On Monday 8th July, Orminston College near Brisbane, QLD invited me to do a book launch event. Fortunately, my book The Best Way to Learn is to Make became available via Amazon the day prior.

Brett Salakas, the founder of Mammoth Learning and the Education Ambassador for HP, helped me with the launch as did my friend (and former Adobe Colleague) Richard Turner-Jones.

What wasn’t expected is when Brett Salakas announced that the book hit best seller status for the Computers & Technology in Education category within Amazon just prior to this event.

Part of the launch involved doing a word cloud activity based on what are the most important skills that we should foster in the young people in our care. This is looked at in chapter 3 titled Why Creativity is Important in Education.

Then we did a poll based on this statement – The recent Gen AI evolution is one of the best things to happen to education since the invention of the Internet. 1 = strongly disagree, 2 disagree, 3 not sure, 4 agree, 5 strongly agree.

This lead to a session from Brett focused on the current Gen AI evolution and how it relates to education.

Richard shared how he has been using the AI & Gen AI tools within Adobe Express to link his PhD research at Griffith University with a project he is doing with school students in Far North Queensland. He showed how simple it was for him to build a short animated video and a webpage using Adobe Express. The teachers were then asked to play with various aspects of Adobe Express and challenged how they could use it in their classrooms.

The launch event was completed with a look at Chapter 7 of my book which is focused on the work of Professor Seymour Papert and his Constructionist learning theory.

I would like to thank Craig Askin​​​​ the Head of Learning & Innovation at Orminston for organising this special event for his staff on their first day of Term 3, 2024.

Click here for the resource guild created for this launch event.

If you are interested in organising a similar event for your school, contact me via LinkedIn.