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A lot of my professional life is spent in and around Australia’s two biggest cities, Melbourne and Sydney. So it seems to make sense that I spend some time directly between these two metropolises in south western New South Wales (NSW) and northern Victoria (The Riverina) meeting a number of educators and students who are using (or wanting to use) Adobe software in many creative ways.

My first stop, on the morning of Monday 17th November, was The Scots School in Albury, on the boarder of NSW and Victoria.

It was great to meet Peggy Mahy the Principal and some of her senior staff and get a tour of this most prestigious of schools, one of the oldest in Australia. It was nice to see that Adobe software was prominent on the computers at Scots.

In the afternoon, I crossed the boarder into Victoria and ran a workshop/presentation with key staff at Wodonga Catholic College (CCW). My sister Lisa Mason, is a teacher at CCW, and it was great to spend some time with her and meet the CCW Arts staff and members of the executive. They allowed me to show them how Adobe software is making a difference to education around the world.

On Tuesday 18th November, I drove about 1.5 hrs from Wodonda to Corowa High School which is also on the NSW/Victoria boarder. I spent the day with NSW DEC teachers Phillip Lelievre and a number of his students running a video workshop.

I was very impressed with how quickly the students picked up how to use Adobe Premier Pro to make some great video news stories about their school.

On Wednesday 19th November, I drove to Tumut High School in the Snowy Mountains and spent the day with NSW DEC teachers William Crain & John Thompson and a number of their students. Together we worked through how to use Adobe Premier and a range of other Adobe software to create video news stories about their school.

A screen grab from Andrew’s story on uniform changes at Tumut High School

Thursday 19th November was spent at Gundagai High School with teacher Matthew Bishop and about 20 students in a range of year levels. By the end of the day they produced a series of video news stories that the school plans to use in their communication with parents and the wider community.

I was very impressed with how quickly these students picked up the skills and produced some interesting and entertaining and work.

Stay tuned for a new CreateEDU TV story about the Gundagai High video day.

To conclude my week in The Riverina, I did a presentation to a number of academics and other staff at Charles Sturt University (CSU) via their online systems including an Adobe Connect at their very impressive Wagga Wagga campus. The session connected with staff throughout NSW at Albury-Wodonga, Bathurst, Dubbo and Orange.

The Wagga Wagga campus of CSU is set on a hill overlooking the town of Wagga Wagga and is urrounded by farm land owned by the university. It was the first university campus I have driven through where I had to stop for a heard of sheep.

I’m looking forward to coming back to this region of Australia in the future.

Check out Tim’s Website                                                  Check out CreateEDU TV

I’ve just had a delightful week in Perth which began on Monday 10th November with a visit to Polytechnic West where I met fashion designer and teacher Jennifer Rule, a very strong advocate for the use of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop in the fashion industry. It was great to see the work she has inspired from her students and the way Adobe tools are being taught and used creatively in the fashion world.

One of Jenny Rule’s fashion students showing a garment design with Adobe Illustrator.

Tuesday 11th November was a very memorable ‘Remembrance Day’ with a large number of senior staff from Atwell College at their eLearning Conference. I was invited as the keynote speaker and also ran a couple of workshops on ePortfolios with Acrobat Pro.

I was very impressed with the way Darren Smith (Adobe Education Leader and Head of I.C.T. Pedagogy at Atwell) organised this event with the executive of the school. The conference was based on the ‘Train the Trainer’ model where I was brought in to train and inspire the school leaders who were then tasked with inspiring the rest of the school community.

The SAMR model and the importance of creativity in all aspects of education were key themes throughout the day.

Darren Smith (AEL) being interviewed by Tim Kitchen for Adobe CreateEDU TV

On Wednesday 12th November, I ran a workshop on Adobe Acrobat in education at Willetton Senior High School. This involved staff from Willetton as well as some ICT teachers from  surrounding schools.

Thursday 13th was a day with teachers from a range of WA Independent schools organised by the Association of Independent Schools of Western Australia (AISWA). The first part of the day was focused on ePortfolios with Adobe Acrobat and the afternoon was dedicated to Flipped Learning with Adobe Voice, Adobe Presenter and of course Premier Pro.

I had a great week in WA. It was good to meet so many passionate educators and it was a real pleasure to share with them my passion for creativity in all forms of education as well as how to make the most of Adobe software in the classroom.

I’m looking forward to doing it all again in southern NSW and northern Victoria next week.