Day one of the Adobe Education Summit for the Asia-Pacific region was exclusively for Adobe Education leaders (AELs). AELs are the highest level of Adobe’s education leadership community and we had about 45 teachers register for this event and join us throughout the day.

The event started with a video by many of the attendees …

Clara Galán (Adobe’s Globa Education Community Lead) and I welcomed everyone prior to a series of sessions by members of the global Adobe in Education team.

Clara Galán

Clara shared new information about the Global Adobe Education Community programs.

She highlighted the new Adobe Creative Educators programs, the various Adobe Education Exchange on-demand courses, Adobe Education social media channels, virtual events, Adobe Max and much more

Click here to see Clara’s presentation

Dr Brian Johnsrud

Dr Brian Johnsrud joined the Adobe Education Team about 1 year ago as the Education Curriculum Strategy Lead. Brian leads the worldwide education curriculum strategy for Adobe. Brian shared a presentation titled Adobe 2020 curriculum updates.

He shared some of the new and coming resources on the Adobe Distance Learning Resources section of the Adobe Education Exchange.

Click here to see Brian’s presentation

Tacy Trowbridge

Tacy Trowbridge is Adobe’s Global Education Programs Lead and she shared the latest in the thought leadership and research messaging from Adobe Education.

Click here to see Tacy’s presentation

Matt Niemitz

Matt Neimitz is well known to many of us as the manager of the Adobe Education Exchange which recently hit over 880,000 members of the Adobe Education Exchange and about 140,000 from the APAC region. He shared with us some of the Exchange highlights this year and what is planned in the near future.

Click here to see Matt’s presentation

Adobe Product Team members

One of the advantages of being an Adobe Education Leader is the NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement) access they get to Adobe product announcements. It was a great opportunity for the AELs to connect with Jessica Nunez from the Premiere Rush Product Team, Erica Schisler from the Character Animator Product Team, Mark Dahm from the Photoshop Product Team and Ajay Shukla from the Adobe Animate Product Team. We can’t publish what was shared during this session. All we can say is watch out for some exciting news at the coming Adobe Max conference.

Adobe Customer Success Managers

We had a great session with all of the Adobe Customer Success Managers connected with Education in the ANZ region.

Click here to see this session.

Adobe Product Demonstrations

Brian Chau and Chris Hansen from the Adobe Solution Consultant team joined us for some demonstrations on Character Animator, Animate and After Effects.

• Click here to see Brian’s Animate demo
• Click here to see Chris’ After Effects demo
• Click here to see Brian’s Character Animator demo

Adobe Master of Teaching project

Dr Magda Gross and AEL Juliette Bentley introduced us to the new Adobe Master of Teaching project.

Click here to see this session

Peter Hutton

We were delighted to have Peter Hutton from the Future Schools Alliance as our keynote presenter for day 1 of the APAC Adobe Education Summit.

Peter is a former school principal in Victoria and the Director the Future Schools Alliance. He has extensive leadership experience in both the state and independent school systems where he has led significant successful innovation in both sectors.

His keynote was very informative and thought-provoking. He reminded the AELs that it is important that they don’t just do education the way we have always done it. He challenged all of us to question basic assumptions about education like all students learning at the same time, in the same age groups from 9 to 3.30 on weekdays. He suggested that the education system is not broken but just not built for modern society. And he challenged us to consider that maybe schooling should be focused on fulfillment rather than learning.

Peter inspired us to really challenge how we do school. More information on the Future Schools Alliance ca be found via: https://futureschools.education/  

Click here to see Peter’s address and the following discussion.

Workshops

Following the keynote, the AELs broke into a series of workshop on the following Adobe applications:

• Dimension & Illustrator with Steve Nichols from Adobe
• Animate with Brian Chau from Adobe
• Photoshop with Craig Daalmeijer-Power from TAFE NSW
• Substance & Mixamo with Alwyn Hunt from Adobe
• Premiere Pro with Craig Daalmeijer-Power from TAFE NSW
• XD with Mark Woszczalski from TAFE NSW

Feedback

Here are some of the highlights reflected in the feedback process …

• Loved hearing about what’s coming in a few of the products and also what resources are being developed/released.
• Loved Peter’s highlights and hearing from the Adobe product teams. Clara, Matt and Tacy are always fantastic to hear from.
• Peter Hutton’s talk was very engaging and though provoking.
• I would love to spend more time with Brian and Alwyn, just to pick their brains for all of the amazing knowledge that they have stored away there!
• Keynote address from Peter Hutton was very engaging and thought provoking. He posed challenges to educators to personalise change rather than rely on systemic changes out of our control. Good range of workshops and presentations throughout the day covering new and exciting Adobe applications. Exciting times ahead for all educators with improvement to EdEx and many pathways towards becoming Adobe education leaders and community contributors.
• Peter Hutton was outstanding. His ideas resonate and despite being presented simply and eloquently, they have great potential for change and the ramifications of implementing his thoughts would be long-lasting and profound.
• Brian’s session on Animate was also a highlight. He has such a friendly manner, a great presentation style and he’s easy to listen to. I look forward to re-watching his presentation and trying out his tricks and tips.
• Very much enjoyed having more time to listen to Peter Hutton and his thoughts and philosophy concerning the current education model. Other highlights – well honestly, the entire Day 1 of the summit was a highlight.
• Great presentation by fellow AEL Juliette & keynote speaker. Adobe Product Teams updates are always super exciting. Great to chat with colleagues online. Good workshops.

It was a pleasure to host a panel of distinguished educators including Marise McConaghy – Principal of Strathcona, Adobe Education Leader Michelle Dennis and Arti Chopra Principal of the Amity International School in Noida, India. This session was with over 1,800 K-12 teachers at the India Adobe Education Summit.

Special thanks to Garima Babbar from Adobe for organising this amazing professional learning event for Indian educators.

I had the pleasure of working with a class of Year 9 students from Our Lady of Mercy Catholic College in Cronulla, NSW to help improve their video editing skills with Adobe Premiere Pro.

I wasn’t able to visit the school due to COVID-19 restrictions but we we organised a video link and, over two sessions, we went through the following video editing techniques:

1 – File Management
2 – Importing & working with bins
3 – In & Out editing (7 second rule)
4 – Transitions
5 – Titles
6 – Adding & editing audio (voice over & music)
7 – Audio effects
8 – Video animation (key framing)
9 – Colour Grading
10 – Green Screen keying
11 – Exporting for online & High Def

Video editing is a modern literacy that all students should learn. Just about every industry that involves communication is looking for people with video production skills. Adobe Premiere Pro is the ultimate video editing solution. It is used at the highest level of multimedia, TV and film making. A more simple solution is Premiere Rush and the simplest video editing application is Adobe Spark Video.

On Thursday 10th September Adobe Education Leader Eden Carey from Perth and I ran an event for schools who used iPads & iPhones called All things iOS and Adobe.

This event involved about 60 members of the Apple Distinguished Educators network, Apple Professional Learning Specialists, Adobe Education Leaders and Adobe Creative Educators who teach with iOS devices.

The aim was to share the value of the main Adobe iOS applications being used by teachers to enhance creativity and digital literacy in classrooms around the globe.

Click here to access the recording.

Key apps demonstrated during this event included:

• Spark Video
• Photoshop Camera
• Aero
• Fresco
• Spark Post
• Rush

Last Friday 4th September, about 30 students representing Year 8 to Year 12 at St Leo’s Catholic College took part in an Adobe 1-Minute Video Challenge.

This challenge is all about working with a team of students and teachers to create a 1 minute video in a day with the use of Adobe software (such as Premiere Pro, Premiere Rush, After Effects, Character Animator, Aero & Photoshop) to help promote the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

In 2015, the United Nations established 17 interconnected Sustainable Development Goals that need to be achieved by 2030 achieve a better future for our globe. Each goal addresses the following global challenges:

• Poverty
• Inequality
• Climate change
• Environmental degradation
• Peace and
• Justice

The St Leo’s students formed 5 groups and after I went over the criteria and some basic film making techniques, they created five x 1 minute films to help raise awareness of these goals.

Here is a video made by St Leo’s teacher Louie Tiglao about the students in action …

The last hour of the day involved exporting, sharing and judging the films. The judging involved a mix of peer judging and me judging. Here are the winning films …

1st Place

2nd Place

3rd Place

Here is the YouTube link to yesterday’s Inject Creativity Live Chat-show.

Click here to access the Deeper-dive event recording

• Chapter 1 – Introductions
• Chapter 2 – Mark Woszczalski (After Effects basics)
• Chapter 3 – APAC Summit promo
• Chapter 4 – Clara Galan (Adobe Edu Community Programs)
• Chapter 5 – Resources