Over 600 Indonesian teachers applied for 25 places at this week’s Adobe Creativity Challenge in Jakarta. The lucky 25 were a mix of media, IT, mathematics, science and humanities teachers from all over the country. The Indonesian Ministry of Education flew them into Jakarta and paid for their food and accommodation so that they could make the most of this two-day professional learning opportunity that was organised by the Indonesian Ministry of Education,  Teknologika and the Adobe Singapore office.

Their challenge was to work in a small team to produce a 3 minute video on the topic – A Promising Creative Industry for the Digital Native.  The criteria included:

• Edited in a mix of Spark Video & Premiere Rush
• Character Animator should also be featured
• At least one image manipulated in Adobe Photoshop should be used
• About 3 minutes
• All images and audio must be original or royalty free
• If in Indonesian, must have English subtitles

With the help from my translator Sonny Adi Purnomo, we started the event by introducing the group to Adobe Spark Page and encouraged them all to create a Spark Page that they could use to record and reflect on all their learning. Then we encouraged them to join the Adobe Education Exchange and explore some of the amazing resources that are available to enhance their ongoing digital creativity skills.

Adobe Spark Video was then demonstrated an work-shopped.

Then we looked at Spark Post as a way of making graphics for our video as well as short animations via the Android & iOS version.

Following a morning of Adobe Spark activities, I introduced the teachers to Adobe Premiere Rush. They were so impressed with the power, yet simplicity of this video editing tool and the versatility of working with it on a phone, tablet, laptop or desktop.

The afternoon of the first day was all about Adobe Character Animator. The teachers were encouraged to manipulate and animate some of the built in puppets and reflect on who this tool could help enhance student voice and engagement. They loved the Characterizer plug-in to Character Animator that enabled them to create a puppet based on their own face.

The rest of day 1 was based on enhancing their Photoshop skills with a range of techniques such as:

• image compression
• camera raw filter
• cropping & straightening
• content aware fill
• clone stamp tool
• spot healing brush

Day 2 was all about the challenge. They had about 3 hours to work with their team to plan, film and edit their video story.

There were 6 teams and each interpreted the topic in different ways. All groups did a great job at applying everything they learned the previous day.

Here are a couple of examples of the films that were made …

I would like to give a special thank you to the Indonesia Ministry of Education, Lili from Teknologika, Sonny for being such a great translator and Greg Sisk from the Adobe Singapore office for inviting me.