• Check out the Adobe Education Professional Development Catalogue

It was such a delight to be back involved with the 2015 DLTV Conference (DigiCon). Digital Learning & Teaching Victoria (DLTV) was a merger of VITTA & ICTEV back in 2013 which I was very involved with as the Vice President of VITTA at the time. I missed last year’s DLTV conference due to overseas commitments so it was great to be involved this year and get Adobe on-board as a sponsor.

Richard Gordon (GM of XCERIO – Adobe Certification partner), Me & Brian Chau at the Adobe stand.

The conference involved about 700 teachers from around the country spending Friday July 24 & Saturday July 25 enjoying a wide range of professional learning at Swinburne University.

Check #digicon15 on Twitter to find out more.

The Maker Movement was a strong focus throughout the conference. Thank you to Gemma Sherwood for posting this image on Twitter via #digicon15

Education consultant Hamish Curry from notosh inspired the day 1 audience with an outstanding keynote address that commenced with the playing of the game duet (which he was very good at). He encouraged us all to look for the educational value of playing games.

He quoted Sir Ken Robinson when he said, The exile of play is one of the greatest tragedies of standardised  education.

He also quoted Jane McGonigal who said … people who continue to write off games will be at a major disadvantage in the coming years.

Some of the other great quotes from Hamish’s talk include:

School is like the ‘Hunger Games’ trilogy because it is a perfect metaphor for how adults entertain themselves by making children compete against each other. (Jiang Xueqin)

Finding out what teachers want to you to know and giving it back to them in assignments and exams is a common key to success. (John Hattie)

Why aren’t we teaching kids to say: this might not work. (Seth Godin)

Once you embrace the spirit of experimentation, the world becomes a sandbox in which to try out new ideas, ask new questions, and challenge the prevailing orthodoxies. (Steven Levitt)

It was great to catch up with Hamish Curry.

Brian Chau (Adobe Solution Consultant) & I presented on both days and enjoyed sharing the value of working with the large range of Adobe software that helps enhance creativity & engagement in the teaching & learning process.

We also promoted the value of the Adobe Education Exchange, free online resources & PD with a membership of over 217,000 educators.

We both enjoyed sharing the new Adobe Character Animator program which is part of the latest version of After Effects on the Adobe Creative Cloud. It tracks movements of you eyes, face and head to animate digital characters – very cool! Click here for a sample.

My friend Roland Gesthuszen & his vodcasting partner Amanda Rablin were working hard during the conference capture interviews and highlights for their show the ACCE Learning Network

[youtube:https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1g2_oTD6fjGkW_55m_fWTq_vjJYakfUi%5D

A special thank you to Mel Cashen (Conference Director and new President of DLTV) and her team for putting on such a great event.

• If you need any help with how to use Adobe software, get free tutorials from the Adobe Learn & Support site.

Thank you to my friend Roland Gesthuizen for this great image of the 2015 Digital Learning Showcase and for some of the other images on this post.

If all went to plan, I should have arrived in Melbourne for 2015 Digital Learning Showcase event after almost 2 weeks in the USA at least 24hrs before hand. As it turned out I arrived with 20 minutes to spare before my first speaking spot.

Not only was my flight from San Francisco to LA delayed because of fog and the closing down of one of their runways, but I find out later that all air space over LA was closed because President Obama was flying out after a golf trip.

At least I had an interesting excuse for being late.

It was great to see about 900 students (primary & secondary) at Swinburne University in Melbourne for this event that was focusing on encouraging young people to think about the importance of ICT as a possible career and the impact ICT has in most work places.

Wearing the same clothes for 2 days and not shaving for 3 days due to arriving late from the USA was not ideal for a live to air Internet TV interview.

Special thank you to the team at DLTV for putting on this great event on the eve of DigiCon, the annual DLTV Conference.

From the tranquility of Asilomar, the AEC Summit re-located to the creative activity of the Adobe office in San Francisco.

The final few hours of the Adobe Education Community Leadership Summit were spent with a wide selection of Adobe’s various product teams. The AELs had the rare privileged of interacting with Adobe employees who have direct input on the features of Adobe products. It was great to see the how enthusiastic the various product team members were to get feedback from these outstanding educators.

Our final day at Asilomar was spent working in groups to come up with ideas on how we can further enhance and grow the wider Adobe Education Community and encourage a stronger emphasis on creativity in education throughout our networks.

We collectivity came up with so many great initiatives and committed to supporting each other in this important work.

Tomorrow, the Adobe Education Leaders have been invited to the Adobe San Francisco office to meet with a wide range of Adobe Product team members. They will hear the latest news about their favourite Adobe software and pass on information from an educators perspective. This will be a great way to finish off what has been a really successful Adobe Education Community Leadership Summit in North America.

Saturday July 18 was Day 2 of the Adobe Education Community Leadership Summit in Asilomar, California.

This day was dedicated to enjoying some outstanding Creative Catalyst talks by a group of very talented educators who shared bits of their story and their passion.

The rest of the day involved generating ideas on how to build the Adobe Education Community and leverage the leadership talent at the conference.

The first of a series of three Adobe Education Community Leadership Summits commenced today (Friday July 17) at Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove, California.

About 40 Adobe Education Leaders are meeting this weekend from around the USA, Canada, UK and the Netherlands. In September, AELs from around the Asia Pacific region are meeting in Sydney for a similar event and in October, the European Summit is being held in Rotterdam.

It has been great catching up with so many on the wonderful educators who are instrumental parts of Adobe Education Leader community. I’m looking forward to sharing with and learning from this dynamic group of passionate educators over the next couple of days.

On Wednesday July 15, I had the pleasure of visiting the 2015 iD Tech Camp for girls called Alexa Cafe at Palo Alto High School in California.

Alexa Cafe is a summer camp for girls aged 10 to 15 with a focus on coding, web design, visual design and video production. I spent some time doing video interviews with instructors and students in three of the camps. One was based on video production with Adobe Premier Pro and the other two were focused on web design and image manipulation with Adobe Muse, Lightroom and Photoshop.

Alexa Cafe girls working with Adobe Premier Pro

Image manipulation with Adobe Photoshop

With an emphasises on entrepreneurship, leadership, brand identity, and philanthropy, each Alexa Cafe project is based on a social movement. The videos were focused on bullying and the website projects were telling a range of important stories on a variety of issues that were important to the girls.

Stay tuned for a video about this year’s visit. Here is the one I did with Mick McHugh at last year’s camp as seen on Adobe CreateEdu TV …

[vimeo:https://vimeo.com/104794703%5D