Fifty Indonesian Vocation Education Teachers were selected to take part in a special professional learning event on Tuesday March 5. Earlier this year, I ran a webinar with over 200 of these teachers and this was a special follow up face to face activity.

It was a delight to spend an afternoon with these creative educators and provide them with some Adobe magic. The aim was to inspiration them and provide them with ideas to engage their students and help them develop some practical digital creativity skills.

At the end of the event, for some reason, a number of the teachers wanted to get a photo with me. I felt like a celebrity.

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About 40 lecturers representing universities throughout Indonesia joined me for digital creativity workshop/presentation in Jakarta on March 4, 2019 focusing on Adobe apps in education.

Some of the messaging during this session included that today’s students are immersed in a range of digital realms and they want to produce media, not just consume media. It is important that educators acknowledge this and allow their students time to construct their learning in creative ways with a range of  digital technologies.

Students are engaged more in formal education when they are encouraged to work with digital creativity tools. Digital is how thinking and learning are increasingly happening across the whole curriculum.

I showed these lecturers some of the work we are  doing with the Faculty of Arts at Macquarie University as they are moving towards using video as an important  part of the assessment process. Click here to see a video about this.

One of the themes we discussed was that traditional education systems are not designed to enhance creativity. Students are rewarded for memorising facts for a test, not for imagination, creativity, resourcefulness, collaboration & problem solving.

I suggested that one of the reasons we have to think differently about education is that the world our students are living in is so different from the one that most educators grew up in yet many are still teaching the way they were taught and most likely the same way their teachers were taught.

Sharing some of the practical solutions available via the Adobe Creative Cloud is always a pleasure. I never cease to enjoy seeing the delight in the faces of educator as they discover the joys and educational potential within the Adobe apps.

It was great working with Adobe Account Executive Greg Sisk our Indonesian partners on this event.