimes.

Click here to find out more about John’s work

The rest of the day involved a series of workshop options that allowed participants to have a deeper dive into a range of the applications with the help of the Adobe experts.

A special thank you to Adobe Customer Success Manager Jerry Wong for working with the University of Auckland to put this event together.

Like many Universities, The University of Auckland have access to the Adobe Creative Cloud applications for their staff and their labs. It is always a pleasure to share with educators the value of what they have and how many of the Adobe apps can be used to aid teaching and learning.