One of my favourite Aussie rural cities is Wagga Wagga in southern NSW and on Tuesday 6th March, I had the pleasure of working with a number of Year 9, 10 & 11 students and teachers from Wagga Wagga High School.

Video production is now considered a standard digital literacy. Student who develop skills in video production give themselves an edge when it comes to branding themselves and enhancing their ability to communicate.

Adobe Premiere Pro is well recognized as an industry standard video editing tool. As part of the Adobe Creative Cloud, all NSW government schools get it for free (thanks to the NSW Department of Education).  It is always a pleasure to show students the potential of what they have and how it can make a difference for them.

Refugee connection

Wagga Wagga has been a refuge for many fleeing Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other war torn parts of the world. One of the classes I was teaching had two boys who had recently arrived from Iraq with their families as refugees. For these boys, it was the first time they had experienced the power and potential of digital video editing. Their faces glowed with amazement and in their broken English they expressed their thanks and gratitude at being introduced to a whole new way of communicating. Opportunities that many Australian students take for granted.

For students like these, having access to tools like Adobe Premiere Pro, Photoshop, InDesign etc opens up a whole world of possibilities that was previously hidden to them. This reinforces the decision made by the NSW Department of Education and the Victorian Department of Education & Training who central purchase the software allowing their students and teachers access without the schools having to budget for it.

The look on the faces of the refugee students as the realised they could manipulate video and tell a digitally creative story was priceless.

Working with the Wagga Wagga High Teachers

After school, the English department as well as a number of technology teachers joined in on a professional learning session based on multimodal text with adobe Spark.

Special thank you to Josh McKenzie – IST, Multimedia & VET Entertainment teacher at Wagga Wagga High for organising this day.