About 200 NSW Department of Education teachers from the Hunter Valley region took part in the InteractED event at The University of Newcastle on Wednesday July 3.

InteractED is a series of events run by the NSW DoE T4L team around NSW with an aim to enhance the use of digital technologies throughout NSW Government Schools. So far this year, Adobe, Google, Apple and Microsoft have been involved with the InteractED events in Sydney, Wagga Wagga, Wollongong and this one in Newcastle. Later in the year, InteractED will hit Coffs Harbour and Dubbo.

This event began with a great keynote presentation from Chris Betcher from Google. Chris is also an Adobe Education Leader and a well known education thought leader in Australia. He flipped his keynote by using Google’s collaboration tools to get the audience to to contribute most of the content.

I was up on stage next to do a keynote sessions titled Creativity is not an option, it’s an absolute necessity. I used this opportunity to share some of the key themes from Sir Ken Robinson’s messaging at EduTech this year such as:

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Then we spent some time looking at this question …

I also provided the teachers with some information on how they can enhance digital creativity within their curriculum areas with the help of their Adobe products.

Following the keynote, I ran the following three workshop sessions …

Feedback from the organisers …

Tim I love the way you provide the why in the keynote and then the how in your workshops…the hands on demonstrations and using participants to present is such Gold!!!

Special thank you to Mark Greentree, Jo Cohen and the T4L team for putting on such a great event.