Malvern Valley Primary School in Melbourne’s East hosted a great Big Day In Junior on Wednesday August  28.

Big Day In Junior events are hands-on STEM focused events for Year 5 and 6 students organised by the Australian Computer Society Foundation. A number of representatives from companies such as Apple, Google, Origin Energy and of course Adobe dedicated the day to provide opportunities for students from a range of primary schools.

The schools that I worked with included:

• Glen Huntley Primary School
• Lloyd Street Primary School
• Caulfield Junior College
• Coatesville Primary School
• East Bentleigh Primary School
• Malvern Valley Primary School &
• Korowa Anglican Girls School

The aim of the Adobe session was to develop digital video literacy skills with Adobe Spark Video. Following a demo of how simple Spark Video is as a tool to make a quality  video production, the students were encouraged to partner up and work  with an iPad to produce a video about  their passions.

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It was a great pleasure to work with these students and see the creative video work they achieved.

Click here to find out more about Adobe Spark in Education.

Here is a video I made about a Big Day In Junior event last year

The Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM) Victorian State Conference was held on Friday August 23 at Graduate House, The University of Melbourne.

I was asked to run a workshop/presentation on Adobe Character Animator that was attended by about 40 Victorian media teachers.

Most of the teachers were experienced with Adobe Premiere Pro and Photoshop but this was the first time they had experienced Character Animator.

It was pleasing to get such positive feedback about how this application can be used in classrooms to enhance curriculum content, provide students with a voice and an opportunity to be creative and develop their 21st century communication skills.

John Penn II was the special guest at a Creativity Challenge I facilitated with TAFE QLD students and teachers at their Mooloolaba Campus on Thursday August 22.

John is back in Australia again to help Police agencies solve crimes and find missing people with the aid of Adobe’s technologies. Formally on the Photoshop product team as a computer engineer, John is now Adobe’s Senior Solutions Architect for Law Enforcement Technologies.

Find out more about John’s work …

Following an inspiring presentation from John as well as some product demos of Spark Video, Premier Rush, Character Animator and Photoshop, the students and teachers were equipped  for their Creativity Challenge.

They had just over 3 hours to work in a team to produce a web page with Spark Page that featured some Spark posts and a video based on the theme of making the world a better place.

It’s always great to work with the talented teachers and students from TAFE QLD. In most cases their productions were informative, creative and well produced.

Recently rated in the top 50 universities in the world, last Wednesday August 21, it was delightful to be invited to facilitate a three hour workshop session with key representatives from The University of Queensland.

Many of the participants were experience Adobe users, keen to find our more about what is available in the Adobe Creative Cloud set of applications. One of the apps of great interest was Adobe Experience Design (XD).

Adobe Character Animator and Premiere Rush were also very popular and a pleasure to share.

Special thank you to Brisbane based Adobe guru Richard Turner-Jones for sharing his expertise and helping me with this session.

The Rockhampton campus of Central Queensland University (CQU) was the venue for a three-part Adobe Day run by Brian Chau and myself on Monday August 19.

The first part was with a group of CQU teachers and students and the focus was predominately on learning Adobe Experience Design (XD) a great tool for designing and prototyping apps & websites.

The second part of the day was an intensive session with Adobe’s video tools. We started simple with Spark Video, moved to Premiere Rush, Character Animator then to Premiere Pro.

Part 3 was an Inject Creativity into the Curriculum event that was registered by over 70 teachers from the region. With those numbers expected, we called in local Adobe Campus Leader Heath Henwood to help run a workshop.

Here is a list of the schools that registered teachers for this event …

My resources for this event can be found on the Adobe Education Exchange via  – http://bit.ly/adobe19Aug19

A special thank you to Michelle Roberts (Associate Lecturer – Digital Media, School of Education and the Arts at CQU) for all the work she put into organising this Adobe Day.

On Friday August 16, I had the pleasure to run an introduction to video literacy professional learning event at the Independent Schools Victoria (ISV) headquarters in Melbourne for teachers from 6 different schools.

I began by showing them how to use Adobe Spark Video as a very simple way of making a quick video production. Spark Video is part of the free set of Adobe Spark apps. The teachers were very impressed with the simplicity of the Spark tools but most of them were wanting a more comprehensive solution, so I introduced the Adobe Premiere Rush.

I set them a design challenge to work with a partner and create a 1minutes video about themselves and their passions. Some chose to work with Spark, other worked with Rush. Two of the teachers wanted to go to the next level with Premiere Pro, so while the teams were creating their clips, I worked with them to developed their Premiere Pro skills.

The resources I shared for this event can be found on the Adobe Education Exchange via – http://bit.ly/adobe-ISV19a

Surrounded by stunning bush scenery and vineyards, Eltham College is a beautiful school of about 800 students in Melbourne’s North-East. I had the pleasure to spend Friday Aug 15 with a number of the students and the staff to encourage their use of a range of Adobe applications.

I began the day with a room full of creative Year 8&9 students who all have access to the full Adobe Creative Cloud suite of software on their laptops. Most of them were not  aware of the power of what they had and when I showed them Character Animator, the energy and excitement in the room was palatable. When I showed them the power and simplicity of Premiere Rush, the energy lifted even more with great anticipation about future assessment tasks and simple fun with video.

The next session was with all the Year 7 students and the focus was Adobe Spark. Some of the students had experience working with Spark before in primary school so it was great to get their testimonials prior to jumping into some Spark activities.

I gave them the challenge to work with a partner and create a video about their passions. The results were funny, informative and creative.

The final student session was with all the Year 5 & 6 students and the focus was again Adobe Spark.

From 4PM to 6.30PM, Eltham College kindly hosted an Inject Creativity into the Curriculum event which  involved about 30 staff from the school and a group of teachers from around the region. I was most impressed that the first staff member to arrive and the last  to leave was the school Principal Simon Le Plastrier.

Special thank you to Adobe Campus Leader Paul Cifone for organising this Adobe Day at his amazing school.

I had the great pleasure to spend the afternoon of Tuesday August 12 with a group of Year 9 students as well as the whole staff from Melbourne Girls College.

The student session was based on a Design Thinking Challenge based on using the three Adobe Spark tools to create a webpage, posters & a video about how the students would make the world s better place if they were in charge of the country for a day.

After school, the whole staff community filed into the library for a special Inject Creativity into the Curriculum with Adobe session.

We began with a demonstration on how Adobe Character Animator can be used to help engage students.

Following a demo on Adobe Spark video, the teachers were asked to pair up and create a Spark Video story about their passions. The results were very impressive considering they only had 10 minutes to make the clip.

The remaining time involved a short demo of Spark Post, Spark Page and Premiere Rush. The premium version of Spark, Rush and the full 2019 Adobe Creative Cloud applications are gradually being deployed as part of a new agreement into all Victorian Government Secondary Schools.

The main message from this event was that …

Adobe is no longer just about the high-end professional tools used in Arts, IT and Media programs.

There are a growing range apps from Adobe like Spark and Rush that can be easily used by any educators in any curriculum area.

I’m looking forward to sharing this message to Victorian Department of Education school across the state as we further develop our active use program throughout the region.

Special thank you to Wendy Keen and the team at Melbourne Girls College for inviting me to be part of their community for this event.

It has been amazing to have Dr Todd Taylor and Sebastian Distefano from the Adobe World Wide Higher Education Development team in Australia this week.

Today, the team worked with about 40 educators and support staff from Victoria University in Melbourne.

Following over 20 years as a Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Dr Taylor is now working for Adobe as the Senior Strategic Development Manager for Higher Education.

Today’s session was focused on working with Spark Page, Premiere Rush and Adobe Audition. Dr Taylor is passionate about encouraging students and teachers to learn and teach with multi-modal methods. He has many years of experience working with educators and encouraging them to develop their digital literacy skills.

The big challenge he posed at the start of this session was to encourage the educators to allow students to work with Adobe Spark as an assessment option and then compare the results. He is confident that students will want to continue working with Spark over tradition word processing and slide tools that they have been using for years.

Have a look at this video from Dr Taylor’s formal university and note the way Adobe tools are integrated into all facilities as an essential assessment and productivity tool.

On Thursday August 8, a group of talented Year 11 media students from The Ponds High School visited the Adobe Sydney office for an Adobe Day based on video editing with Premiere Pro.

The Ponds High School is a new NSW DoE school in the north-west of Sydney that opened in 2015 and these Year 11 students will be the first to graduate at the end of 2020.

After a tour of the office, the students enhanced and developed their video editing skills by creating a story based on footage that was provided to them as well as green screen footage that they captured.

They learned all the basic Premiere Pro fundamentals and created a range of very creative video stories.

I’d like to thank educator Liz Rose (Head Teacher TAS) for organising this excursion for her students. Liz recently became an Adobe Campus Leader which involved being an active member of the Adobe Education Exchange.

Stay tuned for a video story about this event coming soon to CreateEdu TV.