St Mary’s Geelong is a small Catholic Primary School about 1hr south west of Melbourne. I first met a number of the St Mary’s students, and their wonderful Deputy Principal Sarah Kelly, at the DLTV Digital Learning Showcase at RMIT early in September. Sarah was keen for all of her Year 5 & 6 students and teachers to enhance their digital communication skills with Adobe’s software, so she invited me to run an Adobe Day with a focus on video production.
The aim of the day was for the students to work in groups with their iPads, Premiere Clip, Spark Post & Spark Page to produce a web page that featured a video about their passions.
The teaching staff at St Mary’s were very keen to explore ways of using the iPad to create products and construct learning rather than having them predominately as a consumption tool.
I was very impressed with the way the students worked with the software and each other to produce some very creative work. I explained to the students that video is now considered a literacy and encouraged them to further develop their video literacy skills to help them creatively communicate in the future.
It was great working with DP Sarah Kelly
After school, local Adobe Campus Leader Andy Hair joined me to run some Adobe workshops with the teaching staff.
Andy ran a session focused on creating with Adobe Illustrator and sharing with Adobe Spark Post & Spark Video. I ran a workshop on video production with Clip, Spark Post & Spark Page.
Prior to the workshops, I shared with the teachers the value of enhancing creativity. We looked at some of the work of Professor Mitch Resnick from the MIT Media Lab who said in a past Adobe webinar …
Success in the future – for individuals, for communities, for companies, for nations as a whole – will be based not on what we know or how much we know, but on our ability to think and act creatively.
It was great catching up with Andy following a major bike accident earlier this year which has resulted in some major changes in his life. He is about to start working with the University of Canberra on some national research on the value of Physical Education in the curriculum. I’m looking forward to finding out more and possibly linking Adobe’s great communications tools to help share this work.
Dr Tim Kitchen's Journal - Creativity in Education 