I had the great pleasure to again be a judge at the Melbourne edition of the Young ICT Explorers competition.

Young ICT Explorers is a non-profit competition created by SAP the global market leader in enterprise application software. The aim of the competition is to encourage school students from Years 3 to 12 to create their best Information and Communication Technology (ICT) related projects.

The competition’s aligns nicely with the new Digital Technologies curriculum and enables students to apply what they learn at school to develop a technology related project of their choice. Students have the opportunity to present their project to a judging panel of academia and ICT industry professionals who make a judgement on the bases of creativity, uniqueness, quality, level of difficulty and project documentation.

It is so inspiring to see what these talented young students have been able to achieve as they have developed their coding skills. As I said to the audience of students, parents, teachers, judges and competition organisers, the future of the world is in great hands with this inspiring young people.

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Close to 500 teachers attended the 2017 Ignite, Innovate, Integrate ICT Conference in Melbourne on Friday 11^th August.

This is very much an event run by teachers for teacher through the initiative of the leadership of Kingswood Primary School in Dingley Village.

I ran three Adobe workshops throughout the event featuring a range of video tools such as Premiere Clip and Premiere Pro. I also ran a workshop on Flipped Learning that featured the use of Adobe Presenter Video Express and the very popular Adobe Spark products.

It was great to see Victorian Adobe Education Leader and Media Arts teacher Joel Aarons also running three workshops with a string Adobe focus.

A highlight for me was reconnecting with Hugh van Cuylenburg from The Resilience Project. Hugh was the School Captain of Carey Grammar School when I was there as a teacher. He is now a well-known former educator and motivational speaker. Following post graduate studies into mental health and resilience, Hugh has developed and facilitated programs for schools a wide range of corporate and sporting organisations including the Australian cricket team and 11 AFL sides.

Hugh van Cuylenburg – Keynote presenter

 Another highlight was hearing from Dr Karl Kruszelnicki. Dr Karl is the Julius Sumner Miller Fellow at Sydney University, where his ‘mission’ is to spread the good word about science and its benefits. He has degrees in Physics, Maths, Biomedical Engineering, Medicine and Surgery and has worked as a physicist, tutor, filmmaker, car mechanic, labourer, and medical doctor at The Children’s Hospital in Sydney.

Dr Karl Kruszelnicki – Keynote presenter

Another highlight for me was awarding a 12-month Adobe Creative Cloud licence to Rachel Bryant, a teacher from Willmott Park Primary School in Craigieburn, Melbourne.

Congratulations Rachel

Special thank you to the team from Kingswood Primary who have been running this very impressive event now for 6 years. I’m looking forward to next year.