The New South Wales Department of Education InteractED roadshow hit Coffs Harbour in northern NSW this week and it was a pleasure for Adobe to be involved again, this time with Ben Forta and myself.

The wonderful Joachim (Jo) Cohen (Schools Technology Innovation Lead) and Mark Greentree (Director, Technology for Learning) from NSW DoE kicked off the event. Jo did a great job with his usual enthusiastic hosting style.

Google Australia’s Engineering Community and Outreach Manager Sally-Ann Williams, did a wonderful keynote presentation titled Preparing students for careers of the future.

Among a range of interesting facts and figures, she told us that 80% of all new STEM jobs in the US are in computer science but only 8% of STEM graduates are from computer science courses.

She also said that according to code.org, computing jobs are the number 1 source of new wages in the US and that there are currently 500,000 computer science related jobs available in a wider range of industries.

Sally-Anne shared some research from LinkIn.com stating that soft skills that 57% of leaders are looking for include leadership, communication, collaboration & time management.

In between the keynote sessions were a range of hands-on workshops and presentations from the NSW DoE Info Tech Department (ITD) and four key ICT partners Apple, Google, Microsoft and of course Adobe.

Ben Forta and I ran a session on Acrobat & Spark Page for the School Leadership Stream, an overview of the Creative Cloud in education for Technical Coordination Stream and a session on Adobe Spark for the Using Technology Stream.

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We also had the privilege of doing the final keynote session for the day titled: Focusing on creative problem solving skills to enhance employability in the age of automation.

Most of the resources we shared throughout the InteractED event can be found on the Adobe Education Exchange via – http://bit.ly/adobe-Coffs18

Tim Kitchen, Kim Maksimovic, Anthony England & Ben Forta. Anthony is holding Ben’s new book about how to use Adobe Spark in the classroom.

Adobe’s Senior Director of Education Initiatives, Ben Forta began his 2019 Aussie visit with a visit to Pymble Ladies College in Sydney on Tuesday November 20.

Ben lives in Michigan, USA but spends most of his time visiting teachers and students all over the globe with a focus on improving the Adobe experience for education. Ben has been part of the Adobe Spark product team in recent years and he loves sharing the value of the Spark tools.

Pymble Ladies College is a large independent girls school with over 2000 students from K to 12. They have an extensive ICT program and were very keen to show Ben the way they integrate a wide range of Adobe’s creativity & productivity applications throughout the curriculum.

Using Adobe Illustrator to design objects cut via a laser cutter

Pymble are obviously big fans of the Adobe Spark tools

One of the highlights of his visit to Pymble was being interviewed about his work and experiences for one of their podcasts.