Clara Galan (from San Francisco) is Adobe’s Global Community Lead for K-12 and Higher Education and she has made her first trip to Australia this week for the Adobe APAC Education Summit and the ACCE Conference.

She has meet with a number of key Adobe education customers while in Sydney and earlier today I took her to the wonderful Pymble Ladies College where she was interviewed by the Kim Maksimovic and Anthony England for a series of podcasts they are doing on women in leadership.

Clara is looking forward to meeting about 30 Adobe Education Leaders and Adobe Campus Leaders from around Australia at the Adobe Sydney office next week.

Make sure you tune in live on Tuesday Oct 2 at 9AM AEST to hear from Clara as well as a great set of  Creative Catalyst Talks at the APAC Adobe Education Summit. Click here to download the PDF flyer.

On Wednesday 19th September, I had the great pleasure to meet Adobe Sr. Solutions Architect John Penn II who presented at RMIT in Melbourne. Following being part of the Photoshop product team for a number of years, John developed a passion for how Photoshop can help law enforcement solve crimes. He approached the Adobe CEO with a request to focus full time on this passion and he now dedicates his work to helping law enforcement solve cases with digital imaging technology.

John has helped investigators all over the world solve crimes with the aid of image manipulation. He has a particular passion for working with investigators who focus on crimes against children.

Click here to see a special Adobe blog highlighting his work.

Swinburne University invited me to run a Photoshop workshop for teaching & admin staff on Monday September 17.

About 30 registered for this event and most were new to Photoshop, or only had a rudimentary understanding.

We went through a range of simple (and some more advanced) techniques that are practical for an education context.

All my resources for this event can be found via – bit.ly/adobe17Sept18

Special thank you to Sofia Ridwan, Swinburne’s Manager, Collaboration and Partnerships for her help is making this event happen.

Following a wonderful Adobe Day with a number of Year 7 & 8 students from Nerang State High School, about 30 teachers from 13 Gold Coast schools took part in an Adobe professional learning event on Thursday September 13.

The highlight of this event for me, was having five local Adobe Education/Campus Leaders run workshop options.

Lucy Carr, Adobe Campus Leader and media teacher at Miami SHS ran a workshop titled Premiere Pro beginners workshop: getting to know the interface and editing essentials. Lucy is also the State Conference Convener for ATOM QLD.

Kesh Chinia, Adobe Campus Leader and Senior Digital Solutions Teacher at The Southport School, ran a workshop titled Going to the next level of image manipulation with Photoshop.

Stephen Henderson, Adobe Campus Leader and computer science teacher at Somerset College, ran a workshop titled How to integrate Adobe into Assessment.

Damien Airey, Adobe Campus Leader and English teacher at the host school ran a workshop titled Flipped Learning with Adobe Presenter.

Rose Duggan, Adobe Education Leader and English teacher from Merrimac SHS ran an Adobe Spark workshop.

I am looking forward to returning back to this spectacular part of Australia to see how these teachers will be creatively applying the skills they learned during this event.

The resources I shared for this event can be found on the Adobe Education Exchange via – http://bit.ly/adobe-GoldCoast18

Nerang State High School, near the Queensland Gold Coast, was the venue for a day of digital creativity and professional learning.

The day began with a selection of about 60 of Nerang’s most talented Year 7s & 8s gathering together to enhance their digital literacy skills with Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Pro.

Two not-for-profit organisations,  AWLQ (Animal Welfare League QLD) and LIVIN (a mental health awareness group) were chosen for the students to use as the stimulus for a range of digital posters and videos made with Adobe Creative Cloud applications.

Katheryn from AWLQ brought in two dogs and spoke to half of the students.

In a relatively short amount of time, the students produced a wide range of creative digital assets for both organisations.

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Ben and Josh (Year 8) decided that they wanted to interview Katheryn. They began by filming with an iPhone from a distance of about 3m away. I told them that they were too far away to capture good audio and provided them with one of my wireless microphones and a camera to use. I encourage them to use a range of angles and they produced a great short interview good enough for TV with just a brief intro on how to use Premiere Pro.

Special thank you to Adobe Campus Leader and English Teacher Damien Airey at Nerang State High School for organizing this day and inviting me to be involved.

It was a pleasure to visit the Mooloolaba campus of TAFE QLD last week to share some recent Adobe applications and updates.

Most of the students and teachers who attended this session were from Gaming and IT courses. They were all experienced and, in many cases, very passionate Adobe users.

My resources for this event can be found on the Adobe Education Exchange via – http://bit.ly/adobe-11Sept18

Queensland’s first Adobe Mini Creative Jam was held on Monday 10^th September at Griffith University, Southbank campus in Brisbane. This was a collaboration between Griffith University, Queensland University of Technology and TAFE QLD.

The aim of this event was to help the students improve (and show off ) their digital creativity skills with Adobe’s Creative Cloud tools.

Over 30 students registered for this event which involved the students working in teams to create digital assist for a not-for-profit charity fundraising campaign. For this event, we asked YGAP to brief the students about the Polished Man Campaign.

The students then formed groups and had about 3 hours to build their assets in preparation for a showcase judging session. They were encouraged to make any of the following assets with the time & skills they had available – video, animation, poster, flyer, banner, mobile app, website, spark page, podcast.

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The judging panel for the showcase was made up of representatives from Griffith Uni, QUT, TAFE QLD and Adobe. Each group/student shared what they had produced and pitched how the assist/s could be used by YGAP for future Polished Man campaigns.

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Congratulations to the following winners of a12 month Adobe CC Licence (retail value of about $900)

Levi Miller & Aidan Gorman from Griffth University (Gold Coast Campus) as well as Arnn Baet from Queensland University of Technology.

Special thank you to Professor Ming Cheung (Head of Design at Griffith) and Daniel Della-Bosca for their support in hosting and judging this event.

Also thank you to Kev Lavery (AEL TAFE QLD), Richard Turner-Jones (Adobe expert), Manuela Taboada (QUT) and Amrita Deshpande (Adobe Education Trainer) for their support in judging and helping to make this event a success.

On Tuesday September 4, I had the privileged to run a 60min Adobe Spark workshop with the teaching staff at the wonderful Rowellyn Park Primary in Carrum Downs, Victoria.

Each of the teachers began by teaming up with a partner to create a short video with Adobe Spark Video in just 10min about their passions (or any other topic they wanted). I am always impressed with what can be achieved in such a short amount of time with the Adobe Spark apps.

iPads are used throughout the school and the teachers were buzzing with ideas on how they can use Spark Video. We showcased a number of the videos made by the teachers on the big screen. This provided evidence that the Spark tools were simple to use and engaging ways to creatively communicate.

At the end of the workshop, I conducted a short demonstration of Adobe Spark Post and Adobe Spark Page.

Special thank you to Adobe Campus Leader Carol Sieira (Media Arts Teacher) and Alistair Sproal (Assistant Principal) for inviting me and organising this professional learning opportunity.

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

Click here for the program flyer

Click here for the live feed site

It was such a delight to be part of the Philippines first Adobe Education Summit on Thursday 30th August, 2018.

About 40 academics and education administrators from the Philippines took part in this all-day event which was held at the Diamond Hotel Philippines in Manila.

The event was hosted by Wayne Weisse (Adobe’s APAC Director, Government & Education, Digital Media) and Sarah Medilo from GetCre8tive.

I had the pleasure of presenting a session about the Global Adobe Education Community and the Adobe Education Exchange.

There are currently over half a millions teachers who have joined the Education Exchange, 68,000 from the APAC region and 3,874 from the Philippines. We are hoping to double those numbers by this time next year.

It was my pleasure to talk about the Adobe Education Leaders (AEL) program and the Adobe Campus Leaders (ACL) program and we welcomed the Philippines first set of ACLs.

Sherwin O, the President of CIIT College of Arts and Technology gave a presentation titled Impact of Creativity in a School.

Troy Sitosta, the Creative Head of Shao gave some of his personal insights and experience as an entrepreneur with the topic The Entrepreneur Creative.

Aiza King-Averilla, founder of Graphics Artist Philippines presented The Freelance Creative

Two very talented design students from Manila, Jomari Bolaton and Sean Sonsona shared their story and presented some of their creative work. Both of these students were finalists in past Adobe Design Achievement Awards competitions.

My colleague (Adobe Solution Consultant) Albert Goh wowed the participants with a wide range of demonstrations on new Adobe updates and applications.

It was a pleasure to hear from Rock Cleo Serevilla, Sr Manager of the Marketing Services Group of SM Retail. He shared his professional journey and his passion for design.

Rollan Banez from Creative Nation Acadamy was the Philippines first Adobe Campus Leader. He now coordinates a plethora of face to face and online professional learning opportunities for teacher interested in enhancing their use of Adobe tools in the classroom.

I am looking forward to returning to this amazing country full of very talented, creative and friendly people.

My resources for this event can be found on the Adobe Education Exchange via – http://bit.ly/adobe-manila2018