The beautiful Vivanta by Taj resort in Sri Lanka was the venue for the fourth and final Adobe Education Leaders Seminar for 2016. This was was very well organised by the Indian Adobe Education team who invited me to present along side some of India’s top Higher Education leaders.
Sand projection art
This event brought India’s eminent thought leaders, industry professionals and education leaders together to connect as a community and share best practices on how institutions are catalysing creativity and embracing digital transformation in the classroom.
The welcome reception event was a great opportunity to meet the delegates.
The next day was packed with customer presentations and Adobe sessions. I was very impressed with the passion these India education leaders had for enhancing ICT and Creativity opportunities for their students.
Kulmeet Bawa, Adobe’s Managing Director for South Asia welcomed the delegates and set the scene for a day packed with information and inspiration about how and why Adobe’s set of industry based creativity, document and marketing tools can be (and are being) used to enhance education in India.
Mr Shigeru Aoyagi, from UNESCO shared a range of education initiatives and gave us some international reflections on how digital technologies are impacting education.
Mr Suhas Bendre, Director – Creative Design at Cognizant shared how educational institutes need to evolve with the times otherwise risk becoming irrelevant.
I was most impressed with Professor Mangala Sundar from IIT who showed a wide range of examples of how Adobe tools are being used to enhance the teaching of Medicine, Mathematics, Chemistry and Physics through animation, image manipulation and video.
Roychand Chenraj Jain, Chairman of the JGI Group spoke about the secret art of entrepreneurship.
Another special highlight for me was listening to Indian/US student Shrenik Ganatra, previous finalist of the Adobe Design Achievement Awards, share his passion for the use of Adobe tools in his design work and studies.
It was a privilege for me to share some of the research Adobe and others have been doing on how best to prepare young people for the future workplace.
My colleague Baljeet Singh Juneja (Indian based Adobe Solution Consultant) did a number of demonstrations on the power of Adobe tools, including how to convert a paper based university admissions form into an interactive digital document that can be completed via a laptop, desktop, tablet or phone via Acrobat Pro and the Adobe Document Cloud.
Mrs Garima Babbar, Adobe’s Head Strategic Alliances – Education and Skill Development for India, hosted a distinguished panel including Dr Sandhya Chintala (VP & Executive Director at NASSCOM) Professor Ashok Kolaskar (VC of The Neotia University), Professor Ashoke Sarkar (Director of BITS Pilani) , as well as Adobe’s own Sunil Mohapatra (Director, Digital Media Sales).
The Adobe Team for this event
I would particularly like to congratulate Sudhish Sitaram (Adobe Marketing Specialist) for the work that he and his team did putting this event together. This image above is both of us standing at the entrance of the Gala Dinner which was also a highlight.
Dr Tim Kitchen's Journal - Creativity in Education 