I had the pleasure of doing an Adobe Day with the Year 6 classes at Kardinia International College in Geelong, Victoria on Monday 25th March, 2024.

Kardinia is an IB school, which means it follows the International Baccalaureate curriculum. The PYP (Primary Years Program) focuses on nurturing young minds through inquiry-based learning, encouraging students to explore, question, and understand the world around them. Critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration and creativity is at the heart of Kardina and all of these skills were on display during this Adobe Day.

The aim of this Adobe Day was to have the students work in small groups to create a 1-minute promotional video for one of the United Nations Sustainability Development Goals using Adobe Express.

Rather than filming individual students, the groups were asked to use the Animate from audio feature within Adobe Express to get digital puppets to do the bulk of the presenting.

I was very impressed with how the groups worked so well together to get the project completed in time for the showcase at the end of the day. It was obvious that the Kardina teachers had spent a lot of time and care teaching the student how to collaborate and problem solve.

Each group created a script for their production then proceeded to record each section of the script using an Adobe Express character. Then they worked through the process of adding video content, still images, music as well as other elements found within the Adobe Express access to the K-12 friendly version of Adobe Stock.

Considering the students has not used Adobe Express before, what they produced in such a short time frame was outstanding. Have a looks at some of the samples below.

After school, all the Junior School staff as well as some members of the Senior School joined me for a professional learning session focused on getting to know some of the tools they had within the Adobe Creative Cloud set of applications, with a focus on Adobe Express.

Feedback highlights included:

• Being able to play and trial things ourselves during the session.
• Staff engagement
• How engaging the presenter was and incorporating staff in the presentation.
• Creating after each demo.
• Hands on learning
• Learning about Adobe Express and all of its incredible potential for our students
• Adding music to the video
• The free pens for volunteering
• The ease with which backgrounds could be removed and film making
• Watching students engage with the product and share their knowledge
• Getting up and having a go. Helps me connect to how children might feel when using something new.
• Learning about character animator as I can see where it can be applied for year 10 media immediately.

Other comments:

• Great session.. have ideas forming for curriculum content.
• I would love to learn more specific to my learning age group
• Thanks for an amazing day Tim!

I would like to thank Aisha Kristiansen (Head of Innovation & Technology K-12), Matt Baron (Head of Junior School) and all the Year 6 teachers for helping to make this day such a success.

Have a look at some samples of what the students produced …

This year’s two 2024 Sydney Big Day In events involved over 1000 students from a wide range of NSW schools on March 20 & 21 at University of Technology Sydney (UTS).

The Big Day In is a series of events around the country run by the Australian Computer Society Foundation that encourage students to consider a career in STEM.

I had the privilege of being the opening keynote presenter for both days and sharing some of the research around the skills that are required to thrive and establish a career in STEM and many other industry areas. We also ran a special Adobe Express activity that involved the students creating an image with the Gen AI Adobe Firefly capabilities of their dream job.

Professor Vicki Chen, Provost & Senior Vice-President, UTS and Dr Ian Oppermann, Industry Professor both set the scene and welcomed the students on both days. Other key presenters included:

• Valessa Basic (Australian Signals Directorate)
• Naomi Perera (Google)
• Mark Flanagan (Animal Logic)
• Aeesha Bello, Holly Craig & Jack McCowan (Wisetech Global)
• Dan Bowen (Microsoft)
• Lieutenant Bridget Free (Defence Force Recruiting)
  

More information about day 1 can be found here and day 2 here.

I would like to thank my colleagues on the ANZ Adobe Edu Team Kaitlin Hartley and Molly Turner for helping me at the Adobe stand and being such great photographers.

On Wednesday, 13 March 2024, I had the pleasure of running an Adobe Day, as well as an Adobe Creative Educator level 1 course to the students and teaches at Matthew Flinders Anglican College on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia.

The school provides the Adobe Creative Cloud set of applications to its students and teachers, so it was a delight to be able to share the value of these tools and how they can be used to enhance teaching and learning.

Many students showed keen interest in Adobe Express, a user-friendly browser-based tool for designing videos, animations, and more. Throughout the day, I collaborated with various classes, seamlessly incorporating Adobe Express, Adobe Character Animator, and Photoshop into their ongoing projects. Witnessing the numerous “aha” moments among students as they discovered the creative potential of these tools was truly gratifying.

After school, I ran the Adobe Creative Educator level 1 course with about 36 Teacher. This course is a mix of the theory of why creativity is important in education as well as some practical applications using Adobe Express.

According to the feedback, highlights of this session included:

• Everything
• Learning about the 4 C’s of creativity, the ease of using Adobe Express
• Animation and AI aspects of Adobe
• Realising how much the students can create through this. And also making me realise how much I want to get creative myself.
• Voice to animation
• Others coming up and doing some things – hilarious
• All of it!
• Learning creativity
• Great presentation – thank you so much for coming in person.
• Understanding the types of creativity and the hands on nature of creativity the webpage.
• Creating a webpage
• Using AI to create
• The highlight of the event was looking at the credentials of an image, in particular where the image is being created from and the date of its origin.
• Sharing links

Other comments

• Fabulous
• Engaging and feeling inspired
• Loved today’s session. Can’t wait to implement some of these things into the classroom
• I enjoyed the networking with other Adobe creative educators.

I would like to thank, Chris Topp (Technology Services and Innovation Manager) and his team organising this special day at his school.

On Tuesday, 12th March, I had the pleasure of being the opening keynote speaker at the Big Day In event on the Sunshine Coast.

Hosted by the Australian Computer Society Foundation, the Big Day In is a series of events around Australia to encourage students to consider a future career in the Information Technology industry.

About 400 students from a range of Queensland schools were involved in this event.

This year, Data#3 is helping Adobe with a number of Big Day in events around Australia. It was lovely to have Isabel Grisales from Data#3 support the Adobe stand and promote a special activity where students were encouraged to use Adobe Express to depict their dream job.

Here are a couple of the images they came up with …