It has been an exciting and busy start to 2021 with over 30 events so far this year involving about 7000 teachers and students, include my first face to face engagement for 12 months. I recently calculated the numbers and since the beginning of the COVID lock-downs, I have personally run over 200 online events, directly impacting over 24,000 teachers and students in Australasia.

I would especially like to thank all the Adobe Education Leaders from this region who have helped present many of the online events over the past 12 months. Your contributions have been outstanding and very much appreciated.

There is still such a need for sharing simple digital literacy and creativity skills to teachers and students and it is a privilege to be managing so many great free creativity events and programs for teachers and students in Australasian region.

Please don’t hesitate to reach out to see what our team can do for your school or university and please share the programs that most relate to you with your colleagues and wider education networks.

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

Do you have your Adobe Creative Educator Badge yet?

So far, over 17K teachers have enrolled in Level 1 of the Adobe Creative Educator Program. This is a great program with the focuses on creativity in education rather than Adobe skills. All educators in any subject area and level can benefit from this program. To achieve Level 1 you need to do the On Demand Creativity for All course on the Adobe Education Exchange. If you would like help, we are running another Be a Creative Educator course April 13 (school holidays) and May 24. Click here for more information and registration.

Get to know your Adobe apps – webinar series

Session 1 of the three Get to know your Adobe apps webinar series have now been completed and we have a great set of recordings featuring short demos of a wide range of Adobe applications in education from Adobe Education Leaders and other Adobe experts.

• For Year 4 to 9 teachers
• For Year 10 to 12 teachers
• For Higher Education educators

Session 2 for each category is well underway with more time on the apps highlighted as the most popular during the first sessions. Please do register for these events, let your colleagues know and join the live sessions.

Inject Creativity Live – highlights

So far in 2021, we have run four Inject Creativity Live events with lots of great content from Adobe Education Leaders and other inspiring educators such as Clara Galan, Erin Raethke, Jason Lane, Dan Haesler, Chris Betcher, Paul McClean, Juliette Bentley, Michelle Dennis and Peter Hutton.

All of these events and more can be viewed on-demand via the Adobe for Education YouTube Channel.

Register here to get reminders of future live sessions and a copy of the recording. The next episode will be on Wed March 31 with AEL Adrian Bruch from SEA Melbourne and AEL Michelle Dennis from Haileybury College.

ACCE Conference

The Australian Council for Computers in Education Conference was a great success. It was run each afternoon from 4 PM to 6 PM (AEDT) throughout the week of March 15 to 19.

Adobe was a major sponsor and featured throughout the week of events with a range of workshops as well as the closing keynote. Have a look at the sponsor video we posted. It has some material that you may like to share with your colleagues and wider networks …

Here is the closing keynote session from the 2021 ACCE Conference.

Earth Day Mural Project

Use Adobe Fresco to get involved with the world’s largest digital mural in collaboration with Macquarie University, Venture Café Sydney & Adobe. See this video.

For QLD teachers

DIGITREK 21

TAFE Queensland is proud to be Queensland’s largest and most experienced training provider. They have drawn on their industry networks and event experience to curate DIGITREK 21 to provide information and experiences in digital technologies.

One of these experiences is the Adobe 1 min Video Challenge to be held on Thursday, 22 April. This is open to any QLD school student and aims at working with a team of students and teachers to create a 1-minute video in a day with the use of Adobe Premiere Rush (or Premiere Pro) to help promote the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Click here to register.

Inspired Education – Injecting Creativity into QLD Education

Adobe is partnering with Inspired Education for a series of Adobe related masterclasses around Queensland. Check the video below to get an idea of they offer and contact get@inspiredgrp.com.au if you are either interested in hosting or attending a future event.

For Vic DET & NSW DoE Secondary Schools –

The Adobe Holiday Video Challenge is a free 2.5 day online workshop during the April 2021 school holidays for Vic & NSW Government secondary students (Year 9 and higher) and teachers who are keen develop their video editing skills with Adobe Premiere Pro. Students could win an iPad Air & Apple Pencil and other prizes by being involved.

Go Mobile, Stay Sustainable

The Mobile Storytelling Congress 2021 is scheduled for the 13-15 November 2021 (as online and physical event) at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. 

They invite submissions of pre-constituted panels, workshops and individual paper and project showcase
Submission Deadline: 1st May 2021proposals. 

Submission for Abstracts for Research Paper, Workshops, Project Presentations and/or Showcase via https://bit.ly/MobileSC2021

Submission for smartphone films via https://filmfreeway.com/mina

All information about the categories for the 10th edition of the International Mobile Innovation Screening online (www.mina.pro)

Submission for Video Essays via https://www.videoessay.org/upload-your-submission/

Australasian Adobe Education Community on Facebook

If you haven’t already, please do join the Australasian Adobe Education Community Facebook group to keep regularly up to date with the world of Adobe in Education for the Australasian region.

Make sure you catch this week’s episode of Inject Creativity Live featuring award winning English & RE teacher Juliette Bentley and Peter Hutton, Director of Future Schools.

We also celebrated AEL Michelle Dennis wining the DLTV Women Teachers of Technology Award.

Click here to see co-host Erin Raethke’s amazing Spark Page summary of this episode.

The next episode of Inject Creativity Live is on Wednesday March 31 with Adrian Bruch from SAE and Michelle Dennis from Haileybury. Register here to get a reminder email.

This week we ran session 2 from the Year 4 to 9 teachers Get to know your Adobe apps webinar series with a focus on Character Animator, Acrobat DC & Photoshop.

Click here for the recording

Chapter 1 – Introductions
Chapter 2 – Character Animator workshop with Tim Kitchen
Chapter 3 – Acrobat DC workshop with Steve Nichols
Chapter 4 – Photoshop workshop with Tim Kitchen
Chapter 5 – Resources

Session 3 – Tue May 11 (4.30 PM AEDT) or Wed May 12 (6.30 PM AEDT)

Click here to find out more about this and similar sessions for senior secondary & higher education teachers.

Join us live if you possibly can – much more fun!

Check out Dr Kitchen’s EduTips

Last night, I ran another Be a Creative Educator course webinar. Over 115 teachers registered for this event which is aimed to help guild teachers in K12 & HED through the Creativity for All course – a requirement to becoming a Level 1 Adobe Creative Educator (ACE).

Click here for the recording

Chapter 1 – Introduction & welcome
Chapter 2 – Making the case for creativity
Chapter 3 – Defining creativity
Chapter 4 – World Economic Forum research & How creativity enhances other critical skills
Chapter 5 – How to develop creativity.
Chapter 6 – The power of creative tools
Chapter 7 – How to foster a creative learning culture 
Chapter 8 – Strategies to infuse creative thinking into any subject & How can you assess Creativity
Chapter 9 – Adobe’s creativity tools

The next Be a Creative Educator course will be on April 13 at 11 AM (AEST) during the school holidays for K12 and (just announced) Monday 24th May, 4 PM (AEST).

Register here and let your colleagues know about it.

Note that you don’t need to do this course to get your ACE badge. You can do the Creativity for All course On-Demand any time.

This week was the first of three webinar sessions for Post-Secondary educators focusing on getting to know a range of Adobe applications.

Click here for the recording

Chapter 1 – Introductions & CC in Edu overview video
Chapter 2 – Spark Post demo with Erin Raethke
Chapter 3 – InDesign demo with Adrian Bruch
Chapter 4 – Character Animator demo with Craig Daalmeijer-Power
Chapter 5 – Acrobat DC demo with Erin Raethke
Chapter 6 – Photoshop demo with Adrian Bruch
Chapter 7 – Adobe XD demo with Craig Daalmeijer-Power
Chapter 8 – Premiere Rush demo with Erin Raethke
Chapter 9 – Premiere Pro demo with Tim Kitchen
Chapter 10 – Adobe Audition demo with Brian Chau
Chapter 11 – Survey & Resources

During session 2 & 3 from this series, we will be doing a deeper dive into some of the above apps.

Session 2
Mon May 3 – 4.30 PM – 6.00 PM (AEDT)
Repeated on Tue May 4 – 6.30 to 8.00 PM (AEDT)

Session 3
Tue May 25 – 4.30 PM – 6.00 PM (AEST)
Repeated on Wed May 26 – 6.30 to 8.00 PM (AEST)

Click here to find out more about this and similar sessions for K12 teachers.

Join us live if you possibly can – much more fun!

Adobe Creative Educator program

If you haven’t already, please join the new Adobe Creative Educator program

Last week’s episode of Inject Creativity Live featured an amazing presentation by Adobe Education Leader Emeritus Chris Betcher titled The Cinematic Approach for telling better stories with video. Chris provided so many great tips on how to improve video production and tell stories.

Paul McClean shared about his program for setting up digital mastery within New Zealand schools.

The next episode in on Wednesday March 17 at 6.30 PM AEDT and will feature AEL Juliette Bentley from Brisbane and Peter Hutton, the director of the Future Schools Alliance.

My first face-to-face engagement since March 2020 was with a group of talented RMIT students in Melbourne who are just starting the first year of the Bachelor of Business Innovation and Enterprise course.

We set them a challenge at the start of the week to create a 30 second video about themselves using Adobe Premiere Rush.

This clip explains more …

I had the pleasure of judging what the students created and deciding on which of the students would receive some special merchandise prizes from Adobe.

I also had the opportunity to share with them a short presentation about turning their passions into a job. I highlighted the fact that it is important for them to not wait until they’ve finished their university degree to try and set up a small business and brand themselves in a creative way.

All of these students will be getting access to the Adobe Creative Cloud applications as part of this course and I encouraged them to get to know these tools and to enhance the digital literacy and creativity skills.

Congratulations to Violet, Archer, Marlon & Zuhra for your winning efforts.

A special thank you to RMIT lecturers Simon Thornton, Sam Fearn & Daniel Christiansen as well the wider Adobe Education team for helping to put this event together. We are looking forward to more engagement with RMIT throughout 2021.

This week was the first of three webinar sessions for Yr 10 to 12 teachers focusing on getting to know a range of Adobe applications.

Click here for the recording

• Chapter 1 – Introductions & CC in Edu overview video (6:42)
• Chapter 2 – Spark Post demo with Brian Chau (8:12)
• Chapter 3 – Adobe Premiere Rush with Tim Kitchen (9:06)
• Chapter 4 – Acrobat DC demo with Adrian Bruch (10:37)
• Chapter 5 – Character Animator demo with Tim Kitchen (4:49)
• Chapter 6 – XD demo with Brian Chau (7:24)
• Chapter 7 – Photoshop demo with Adrian Bruch (10:34)
• Chapter 8 – Premiere Pro demo with Tim Kitchen (9:17)
• Chapter 9 – Illustrator demo with Adrian Bruch (4:45)
• Chapter 10 – Audition demo with Brian Chau (5:43)
• Chapter 11 – InDesign demo with Adrian Bruch (3:49)
• Chapter 12 – Survey & resources (4:06)

During session 2 & 3 from this series, we will be doing a deeper dive into some of the above apps.

Session 2 – Wed April 28 at 4.30 PM AEST repeated on Thurs April 29 at 6.30 PM 
Session 3 – Mon May 17 at 4.30 PM AEST repeated on Thurs May 20 – 6.30 PM

Click here to find out more about this and similar sessions for senior secondary & higher education teachers.

Join us live if you possibly can – much more fun!

Click here for the Australasian Adobe in Education Update – February, 2021

Adobe Creative Educator program

If you haven’t already, please join the new Adobe Creative Educator program

Last week was the first of three webinar sessions for Yr 4 to 9 teachers focusing on getting to know a range of Adobe applications.

Click here for the recording

Chapter 1 – Introductions & CC in Edu overview video
Chapter 2 – Spark Post demo with Brett Kent
Chapter 3 – Character Animator demo with Tim Kitchen
Chapter 4 – Spark Video demo with Brett Kent
Chapter 5 – Rush demo with Steve Nichols
Chapter 6 – Fresco demo with Brett Kent
Chapter 7 – Photoshop Camera demo with Steve Nichols
Chapter 8 – Photoshop demo with Brett Kent
Chapter 9 – Aero demo with Steve Nichols
Chapter 10 – Acrobat demo with Brett Kent
Chapter 11 – Resources

During session 2 & 3 from this series, we will be doing a deeper dive into some of the above apps.

Session 2 – Mon March 15 (4.30 PM AEDT) or Thurs March 18 (6.30 PM AEDT)
Session 3 – Tue May 11 (4.30 PM AEDT) or Wed May 12 (6.30 PM AEDT)

Click here to find out more about this and similar sessions for senior secondary & higher education teachers.

Join us live if you possibly can – much more fun!

I’d like to highlight the following Spark Pages that were created during last night’s event as a summary:
· Rebecca Frith
· Tim Cosgrove

Click here for the Australasian Adobe in Education Update – February, 2021

Adobe Creative Educator program

If you haven’t already, please join the new Adobe Creative Educator program

Last Friday 26th February was the first of a series of professional learning events for Queensland teachers that were run by the Inspired Education group in partnership with Adobe.

This event involved about 14 teachers from 12 different Queensland schools, a mix of government and independent.

The focus of these events is encouraging good design and the creative use of a range of Adobe applications such as Photoshop, InDesign, XD and Adobe Spark.

Rashan Senanayake heads up Inspired Education Australia. He is a passionate advocate for good design and loves sharing the value of a range of Adobe tools with schools.

My job for this session was to beam in from Melbourne and run a 2hr session on Adobe Spark and XD.

A special thanks goes to St John’s Anglican College near Brisbane for hosting this event. By all accounts, the day was a great success.

Special thanks you to Rashan and his team for putting this together. I’m looking forward to the next one.