InterfaceXpo is a series of education conferences in New Zealand for teachers and education leaders to find out what is new in the world of digital technologies and education.

I had the privilege of being the opening keynote presenter at their conference in Christchurch attended by about 250 educators.

Special thank you to Fruen Purnell from Adobe and Rosie Sue from Ingram to organised Adobe’s involvement in this event and helped me run a workshop in the afternoon focused on Photoshop Tips & Tricks and the use of Adobe Spark.

The resources I shared for this event can be found on the Adobe Education Exchange via – http://bit.ly/adobe-christchurch18

Over 60 Queensland educators registered for the Adobe in Education Professional Learning event hosted at the TAFE QLD Southbank Campus on 23rd May.

It was lovely to work with Kev Lavery (AEL from TAFE QLD), Juliette Bentley (ACL from Brisbane) and Richard Turner-Jones (Adobe Consultant) for this event.

Kev, Juliette, Richard & Me

Workshops for this event included …

• Text in Photos with Photoshop by Kev Lavery
• Sparking creativity with Adobe Spark by Juliette Bentley
• Making PDFs come alive with Acrobat DC & InDesign by Richard Turner-Jones
• Flipped Learning with Adobe Presenter & Adobe Spark by Tim Kitchen
• Video editing with Premiere Pro by Tim Kitchen

The resources I shared at this event can be found on the Adobe Education Exchange via – http://bit.ly/adobe-23May18

Special thank you to Kev Lavery for helping to organise the venue.

A group of photography students from Northern Beaches Christian School (NBCS) visited the Adobe Sydney Office on Thursday 24th May for an Adobe Day with Adobe Solution Consultant Jane Chen.

NBCS is a world renowned school that has been driving innovation in classroom & building design as well as curriculum for many years. On their website, they say they want learning to be fun, passionate, deep, authentic, personal, engaging, serious and relevant.

I was very pleased that Jane was able to host this session to help enhance the student’s photography skills with Adobe tools.

This event was organised by Mitch Layland (Head of Design at NBCS) and Chris Woldhuis (Assistant Principal and Adobe Education Leader). Here is Chris talking about some of the ways they work with Adobe tools.

Forest Lake State High School, near Brisbane, was the venue for the first of two consecutive professional learning sessions run by Adobe in Education to help teachers enhance their practice with the use of Adobe’s digital creativity and productivity tools.

Twenty four teachers registered for this event from nine different schools/universities.

Brisbane based Adobe Campus Leader Juliette Bentley ran a delightful workshop session titled Sparking creativity with Adobe Spark. Juliette is a well known teacher of english and she runs a series of creative writing classes for QLD students. She has been using the Spark tools in a creative way to get the best out of students writing and story telling. She has been asked to present her Spark workshops in Townsville and in Singapore later this year.

My former colleague and friend Richard Turner-Jones, ran a workshop on how to make the most of Adobe InDesign and Acrobat to create interactive assessment document. Richard is always a great support when I run events like this in Brisbane.

The work shop I ran for this event was on video editing with Adobe Premiere Pro. Even though it is a professional tool, it is not hard to learn the basics of Premiere Pro and it was great to see the teachers get excited about enhancing video production at their schools.

The resources for this event can be found on the Adobe Education Exchange via – http://bit.ly/adobe-22May18

Special thank you to MJ Raatz and Nalin Naidoo from Forest Lake SHS for helping to organise this event.

It was lovely to be back at Forest Lake State High School near Brisbane to work with a talented group of Year 7s as well as a number of teachers from the area.

The Year 7 students were encouraged to work in a small group to create a series of Adobe Spark Post (digital posters) about their passions.

After sharing the posters, the students were asked to combine with another group and build a video story about their passions featuring their posts.

The main message for these students was to encourage them to consider developing their passions into a job and to start thinking like an entrepreneur while they at school.

Thanks to a continues agreement between Adobe an Education QLD, these students have access to the Adobe Creative Cloud to help them enhance their 21st Century communication & creativity skills.

On Tuesday 15th & Wednesday 16th May, I had the pleasure of running a set of professional learning sessions with DLTV – Digital Learning and Teaching Victoria titled – Digital Literacy & Creativity in Victorian Classrooms with Adobe.

As described on their website, DLTV is a community with access to professional learning, support, advocacy and a vibrant network of passionate educators.

Most of the teachers at this session were from Department of Education schools in Victoria with a number representing special education schools.

It was pleasing to introduce Photoshop, Spark Post, Spark Video, Premiere Clip, Character Animator, Adobe Presenter Video Express, Premiere Pro, Acrobat DC and other Adobe apps to most of these teachers for the first time.

I was particularly pleased to meet Jason Cuttriss who helps manage a TV network called Me TV from his school in the Yarra Ranges especially for Special Schools around Melbourne. Jason told me that he used Adobe Premiere Pro to cut all the MeTV stories and the other teachers from special schools praised the value of this resources for their network of schools.

Special thank you to Cameron Hocking from DLTV for organising this event.

All of my resources for this session can be found on the Adobe Education Exchange via – http://bit.ly/adobe-DLTV-May18

The beautiful Crown Plaza Resort in the Hunter Valley, was the venue for a STEM conference involving about 650 NSW teachers.

STEM stands for Science, Technology Engineering and Mathematics

With the implementation of the Digital Technologies Curriculum throughout Australia as well as a major innovation push by the federal & state governments, there has been a strong emphasis on the teaching of STEM related content to better prepare Aussie students for the future.

This event was organised by Regional Development Australia Hunter and the Cessnock Community of Great Public Schools which includes 15 schools in the region.

The Newcastle Herald was quick to get this article published.

I was asked to do a keynote session, a hands on Adobe skills session as well as to be part of a Q&A panel session hosted by the wonderful Adam Spencer (from ABC fame) and featuring the amazing Eddie Woo (Australia’s Local Hero 2018).

My Keynote was titled Focusing on creative problem solving skills will enhance employability in the age of automation.

It was a pleasure to share some of the research in this area including Adobe’s research titled Creative Problem Solving in Schools – Essential Skills Today’s Student’s Need for Jobs in Tomorrow’s Age of Automation.

The workshop I ran was focused on the way Adobe’s free mobile apps such as the Adobe Spark tools can be used to help present STEM related content.

A highlight for me on this event was meeting and working with the amazing Eddie Woo from WooTube.

Eddie is a Mathematics teacher at Cherrybrook Technology High School in Sydney. His YouTube channel (WooTube) has over 280,000 subscribers and more than 14 million views worldwide as of May 2018. Eddie is a great example of what a teacher can do and be when they use the technologies around them to help engage their students.

Another highlight was listening the the wonderful Sally-Ann Williams from Google. Always an engaging and inspiring presenter, Sally-Ann is also an inspiration for women and anyone interested in IT as a career.

All my resources from this event are available via – http://bit.ly/adobe-CESSNOCK18

About 200 teachers from 15 Department of Education schools around Armidale in the Northern Tablelands of NSW gathered together for the first day of Term 2 with a focus on enhancing their digital creativity and communication skills.

I had the pleasure of keynoting this event which was held at the Armidale City Public School.

It is always a pleasure to present to a whole school community. Most of my time is spent working with eLearning coordinators, media & ICT teachers and students who are naturally drawn to the value of Adobe software and 21st Century communication. These days, all educators need to keep up to date with a wide range of digital communication techniques and skills to help with the modern learning and teaching process.

The other keynote presenter was Dr Simon Crook from CrookED Science a STEM education consultancy working with schools, K-12, from all sectors, around HSC Physics, K-6 Science & Technology and STEM. Simon presented a wide range of practical tips to creatively teach STEM and the Digital Technologies Curriculum.

Following the keynote sessions, the teachers took part in a series of hands-on workshops. I enjoyed sharing the value of the Adobe Spark creativity and productivity tools to a number of educators who had never used them before.

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Other workshops were provided by Newcastle University, The University of New England and CrookED Science.

The resources I shared for this event are available via – http://bit.ly/adobe-Armidale18

Special thanks to Craig McGrath and Maria Russell for the work they put into organising this professional learning day to start the term.