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