It was an honour to be the opening keynote speaker at the first ever Virtual Big Day In event run by the Australian Computer Society Foundation.
Over 1,600 students were involved in this session from around Australia and it was a delight to share the stage with Genevieve Ash from Technology One who presented the topic New School Cool : The Fun & Creative Side of Working For A Tech Firm
This interview is with Kevin Cummins, E-Learning Coach with the Catholic Education Office Ballarat, Victoria, Australia. Kevin works with over 60 F – 12 Schools across Western Victoria instructing teachers how to use technology in innovative and constructive ways in the classroom.
…‘remote learning’ is causing a dramatic improvement in the familiarity of most teachers to the range of digital pedagogies that exist. For the majority of teachers this is a titanic shift in what is possible. The metaphor of a teaching toolbox is being extended with new ‘power tools’ being added to teacher’s repertoires.
Adobe Creative Educators Program
To help teachers continue to develop their digital communication and creativity skills, at the end of June, Adobe will be launching the Adobe Creative Educators program. Designed for educators in every subject area and sector, members will receive free lessons and resources to spark creativity with students, in addition to special in-person and online events with other like-minded educators and the Adobe team.
Note that this program will be replacing the Adobe Campus Leaders program.
Adobe Education Summit
The 2020 APAC Adobe Education Summit is going online on September 29 to October 1. Being a holiday period for most educators in ANZ, this event is about digital creativity all areas and levels of education. The theme will be Improving Education Following COVID-19
Tue Sept 29 – Adobe Education Leaders (AELs) only
Wed Sept 30 – all educators
Thursday Oct 1 – Adobe Creative Educators & AELs only
As of the first week of June, the weekly Adobe Inject Creativity Live events will be going live every Wednesday at 6.30 PM (AEST) on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. They will also be shorter and in two different formats. Click here to find out more and encourage your colleagues and wider education networks to tune in each week and register if they would like a reminder email and a copy of the recordings.
Note that these events are NESA endorsed for NSW teachers.
Adobe Max 2020
The Adobe Max conference is Adobe largest Digital Media event and this year it will be going online from Oct. 19–21. Usually you need to travel to LA to be part of this event but this year it will be available for everyone across the globe to enjoy. Find out more Find out more and join the email list to keep posted via https://max.adobe.com/
Adobe Distance Learning Resources
The Adobe Distance Learning Resources site is being updated each week with a range of new courses, articles and blogs. Take note of the collaboration Adobe now has with the Khan Academy and with Time Magazine.
The Keep Being Creative site is a resource for parents, teachers and students working & studying from home.
EduTips
Have a look at the great Adobe in Education tutorials that are found on the Adobe EduTips Vimeo channel which is part of CreateEdu TV.
EduChats
Open the new EduChats site to see and hear in-depth vodcast & podcasts with teachers and parents who have opened up about what has been working and not working for them, their students and their children during the COVID-19 isolation period.
Book an Adobe Expert
Adobe are offering their enterprise education customers the opportunity for some time online with one of their experts. This could be for an online session with a group of students and their teacher/s or it could be an online professional development event for teachers. Click here to find out more and book in your class and/or colleagues.
Free access to Adobe Creative Cloud at home during COVID -19
As schools around Australasia are now gradually moving back to some form of normality, let’s keep driving the benefits of the new digital communication skills that all teachers and students have been developing during COVID-19. Let’s not rush back to the ‘old normal’.
About a week ago, the Philippines eLearing Society invited me to run a webinar for them about effective online teaching for their members. They asked if I could run the event on Friday 8th May at 10AM their time. After a little bit of re-organising of my schedule for that day, I agreed and was planning to run it via my BlueJeans online conference tool which handles up to 200 participants at a time.
They suggested that they may be an issue because there could be up to 2000 teachers interested in joining this session. After I picked myself up from the floor, I agreed to use their Microsoft Teams Events system whoch would handle those sort of numbers.
With so many potential connections, anything could go wrong technically so I decided to create a series of short videos for the participants to stream on their devices and then do Q&A in between each video. This would be a practical example of both synchronous and asynchronous teaching and learning that I could model for them. Adding the wonderful How do you do online teaching clip made by Adobe Education Leader and TAFE QLD educators Kev Lavery into the mix, I had a good 1hr webinar in place.
During the dry run, I was told that 4000 teachers had registered to get access to the recording but because it was a teaching day there would be a considerable drop off.
We ended up with 1,059 teachers live, it was the largest online audience I have ever worked with.
Below are the videos I prepared for this event.
Chapter 1
Key concepts:
COVID-19 disruptions forcing a needed change
Synchronous online teaching
Students as moderators
Features of a good synchronous tool
Asynchronous online teaching
Using an LMS
Chapter 2
Key concepts:
Open webcams at the start of a synchronous session
Mute mics
Record short segment
Some unit & school avoid synchronous sessions
Q&A & polls
Flipped Learning
Blooms Taxonomy
Seymour Papert
Plug into network
Use headset
Look at your webcam
Light behind or to the side of camera
Second device for monitoring
Chapter 3
Key concepts
Blended learning
Open mind set vs closed mind set
Video as a literacy
Spark Video
Premiere Rush
Premiere Pro
Teacher making their own content
Chapter 4
Kev Lavery’s video – How do you do online learning?
Dr Tim Kitchen's Journal - Creativity in Education 