Independent School’s Victoria (ISV), invited Adobe Education to be involved with their first ever Maker Fest this week. The Fest involved a range of activities for teachers and students with an aim to encourage students to construct, tinker and learn lots in the process.

One of the highlights for the teachers was hearing from Adrian Camm, Head of Teaching and Learning at The Geelong College. Adrian is passionate about progressive education methods and he shared some of his experiences and philosophies. He recommended five key points for school leaders to follow to make a difference …

1. Create a shared vision among the staff & students
2. Switch from passive to active learning in the classroom
3. Provide permission
4. Make your default answer to requests “yes”
5. Always remind people (especially teachers) that they are awesome

Other highlights of the day included seeing a number of students working with robots and circuits and simple programming applications to solve problems and build things.

The students worked in groups and were given the opportunity to share what they had made and learned to the visiting teachers.

I had the pleasure of showing the teachers some of the great Adobe resources, including the Adobe Education Exchange which now involves close to 350,000 teachers globally. The Adobe Spark products were also popular at this event.

https://edex.adobe.com/

https://spark.adobe.com/

It was also great catching up with my friend Luke Kerr from  who is making a big difference in the area of STEM education with his team at Real Time Learning.

The maker movement in education is the latest adaptation of Seymour Papert’s Constructionist Learning theory. I’ve often referred to Professor Papert as the godfather of ICT integration in education. His learning theory supports a student-focused, inquiry approach to teaching and learning where students use existing information to build new knowledge. With this approach, students learn through doing with a project-based focus, making connections between various ideas facilitated by the teacher rather than dictated by the teacher.

Click here for my  article about the recent passing of the great Seymour Papert.

Special congratulations to Lynda Cutting, Irene Anderson, Melinda Hargreaves and the rest of the ISV team for making this day such a success. I’m looking forward to being involved again in 2017.

AIE (the Academy of Interactive Entertainment) has been celebrating it’s 20th anniversary throughout 2016 and I was invited to be part of their end of year celebrations this week.

I am always amazed at the quality of work AIE students produce each year. As future film makers and game makers, these students have developed skills in a wide range of digital creativity software including Adobe Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Illustrator and After Effects.

Everyone has the capacity to be creative with a small c but AIE is developing Creatives with a capital C, those unique people who have the ability and passion to produce unique and outstanding digital art.

It was lovely catching up with Head of School Laurie Costabile (centre) and some of his teaching staff.