Grimwade House is the name of Melbourne Grammar’s co-educational Junior School and in Year 5, each student is provided with a laptop equipped with Adobe Creative Cloud software.

Grimwade’s eLearning Coordinator Matt Smith, runs a program of at the start of each year to introduce the students to the educational value of their devices. Last year, Matt invited Adobe to help run some sessions and this year he ran a series of workshops on Premier Pro and invite me to run some sessions on Adobe Photoshop.

Other workshops for the students to rotate though over the two days included Lego Robotics (run by TechKids) and a session on Grimwade’s LMS (Canvas) run by Melbourne Grammar’s Director of eLearning, Sam Denniston.

Cyber Safety was the theme for most of the workshops so my Photoshop sessions focused on how to manipulate a selfie and create a profile image that was unrecognizable.

The students first took a selfie via the webcam on their laptops then learned how to use the following Photoshop techniques to manipulate their faces:

• Zoom in & out with the zoom tool
• select a part of their face with the lasso & magnetic lasso tool
• change the size & shape of a part of their face with the Transform tool
• fix up mistakes with the Spot Healing Brush & Clone Stamp tools
• add various filter effects

At the end of the two days, about 30 of the Year 5s chose the advanced Photoshop session where they learned how to:

• work with the quick selection tool
• create a transparent background
• add in a new picture on their picture as a new layer
• play with the puppet warp feature

Special thank you to Matt Smith for coordinating the two day workshop activities and helping to hopefully kick start a life time of digital creativity and fun.

Mt Matt Smith (Grimwade’s eLearning Coordinator)  teaching the basics of Adobe Premiere Pro to a group of Year 5 students.

Check CreateEDU TV for video stories on a range of Adobe related events.

Probably the greatest pleasure I had as a classroom teacher was giving my students a chance to shine and encouraging them to show off their hard work and talent to an authentic audience. It is easy to take for granted the influence we have as educators and the impact that some encouragement can have on a young person’s self esteem and confidence.

I was reminded of this reality after watching this YouTube clip from Kingswood High in Sydney’s west.

What an inspirational voice and what a great way to use Adobe Premiere Pro and other technologies in such a simple way to capture this talented Year 11 student and share her gift to an authentic audience.

Kingswood Studio is the brain child of English teacher (and Adobe Education Leader) Tim Creighton. A passionate and caring teacher, Tim is a great example of the thousands of teachers I get to work with each year who take risks and work very hard to bring out the best in their students.

Here is a short video on CreateEDU TV about about an Adobe Day we did together at Kingswood High that includes an interview with Tim.

I encourage all educators who read/see this post to reflect on the power and influence they have over the young people in their care and to provide them with creative opportunities to shine.

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Take advantage of the many great professional learning opportunities provided by Adobe Education. Click here for what is coming up.

CC in Victorian Government Schools

Adobe have been working with the Victorian Department of Education and Training over the last 12 months to prepare an excellent offer for all Victorian Government schools to take advantage of the latest Adobe Creative Cloud software applications at a highly discounted rate.

Schools can Opt in for a 3 year period and pay yearly though the Adobe Platinum partner, Insight. The offer is now open and closes on the 23rd February 2016.  This is a yearly opt-in program that will be opened in late January every year.

Key benefits of this new Adobe CCE 2016 Opt in program;

· Substantial cost savings for Adobe Licensing
· Options with Design and Web and CCE completed desktop application suites
· BYOD Student – Design and Web software included, Schools that opt-in to this agreement will also be able to deploy the Design & Web package to student devices as part of the schools Adobe license fee.
· BYOD Student upgrade options for CCE Complete desktop apps – at a heavily discounted rate
· PD aligned to the Australian Curriculum
· Adobe Education Exchange – For teachers – shared teacher learning resources from Australia teachers (free service)
·  Fixed priced licensing for 3 years (secures the low price point for this period)

Part of the Professional learning for Victorian teachers includes a new series of 15 min live webinars at 4pm via Adobe Connect called Adobe EduTips. Click here for more information.

A series of face to face, small group sessions has also been planned to be run at the Adobe office in Melbourne. Click here for more info.

Click here to find out more about other soon to come professional learning opportunities with Adobe Education