When Swinburne University in Melbourne advertised that I was running an Adobe Character Animator workshop, it filled up so fast there was a waiting list. So, on Thursday 22nd February, we ended up running two workshops with a total of over 50 lecturers from a variety of faculty areas throughout the University.

Adobe Character Animator allows users to manipulate a 2D digital puppet by tracking  facial movements via a webcam, thus providing real-time animation that can be recorded and used for a variety of purposes. Traditional digital animation is very time consuming with each movement needing to be manually key-framed in a timeline, as a result, not practical for most educators. Character Animator, which is now a fully fledged part of the Adobe Creative Cloud, provides the opportunity for all teachers to include small animations into their lessons to help engage their students.

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Students can also use Adobe Character Animator to help them present their learning and produce creative assessment options.

Special thank you to Linden Clark, the Project Coordinator at Swinburne’s Learning Transformations Unit for organising this event. The Learning Transformations Unit is responsible for resourcing and preparation Swinburne staff. Adobe has had a close relationship with the Swinburne Learning Transformations unit for a number of years and are proud to support their Digital Aquarium space.

If you are interested in finding out more about Adobe Professional Learning opportunities in Australasia go to the Coming Events Spark Page

Also, subscribe to my monthly newsletter on the Adobe Education Exchange

Northern Beaches Secondary College, Freshwater Senior Campus visited the Sydney Adobe Office on Friday 16th for an Adobe Day based on online production with Adobe Muse and Photoshop.

The theme for this day was preparing for the future workplace and the first activity was for the students to use Spark Post to list some job skills that will be valuable for them when they leave school.

Building on this theme, the students had a tour of the Adobe office and witnessed first hand a modern IT workplace in action. This was invaluable for a major industry study that they are all working on.

Back in the training room, the students were introduced to Adobe Muse as a way of building a website. They built their own sites and learned some techniques that will help them with a range of future assignments at school and beyond.

They also learned about the importance of compressing large images with Photoshop prior to adding them to a website.

A special thank you to their teacher Andrew Lai for organising this event. Andrew is part of the international Adobe Education Leaders program and a very strong advocate for the use of Adobe tools in education.

Thirty Year 12 students from St. Francis Xavier’s College, Hamilton traveled to Sydney from Newcastle to spend a day at the Adobe office focusing on enhancing their video production skills with Premiere Pro & After Effects.

An important part of the HSC for these students is a major industry study that features the use of a range of multimedia software. Not only were these students able to enhance their use of a range of Adobe products, they also had the opportunity to explore Adobe as a multi-national company with 55 offices all over the world.

We spent some time going through a range of video capture techniques and how they can be manipulated with Premiere Pro.

One of themes throughout the day was understanding what job skills will be most required in the future. The students were exposed to some recent research about the future workplace and then applied their newly found knowledge to a range of short Adobe Spark projects.

On Tuesday 13th February, group of Year 12 Media students from Mater Maria Catholic College in Sydney visited the Adobe Office in Darling Harbour for the first Adobe Day for 2018.

Part of the HSC Multimedia course involves doing an industry study and a major project that involves a range of digital technologies. The students worked on a range of techniques with Premiere Pro, Photoshop & After Effects to build a video story.

Stay tuned for a video story on CreateEdu TV about this day.