About 20 ISAT (International Schools Association of Thailand) were represented at a special all-day Adobe in Education event in Bangkok on Monday 27th August.

Greg Sisk (Adobe Account Executive for South East Asia) and Albert Goh (Adobe Solution Consultant) helped me present this event which was attended by about 40 teachers/administrators and about 10 students.

Albert shared some of the collaboration features within the Adobe Creative Clouds apps and highlighted some of the new apps such as Adobe Dimension for 3D image manipulation.

One of the highlights involved bringing both students and teachers onto the stage to help demonstrate a number of apps including Adobe Spark and Character Animator.

The participants were given some workshop opportunities to build their own Spark videos and Spark Posts during the day which were shared on the big screen. Here are some images of the creation process.

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Albert & I also demonstrated a number of Photoshop Tips and Tricks throughout the session.

The feedback was very positive and a number of the educators were interested in joining the Adobe Campus Leaders program.

All of my resources for this event can be found on the Adobe Education Exchange via – http://bit.ly/adobe-bangkok18

On Friday 24th August I ran a workshop session for teachers of Food Technologies and Hospitality who were members of the Technology Educators Association (TEA) Conference in Sydney.

The focus of this session was using the amazing Adobe Spark tools to help teachers and students in the learning & teaching process.

My resources for this event can be found on the Adobe Education Exchange via – http://bit.ly/adobe-TEA18

Brian Chau and I ran two Adobe in Education product demo sessions at the University of Melbourne for a total of over forty lecturers and support staff from a wide range of faculty areas.

The University of Melbourne have an agreement with Adobe allowing access to the latest Adobe Creative Cloud software.

During these sessions, Brian and I covered the following products …

• Photoshop
• Adobe Experience Design
• Character Animator
• Acrobat DC
• Adobe Spark
• Premiere Pro &
• InDesign

A particular highlight for me was catching up with former student of mine from Strathcona Laura (Loz) Fernandez who now works at the University as the Coordinator (Student Enrichment) at Faculty of Business and Economics.

Resources from this event can be found on the Adobe Education Exchange via – http://bit.ly/adobe-unimelb18a

Northern Bay College in Geelong, Victoria was the second of two Adobe in Education regional events organised by DLTV last week.

Northern Bay College is only seven years old. It was formed in 2011 by merging nine Geelong based Victorian government schools (primary & secondary) into one multi-campus College.

During this event, the teachers work-shopped how to make the most of the Adobe Spark Tools as well as Photoshop & Character Animator in a range of curriculum classroom settings.

We also spent some time focusing on video production with Adobe Premiere Pro. One of the visiting teachers was the father of celebrated Victorian media student Isaac Haigh from Kardinia International College. We watched Isaac’s award winning video Doomed To Repeat and discussed his use of Premiere Pro and After Effects.

Note that this film is not recommended for children under the age of 15.

Ballarat Grammar School hosted the first of two DLTV (Digital Learning & Teaching Victoria) Adobe professional learning events in regional Victoria this week.

Teachers from schools in the Ballarat region as well as other parts of Victoria enjoyed this all day workshop event that covered the following Adobe applications and services …

• Spark video
• Character Animator
• Photoshop
• Spark Post
• Spark Page
• Premiere Pro

Here are some of the images from this day …

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Special thank you to the manager of DLTV Cameron Hocking for organising this event.

It was also great catching up with Adobe Campus Leader Rob Hurley at his school. Rob is

My resources from this event are available on the Adobe Education Exchange via – http://bit.ly/adobe-DLTV-August18

The 2018 Adobe Symposium in Sydney last week was the first time that Adobe has combined Experience Cloud, Document Cloud and Creative Cloud customers in the one space at such a scale.

Over 4000 marketing experts and creatives attended both days of this event at the Sydney International Convention Center.

Adobe’s top executives flew in from California to be part of this event. CEO Shantanu Narayen opened with a overview about how Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences.

Adobe’s Executive Vice President and General Manager (Digital Media), Bryan Lamkin hosted the Creative Cloud side of the event.

This featured Australia’s own Michael Stoddart (Adobe Director, Digital Media Enterprise) and Paul Burnett (Adobe Principal APAC Evangelist) from Singapore who I  always enjoy watching on stage and love the contagious passion they both have for Adobe’s creativity solutions.

Here is a slideshow of my favourite images as I met with colleagues, educators and others during this amazing two days of changing the world through digital experiences.

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Adobe Executive Vice President Matt Thompson was in the Adobe Sydney office this week for the big Adobe Symposium event and he met up with a group of students Davidson High School who were taking part in an Adobe Day.

Adobe Campus Leader and Davidson High teacher Jessica Peade, organized this excursion for her Year 9 media students and managed to get a photo with Matt.

This Adobe Day was focused on video production. The students began by creating a short video about their passions with Adobe Spark Video via their iPhones.

Then we got more serious and moved from Spark Video to the more professional Adobe Premiere Pro video editing solution.

It is always a pleasure to see how creative students can be when they get access to Adobe’s professional applications.

The NSW Department of Education have had a long-term agreement with Adobe that supplies all of their primary & secondary students and teachers with access to Adobe’s creativity & productivity tools. NSW DoE teachers & students can also access the Adobe Creative Cloud software on their personal devices. Click here to find out more information.

A group of talented young men from St Mary’s Cathedral College in Sydney took part in an Adobe Day on the afternoon of Monday 13th August.

The focus of this day was an Industry Study that they were doing about Adobe as a company.

Some of the facts about Adobe that we researched included:

• Adobe’s headquarters is in San Jose, California
• There are over 50 Adobe offices globally
• Adobe employ over 17,000 employees worldwide
• Adobe was founded in 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke
• Adobe, comes from Adobe Creek in Los Altos, California near where John Warnock lived
• Steve Jobs from Apple offered to acquire Adobe soon after it was established for five million dollars, but failed.
• Photoshop 1.0 was introduced in 1989
• In 1991 Adobe released Adobe Premiere – becoming Premiere Pro in 1993
• Adobe introduced the PDF to the world along with Acroba in 1993
• In 1994 Adobe acquired the makers of PageMaker & After Effects & took over control of the TIFF file format.
• Adobe acquired Macromedia adding ColdFusion, Captivate, Connect, Director, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash & Presenter in 2005.
• In 2005, Adobe acquired Macromedia adding ColdFusion, Captivate, Connect, Director, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash & Presenter
• Shantanu Narayen has been the Chairman & CEO of Adobe since 2007. He joined Adobe in 1998 as a senior vice-president of worldwide product research.

Most of  the St Mary’s students were experienced users of a range of Adobe tools so it was a pleasure to help extend their knowledge of video editing with Premiere Pro and image manipulation with Photoshop.

The boys were all new the the Adobe Spark tools and were impressed with their simplicity and practical use in a range of school & social settings.

Special thank you to their teacher Mr Fady Ibrahim for organising this excursion.

Along with recently celebrating 1/2 a million members, the Adobe Education Exchange has launched a new look and feel.

Highlights include:

• New Discover experience which leverages a machine learning algorithm that recommends content that leads to increased engagement and user satisfaction.
• A new, more intuitive search experience to help novices and pros alike quickly find what they are looking for.
• Powerful new ways to find community and connect with other members.
• A new design that highlights the creative potential of using Adobe products in the classroom.

The Adobe Education Exchange courses are more popular than ever. We currently have 3,500 enrollees in our Adobe XD course and 4,500 enrollees in two Spark courses.

Click here to find out more about the Adobe EdEx Collaborative Courses.

Close to 300 teachers attended the 2018 Ignite Innovate Integrate STEAM Conference, hosted by Kingswood Primary School in Melbourne on Friday 10th August.

I was very humbled and privileged to be one of the three keynote presenters along with Will Richardson from the USA and Dr Jordan Nguyen from Sydney.

Will is a former teacher and Edu Tech administrator. He is the author of six books and is regularly asked to do keynote presentations around the world. Will is a co-founder (along with Australia’s own Brice Dixon) of Modern Learners, an online community aimed at helping educators put the focus back on learning in their classrooms.

My favourite part of Will’s presentation was his references to Professor Seymour Papert. It’s so closely aligned with a number of the points in my keynote.

And his reference to the great Alfie Kohn

Dr Jordan Nguyen is a TV Presenter and biomedical engineer and, according to his website, his mission is to improve the lives of as many people as possible and to be a driving force behind positive human and technological evolution into the future.

Dr Zguyen shared about some of the amazing people he has met and lessons he has learned while producing a range of scientific documentaries. His stories about building a wheelchair and a car that can be controlled with just the mind were amazing. And seeing a boy who could only move his eyes drive the car was an inspiration for everyone and made us all wonder what may be possible in the future. Check out his keynote show reel …

My keynote session was titled The importance of sparking creativity in the classroom. Being the second keynote, I felt like I was an insignificant filling between two amazing pieces of bread.

In between the keynotes were a range of excellent workshop options for the teachers to enjoy. It was great to see Adobe Education Leaders Brett Kent (from NSW) & Joel Aarons (from Victoria) in action.

I had the pleasure of running a workshop on Adobe Spark and one on Digital Portfolios with Adobe tools.

Special thanks to the staff of Kingswood Primary for again putting on such an amazing event.

All the resources I shared during the keynote and the workshop sessions can be found on the Adobe Education Exchange via – http://bit.ly/adobe-iii18