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.