Following my previous post on the ACA World Championship, here are two videos that have just been made public …
[vimeo:https://vimeo.com/98625016%5D
[youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmiM4vXg7zM%5D
Click here to find more information on the ACA World Championship.
Click here to find out more about Adobe Certification.
Here is the video on last year’s Australian ACA Champion, Liz Watkins.
Last Friday 20th June I had the pleasure of spending the day with the passionate staff and students at Sydney Boys High School.
The day started with a 1 hour staff professional learning session with about 30 staff members. It was great to be able to share some of research Adobe and others have been doing on the importance of creativity in education. I was also able to share how some of the Adobe tools the staff have can make a difference in engaging students and enhancing creativity in the teaching and learning process.
The rest of the day was dedicated to a group of about 20 Year 9, 10 & 11 boys from a mix of Art, Media & ICT subject areas. The aim of the day was to get the boys to work in small groups to come up with a music video clip based on an original kids song.
Here is a video story about the day …
As you can tell from the video, we had a great day.
I would like to thank Mrs Paris Munro and Mr James Kay from Sydney Boys High who organised the day as part of the ‘Adobe &’ program.
Dr Partridge was in Australia as a keynote for the EduTECH conference in Brisbane and flew to Melbourne especially for this engagement at RMIT on 5th June with eLearning educators from K-12, Higher Education and corporate training sectors.
Click the images to see the recordings
Allen’s presentation
Panel session
Allen Partridge, PhD, is Adobe’s world wide Senior Technology Evangelist for eLearning. He has a 20-year background in education, game and multimedia development. He has researched and reported on authentic educational solutions to audiences around the world over the past decade. Allen is well recognized for his many online video tutorials and eSeminars that are a mainstay of eLearning developers & trainers, working to learn how to create effective online educational materials.
Special thanks to Wilkar Productions for filming this event.
It was a delight to spend yesterday at the Adobe office in Sydney helping IC Central host eight young designers who were competing to represent Australia in the Adobe Certified Associate World Championship.
[youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmiM4vXg7zM%5D
These students, from Western Australia, Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales, were competing for the opportunity to represent Australia in the ACA World Championship event to be held in Disneyland, California on 27th July.
The focus for this year’s Australian event was to produce branding and advertising for a new campaign by Melbourne based charity group YGAP, which stands for Y-Generation Against Poverty. Scott Duncan from YGAP spoke to the group of students at the start of the day about the work of YGAP and provided a brief for them to work through.
The students were provided with a computer loaded with Photoshop CC, InDesign CC & Illustrator CC, a Wacom tablet, the YGAP brief and lots of food. Five hours later their poster designs were sent to a local printer and judged by IC Central, last year’s winner Liz Watkins, YGAP and myself.
We all took a water taxi to the Banjo Paterson restaurant where the final judging took place and the winners announced.Each student came away with a new Wacom tablet, but here are the three finalists.
Third place – Olivia Shotton from Victoria
Second place – Sam Coverley from WA
First place – and Australian representative for the ACA World Championship in Disneyland next month – Amy Robinson from Latrobe University, Victoria
Congratulation Amy!
[vimeo:https://vimeo.com/98625016%5D
The Adobe Certified Associate program covers a range of Adobe products and is internationally recognised by industry. The Queensland Studies Authority (QSA) recently approved the recognition of Adobe Certified Associate (ACA) exams as credit for the Queensland Certificate of Education (QCE). If your students are using Adobe software and keen to be certified, they can also qualify to enter the National competition in 2015 when they pass an exam, please contact IC Central.
Image gallery
Dr Allen Partridge, Adobe’s worldwide Senior Technology Evangelist eLearning, has been in Australia this week as a keynote speaker at EduTECH as well as a number of other engagements.
EduTECH is the largest ICT in Education conference in Australasia and possibly the biggest in the southern hemisphere. Over 5000 delegates attended EduTECH at the Brisbane Conference and Convention Centre this year.
Dr Partridge talked about the research he has done while travelling around the world asking educators what they want from eLearning solutions. He demonstrated some of the great features of Adobe Presenter and Adobe Captivate that have come out of this research.
The day he arrived in Brisbane, he took a shuttle to Australia Zoo and used the GPS onsite location functionality within the new Adobe Captive 8 to build an interactive application full of short learning activities that relate to the various animal enclosures within the zoo. Allen demonstrated this app as part of his presentation.
This app can be found via http://p0qp0q.com/zoo
I had the privilege of sharing the stage with Dr Partridge as part of the keynote session and was able to promote the wonderful Adobe Education Exchange and the new Adobe Campus Leader Program.
Outside of the keynote session, Dr Partridge spent time meeting important Adobe education customers and supporting the team at the EduTECH Adobe booth.
On Thursday 5th June, Allen addressed about 100 educators at RMIT. Most of the audience were involved with eLearning at their university or school.
Following his Melbourne engagements, Dr Partidge flew to Sydney for an AEL Breakfast along with a range of other customer engagements at the Adobe office.
It was a great experience for me to spend the week with Allen. I enjoyed learning from his wealth of experience as an Adobe Evangelist and educator.
Dr Partridge can be contacted via
allenp@adobe.com
Twitter – @adobeelearning
Blog – blogs.adobe.com/captivate
One of my hopes when I began working for Adobe was that one day I may get the opportunity to actually meet the guru of creativity in education, Sir Ken Robinson. Today it happened.
It was just by chance that I was heading out of the Rydges Hotel in Southbank Brisbane as Sir Ken was arriving. I recognised him immediately as his car pulled up and took the opportunity to welcome him to Australia and introduce myself. He introduced me to his son James who took the photo and asked me about my work. I was a bit (a lot) star struck and a bit (a lot) in awe.
I was on my way to run an all day workshop with a group of Queensland independent school teachers, so you can imagine what my opening story was about.
I have read (and re-read) two of Sir Ken’s books (‘Out of our Minds’ I often refer to as the teacher’s bible) and I often regularly reference his TED talks and the video series he did with Adobe on Creativity in Education. So to actually meet him face to face was a real thrill.
I’m looking forward to listening to Sir Ken do the Day 1 closing keynote address at the EduTECH conference tomorrow. On Day 2, I will be sharing the keynote stage with Dr Allen Partridge where we have been told we will potentially be addressing over 2000 delegates.
What a great start to what will be an amazing week!
On Wednesday 21st May, I had the pleasure of running an Animation workshop for 12 students and 4 teachers from Sydney Distance Education High School.
These students are all doing their HSC via distance education so they rarely get to spend time together and meet face to face with educators. They enjoyed the experience of visiting the Adobe office in Sydney’s Darling Harbour and spending time going through the basics of Adobe Flash and Adobe Premier.
Flash was used to produce some simple animation sequences.
The students were also taught how to film against a green screen so that they could use Adobe Premier to add live action to their animation.
Luca, one of the students, interviewed a number of other students about the day …
[youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtMCM-dNrt8%5D
Adobe & days
On Tuesday 20th May, I had the pleasure of visiting Kingswood High in the west of Sydney to run an ‘Adobe &’ day.
‘Adobe & days’ are unique opportunities for students to work with Adobe experts on a multimedia project either at their school or (if practical) as part of an excursion to and Adobe office or other city venue.
The aim of this particular day was to enhance the Kingswood student’s film making skills by editing a chase scene with Adobe Premier Pro.
Mr Tim Creighton (English teacher at Kingwood) was recently invited to join the international AEL (Adobe Education Leader) community for the outstanding work he is doing at Kingswood with Adobe products like Premier Pro, After Effects and Photoshop.
We started the day by looking at what makes a good short film and we analyised some professional chase sequences before planning our own. Tim Creighton looked after one half of the students while I help the other half and several short films were made by the end of the day.
Here are two samples …
[youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE_msVpIsCY%5D [youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=337ahDD2hn8%5DIt was nice to visit Kingswood again after first visiting the school in 2013 for another Adobe & Day where this clip came from …
[youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzlK86MOnTc%5D
Telling a compelling story just got easier.
The new free story telling Adobe touch app ‘Adobe Voice’ was launched today. This is a new animated video app for the iPad that gives anyone the ability to create and share engaging stories. An ideal app for educators and students who value simple tools that make it easy to teach, to learn and to express creativity – and it’s free on the Apple App Store (search for Adobe Voice).
‘Adobe Voice empowers students and educators to create using a combination of their own recorded voice, imagery, music and cinema-quality motion graphics and effects without requiring any filming or editing. Adobe Voice is ideal for teachers who want to explain a concept or for students looking to create an engaging school assignment. These animated videos can also be shared by posting a single link through social media, email, personal blogs or websites.’
Tacy Trowbridge – Education Programs Lead (Adobe Education)
Here is my friend Jeff Larson (Adobe Education Leader) telling us more about the value of Adobe Voice in the classroom
As of today, the Adobe Education Leadership Forum held in Malaysia early in April has received:
· 195 press articles with 27% in leading Tier 1 publications in the region.
· 95 articles have carried either the APAC or country specific infographic
· Adobe’s social media across the region churned out 58 social posts with a reach of 53,826 people.
Media post samples …
http://www.nationmultimedia.com/national/Teachers-urged-to-use-education-programs-30231860.html
http://www.hardwarezone.com.my/tech-news-adobe-creativity-essential-students-and-educators-alike
Dr Tim Kitchen 