As we bring 2020 to a close, I would like to thank the Adobe Education Team, the Adobe Education Leaders, members of the new Adobe Creative Educators program and all primary, secondary and post-secondary educators for the great work they have done this year.

This year, the importance of being creative in the way we learn, teach, work and play has been more evident than ever before as reflected in some of the impacts we have had within out 2020 Adobe in Education active use programs.

I was delighted to be involved with 190 events, 170 of them being based online via BlueJeans, Zoom, MS Teams, Blackboard Collaborate or Adobe Connect. We impacted about 17,000 teachers and students, and more teachers than in the past few years.

A highlight of 2020 for me, has been producing 35 episodes of Inject Creativity Live and having the Chat-show go live on the official Adobe for Education YouTube channel. I would like to say a very special thank you to Erin Raethke from TAFE QLD for Co-hosting with me. She has gone above and beyond what is expected from an Adobe Education Leader. And a special thank you to Jerry Wong who is an Adobe Customer Success Manager in the Education Team and has been instrumental is helping behind the scenes as we broadcasted each episode.

Another highlight this year was the APAC Adobe Education Summit. Being an online event, we were able to cater for about 500 participants over the three days and 50 presenters from all over the globe.

Globally, the Adobe Education Exchange welcome and it’s 900,000th member and in Australia and New Zealand, we welcomed 7,752 new members bringing the ANZ membership up to 43,353.

Half way through 2020, we launched the Adobe Creative Educator program. Globally over 13,000 teachers enrolled in this program with nearly half of them successfully passing level one. In ANZ we have had 481 teachers enroll and 221 past the first level.

The Adobe Education Leader (AEL) community is an exclusive leadership and high-touch program where teachers need to be nominated to be involved. Globally, we currently have 365 AELs with 58 coming from the ANZ region. I would like to thank all the AELs for their contributions this year in helping to promote the Adobe Education Exchange and most importantly encourage digital creativity within their schools and universities.

Two personal highlights for me this year were engaging with over 4000 Filipino teachers in one event (over 1000 live and 4000 viewing the recordings) to help them with their online teaching skills and also working with 800 at risk Vietnamese students during 6 online Adobe Spark workshops.

We have a number of great programs planned for 2021 and look forward to working with thousands more teachers and students, hopefully with a blended approach of both face-to-face and online. I’m looking forward to the Get to Know you Adobe Apps series of webinars starting in February and of course a new set of Inject Creativity Live show that we have planned.

Have a wonderful break over January get yourself prepared for a very creative 2021.

Dr Tim Kitchen (Senior Education Specialist, Adobe – APAC)