When AFL footballer Bachar Houli was asked yesterday how he felt after helping his team Richmond win the 2019 Premiership, he responded by stating how humbled and grateful he was to be part of a successful team. That is exactly how I feel about being involved with the Adobe in Education Leadership community in advance of this week’s APAC Adobe Education Summit.

Summit – live to air

Adobe Education Leaders and Adobe Campus Leaders from across Australia and New Zealand are gathering at the Adobe Sydney Office for two days of inspiration and challenge this week. Both morning sessions on the Tuesday and Wednesday Oct 1 & 2 (starting at 8.30AM AEST) will be broadcast live via Vimeo Livestream for all educators to tune into for free via – http://bit.ly/APAC-live19

Adobe Education Exchange

The Adobe in Education Leadership community involves the pinnacle users of the Adobe Education Exchange which welcomed its 700,000^th member earlier this year. Continuing the AFL theme, that is 7 times more people than were at the MCG yesterday for the 2019 Grand Final between Richmond and Greater Western Sydney.

If you are not already a member, please join this free portal of resources, tutorials, courses and discussions for educators who are interested in using Adobe tools to enhance creativity and productivity in their classrooms. As you use the Exchange, you earn points and once you have gained 300 points you qualify to potentially become an Adobe Campus Leader (ACL).

Adobe Campus Leaders

You don’t have to be an expert in any particular Adobe application to be an ACL. You do need to be a passionate educator, willing to regularly share your interest in digital literacy and creativity with your colleagues and students in K12 &/or Higher Education. ACLs are in regular contact with Adobe, they are asked to help run and support education events and in return for their contribution, they get free access to the Adobe Creative Cloud applications. ACLs who prove to have an influence wider than their own school or facility can potentially be nominated to be an Adobe Education Leader (AEL).

Adobe Education Leaders

AELs are at the highest level of Adobe’s Education Leadership Community. Not only do they get the same benefits as an ACL, they also have NDA status with Adobe allowing them access to beta applications and information about future Adobe applications and services before they are public.

Please tune-in online this Tuesday morning Oct 1 at 8.30 AM (AEST) via http://bit.ly/APAC-live19 to see what this international education community is all about as they strive to empower the next generation to be lifelong digital creatives.

On Tuesday 17th September 2019, Swinburne University in Melbourne hosted an Adobe Creative Jam on with a number of their Design students and others interested  in developing their skills with Adobe Experience Design (Adobe XD).

Design at the speed of thought

Adobe Solution Consultant Brian Chau ran a bootcamp on Adobe XD to help those who had little experience and to also provide tips and tricks for those who were experienced usres.

Then we provided the students with the brief for the challenge which was …

To design a platform to connect students and staff at Swinburne to resources on campus and/or in the broader community.

The the students broke into small design groups to work on their solutions.

After about 2.5 hours of planning and designing with XD, each group was asked to present their amazing solutions to a panel of judges who were looking for the following criteria:

• How did they meet the brief
• Creativity & Innovation
• Level of detail
• Design
• Usability
• Presentation solution

Some great prizes were awarded to the winning teams.

Congratulations to all the students involved in this Adobe Creative Jam. Special thanks to Ravi Bessabava and his team, from the Design Factory at Swinburne and Anna Nakao, Sasha McQuade and Brian Chau from Adobe  for putting this event together.

Korowa Anglican Girl’s School in Melbourne’s East hosted an Inject Creativity into the Curriculum event on Monday 16th September.

About 20 teachers from a range of curriculum areas took part including some mathematics teachers who were keen to see what Adobe had to help them deliver their content.

A special thank you goes to Adobe Education Leader Justin de Lacy from Woodleigh School who ran a workshop session on Premiere Pro for teachers who were looking to go further with their video production skills.

Other Adobe applications that were covered during this event included:

• Character Animator
• Photoshop
• Spark Video
• Spark Post
• Spark Page &
• Premiere Rush

Feedback comments included:

Student sessions

During the day at Korowa, I had the pleasure of working with a number of students and teachers with a focus on Spark, Premiere Pro & Photoshop.

One of the great pleasures in my job is seeing how Adobe’s creativity and productivity tools are being used by students around the world to produce outstanding results. Here are a few examples of award-winning films by media students at Northern Beaches Secondary College (NBSC), Freshwater Senior Campus. They are great examples of what students can achieve with Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects as well as other Adobe Creative clouds apps like Photoshop & Illustrator.

An Alternate Road by Lily McElligott

Press Play by Nathaniel Dunwell

Ed’s Adventures by Jack Fairclough

A special congratulations to Adobe Campus Leader Andrew Lai (Multimedia teacher at  NBSC) for working so well with these students and inspiring them to produces such amazing work.

While in Adelaide this week, I had the opportunity to meet the amazing Dr Gill Hicks who was speaking with global education guru, John Hunter at a World Peace Games event hosted by Annesley Junior School.

Dr Hicks was a survivor of the London terrorist Bombings in July, 2005 where she lost both legs below the knees. Today, she is well known as a motivational speaker with a message of tolerance and compassion.

Some of the gems of wisdom I noted from her presentation included:

• We should celebrate our capacity to adapt and learn from over 60,000 years of indigenous wisdom within our own country
• Ideas are really powerful, they connect us and cannot be killed by a suicide bomber or war.
• Design thinking helps us come up with new and greater ideas
• We need to get creative
• Peace can be exhausting, it’s not a nice, soft or easy option. Peace can be very challenging
• Talk with people who have different view to you

  Have a look at her TED talk

It was a pleasure to hear from John Hunter who is doing amazing things around the world with students in a quest for world peace.  Here is his TED Talk …

Congratulations to Luke Ritchie Principal of Annesley Junior School as well as his staff and students for putting on this very inspiring evening.

Thanks to Adobe Character Animator, Rob the Robot was joined (for the first time) by Dr Applesmith from Adobe to help  introduce this professional learning event that I ran at Flinders University on Thursday September 12.

The aim of the event was to introduce a range of academic and support staff to the value of a number of Adobe Creative Cloud applications.

Most of the participants, were not aware of much more than Adobe Acrobat & Photoshop, so it was a pleasure to introduce to them to a whole new world of digital creativity and productivity options.

Adobe Spark was a revelation to many of them and it was great to see how quickly they produced a number of digital graphics and videos with ease.

Other apps that were work-shopped and presented included Character Animator, Rush, Photoshop and Experience Design.

Some of the feedback from  this session included the following comments …

• An informative session
• Learning the new apps was enlightening – I had not used Character Animate, but now I will
• Being able to quickly create using the spark tools while in session
• Tim was warm & engaging
• A good intro to a wide range of apps on the suite. Need to think and read about which are likely to be integrated in my work.
• Being able to create things straight away was a highlight
• I didn’t realise the huge spectrum of Adobe programs, and that some were free and usable on handheld devices so that was really interesting.
• Demonstrate a range of tools and showed some real examples
• This session is very informative and it is great to refresh the knowledge
• Highlight was the animation but overall was a great introduction.

My resources for this event can be found on the Adobe Education Exchange via – http://bit.ly/adobe-Flinders19

It was great to be back at Auckland University of Technology (AUT) to work with a range of academics and support staff to help enhance their understanding and skills with a range of Adobe Creative Cloud applications.

About 20 AUT staff registered for this event. The team from Adobe included John Penn II (Senior Solutions Architect from the US), Jason Grant (Solutions Consultant), Jerry Wong (Customer Success Manager), Myself and (if you look closely at the images above) Rob the Robot (thanks to Adobe Character Animator).

We enjoyed a busy schedule of demonstrations and workshops including the opportunity for a Photoshop deep-dive with John Penn II who started his Adobe career in the Photoshop product team as a senior programmer.

My resources for this event can be found on the Adobe Education Exchange via – http://bit.ly/adobe-AUT19a

On Thursday September 5, The University of Auckland hosted New Zealand’s first Inject Creativity into the Curriculum with Adobe Roadshow event.

This involved about 30 educators from a range of faculty areas within the university and a range of Adobe abilities and experiences.

Character Animator being demonstrated

We started the session with a Character Animator demo and a Rush demo by Jason Grant (Adobe Solution Consultant) with an aim to share some of Adobe’s new tools but also to make the point that Adobe is not just about the high-end, industry standard, professional creativity tools any more. There are a wide range of applications that can be used by every  teacher and student to enhance their digital creativity skills.

Jason Grant showing off Premiere Rush

One of the highlights was hearing John Penn II’s story about how Photoshop is saving lives and making a positive difference in the world of law enforcement.

John is such an engaging presenter. His work and passion is about how Adobe tools can be used to make a positive difference to people’s lives. He shared a number of stories about how Photoshop, Premiere Pro and Audition are being used by law enforcement around the  globe to find and help missing & exploited children as well as to solve other crimes.

Click here to find out more about John’s work

The rest of the day involved a series of workshop options that allowed participants to have a deeper dive into a range of the applications with the help of the Adobe experts.

A special thank you to Adobe Customer Success Manager Jerry Wong for working with the University of Auckland to put this event together.

Like many Universities, The University of Auckland have access to the Adobe Creative Cloud applications for their staff and their labs. It is always a pleasure to share with educators the value of what they have and how many of the Adobe apps can be used to aid teaching and learning.

Congratulations to the Pymble Ladies College Primary Team and the St Andrews Cathedral School Year 8 Team for winning the Adobe 1-Minute Video Challenge that was held at SACS in the heart of Sydney on Tuesday September 3.

The challenge is all about working in a team to create a 1 minute video in a day based on a particular theme with the use of Adobe software such as Spark Video, Premiere Rush, Premiere Pro, Character Animator and/or After Effects.

The theme for this challenge was being in charge of the country for a day and making the world a better place.

St Andrews Cathedral School had two primary aged teams and three secondary teams. Trinity Grammar had two primary teams, Pymble had a primary & a secondary team and Loreto Kirribilli three primary teams.

After being given introductions and the secret ingredients for each video, the students selected either a Spark Video or a Premiere Rush workshop to help enhance their editing skills.

Then they went into the planning stage to brainstorm ideas, story board & script their stories.

After planning their stories, they were allowed out to film and capture all their story  assets.

Then the students got stuck into the Adobe apps to put their story together. They used a mix of Premiere Rush, Spark Video and one group worked with Premier Pro.

At the end of the day, each group had an opportunity to share their story on  the big screen and have their story judged by some experts from Adobe.