On Tuesday December 10, the Adobe Education team hosted a Creative Jam event at Swinburne University in Melbourne based on enhancing digital literacy skills with a focus on video production with Adobe Premiere Rush. This event involved staff from the Swinburne Learning & Teaching Unit as well as the Student Engagement team.

The day began with in introduction and overview by Professor Sarah Maddison (Pro Vic Chancellor – Academic Innovation & Change).

Professor Maddison reminded everyone that Swinburne officially launched as an Adobe Creative Campus on 28th November 2019. This has provided access to the entire Adobe creative cloud suite of software for free to all 56,000 students and 2,000 + staff at Swinburne University. They are the first university in Australia to take up this initiative and within the first 25 universities globally.

Professor Maddison said the purpose of joining this program is all about boosting digital literacy at Swinburne. Part of the agreement will lead to a range of initiatives over the next three years including a new Digital Literacies Hub in the main library to be launched at the start of semester one 2020. This Hub will be hosted by digital literacy coaches made up from Swinburne students who are exceptional & passionate Adobe uses with an aim to help students and staff make the most of their new Adobe tools. There will also be a series of innovation grants for both teams and individuals to help boost the use of Adobe products in the learning teaching process.

Swinburne are also about to advertise for a new Associate Professor for Digital Literacies position who will oversee the management of the Creative Campus initiatives.

Professor Maddison said one of the main reasons for this initiative with Adobe is to prepare graduates for the future world of work. Swinburne staff and students are encouraged to not only use the Adobe products for teaching and learning but also for their own personal use to help enhance their personal passion projects. She said that the skills developed within the use of Adobe apps help train Swinburne students for the future world of work.

Following Professor Maddison’s introduction, it was up to Brian Chau (Adobe Solution Consultant) and myself to lead the Creative Jam.

After an overview and a Premiere Rush bootcamp, the Swinburne staff were given just under 3 hours to plan, film and edit a 1 to 2 minute video based on the topic – Digital Literacy.

The finished videos were quite impressive, especially considering none of the staff had used Premiere Rush before and, for many of them, it was the first time they had been part of a video production team.

Monday 9th December, Caroline Chisholm Catholic College in Melbourne invited me to kick off four days of professional learning with a keynote session on Creativity in Education. The school has over 1,500 students from 7 to 12 and this session involved over 200 of their teaching and admin staff.

During this session we looked at some of the recently announced results that came out of the 2018 OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey. PISA is well known as a tool for measuring 15-year-olds’ ability to use their reading, mathematics and science knowledge and skills to meet real-life challenges. It has been running since 2000 and the 2018 survey was the seventh round of international assessment.

The 2018 assessment had a focus was on reading in a digital environment and also collected extensive data on students’ attitudes and well-being. The section in PISA that I was most interested in for this presentation dealt with the topic Getting ready for the digital world. Some of the key points that came from the assessment included:

• In a world shaped by artificial intelligence, education is no longer just about teaching people something, but about helping people build a reliable compass and the navigation tools to find their own way through an increasingly volatile, uncertain and ambiguous world.
• Tomorrow’s schools will need to help students think for themselves and join others, with empathy, in work and citizenship.
• We cannot ignore how digital tools have so fundamentally transformed the world outside of school.
• People who cannot navigate through the digital landscape can no longer participate fully in our social, economic and cultural life.
• In the 2009 PISA assessment, about 15% of students in OECD countries, on average, reported that they did not have access to the Internet at home. By 2018, that proportion had shrunk to less than 5%.
• The amount of time that 15-year-old students in OECD countries spent on line outside of school increased between 2012 and 2018 – by an average of more than 1 hour per day (on both weekdays and weekends).
• Students now spend about 3 hours on line outside of school on weekdays, on average, and almost 3.5 hours on line on weekend days. For young people, the digital world is becoming a sizeable part of the real world.
• In the past, students could find clear and often singular answers to their questions in carefully curated and government-approved textbooks, and they could generally trust those answers to be true.
• Today, they will find hundreds of thousands of answers to their questions on-line, and it is up to them to figure out what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong
• Reading is no longer mainly about extracting information; it is about constructing knowledge, thinking critically and making well-founded judgements.

https://www.oecd.org/pisa/

Following the keynote session, I ran an Adobe Character Animator workshop with the IT & media teachers.

We also had a quick play with the new free augmented reality iOS app Adobe Aero …

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A special thank you goes to Monique Dalli (Director of Professional Learning) for inviting me and organising this week of professional development activities.

The resources I shared for this event can be found on the Adobe Education Exchange via – http://bit.ly/adobe-CCCC-19