Surrounded by stunning bush scenery and vineyards, Eltham College is a beautiful school of about 800 students in Melbourne’s North-East. I had the pleasure to spend Friday Aug 15 with a number of the students and the staff to encourage their use of a range of Adobe applications.

I began the day with a room full of creative Year 8&9 students who all have access to the full Adobe Creative Cloud suite of software on their laptops. Most of them were not  aware of the power of what they had and when I showed them Character Animator, the energy and excitement in the room was palatable. When I showed them the power and simplicity of Premiere Rush, the energy lifted even more with great anticipation about future assessment tasks and simple fun with video.

The next session was with all the Year 7 students and the focus was Adobe Spark. Some of the students had experience working with Spark before in primary school so it was great to get their testimonials prior to jumping into some Spark activities.

I gave them the challenge to work with a partner and create a video about their passions. The results were funny, informative and creative.

The final student session was with all the Year 5 & 6 students and the focus was again Adobe Spark.

From 4PM to 6.30PM, Eltham College kindly hosted an Inject Creativity into the Curriculum event which  involved about 30 staff from the school and a group of teachers from around the region. I was most impressed that the first staff member to arrive and the last  to leave was the school Principal Simon Le Plastrier.

Special thank you to Adobe Campus Leader Paul Cifone for organising this Adobe Day at his amazing school.

I had the great pleasure to spend the afternoon of Tuesday August 12 with a group of Year 9 students as well as the whole staff from Melbourne Girls College.

The student session was based on a Design Thinking Challenge based on using the three Adobe Spark tools to create a webpage, posters & a video about how the students would make the world s better place if they were in charge of the country for a day.

After school, the whole staff community filed into the library for a special Inject Creativity into the Curriculum with Adobe session.

We began with a demonstration on how Adobe Character Animator can be used to help engage students.

Following a demo on Adobe Spark video, the teachers were asked to pair up and create a Spark Video story about their passions. The results were very impressive considering they only had 10 minutes to make the clip.

The remaining time involved a short demo of Spark Post, Spark Page and Premiere Rush. The premium version of Spark, Rush and the full 2019 Adobe Creative Cloud applications are gradually being deployed as part of a new agreement into all Victorian Government Secondary Schools.

The main message from this event was that …

Adobe is no longer just about the high-end professional tools used in Arts, IT and Media programs.

There are a growing range apps from Adobe like Spark and Rush that can be easily used by any educators in any curriculum area.

I’m looking forward to sharing this message to Victorian Department of Education school across the state as we further develop our active use program throughout the region.

Special thank you to Wendy Keen and the team at Melbourne Girls College for inviting me to be part of their community for this event.

It has been amazing to have Dr Todd Taylor and Sebastian Distefano from the Adobe World Wide Higher Education Development team in Australia this week.

Today, the team worked with about 40 educators and support staff from Victoria University in Melbourne.

Following over 20 years as a Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Dr Taylor is now working for Adobe as the Senior Strategic Development Manager for Higher Education.

Today’s session was focused on working with Spark Page, Premiere Rush and Adobe Audition. Dr Taylor is passionate about encouraging students and teachers to learn and teach with multi-modal methods. He has many years of experience working with educators and encouraging them to develop their digital literacy skills.

The big challenge he posed at the start of this session was to encourage the educators to allow students to work with Adobe Spark as an assessment option and then compare the results. He is confident that students will want to continue working with Spark over tradition word processing and slide tools that they have been using for years.

Have a look at this video from Dr Taylor’s formal university and note the way Adobe tools are integrated into all facilities as an essential assessment and productivity tool.

On Thursday August 8, a group of talented Year 11 media students from The Ponds High School visited the Adobe Sydney office for an Adobe Day based on video editing with Premiere Pro.

The Ponds High School is a new NSW DoE school in the north-west of Sydney that opened in 2015 and these Year 11 students will be the first to graduate at the end of 2020.

After a tour of the office, the students enhanced and developed their video editing skills by creating a story based on footage that was provided to them as well as green screen footage that they captured.

They learned all the basic Premiere Pro fundamentals and created a range of very creative video stories.

I’d like to thank educator Liz Rose (Head Teacher TAS) for organising this excursion for her students. Liz recently became an Adobe Campus Leader which involved being an active member of the Adobe Education Exchange.

Stay tuned for a video story about this event coming soon to CreateEdu TV.

One of the highlights of Education Week with for the NSW Department of Education is The Game Changer Challenge and it was a pleasure for Adobe to again be involved.

About 100 NSW DoE schools entered the 2019 Challenge and 18 primary & secondary school groups from all over NSW were selected to take part.

Schools involved were …

This year’s Challenge was How might we humanise technology?

The Challenge commenced on Tuesday 6th August at Google HQ in Pyrmont Sydney where the students and teachers were welcomed by Melanie Silva, Managing Director, Google ANZ as well as the NSW Minister for Education Hon Sarah Mitchell MLC and then had the opportunity to listen to a panel of expertise moderated by the Secretary of the NSW Department of Education Mark Scott.

The experts

• Scientia Professor Toby Walsh, University of NSW
• Distinguished Professor Mary-Anne Williams, University of Sydney
• Dr Matt Beard, The Ethics Centre
• Jillian Kilby, CEO and founder The Infrastructure Collaborative
• Lloyd Godson, Hastings Secondary College Marine Studies Centre
• Lee Hickin, National TechnologyOfficer Microsoft Australia

Hon Sarah Mitchell with the expert panelists

Following the panel session, the students met with an amazing group of facilitators who guided them through the challenge which involved using a design thinking approach to solving a problem focused on the  theme of humanising technology.

At the end of Day 1, all the students were bused to Parramatta where they had the amazing opportunity to stay at the Parkroyal Hotel ready for Day two at the NSW Department of Education Building on Phillip St, Parramatta.

Day 2

Day 2 of the Challenge involved dividing teh student groups up to take part in a range of workshop events including an Adobe workshop that I ran on Character Animator for the secondary students and an Adobe Spark workshop for the primary students run by Andrew Balzer from the T4L team at the NSW DoE.

Other workshops included sessions from Microsoft, Google, The University of Sydney, the Stem.T4L team at the NSW DoE as well as a how to design a pitch session buy the amazing story teller and poet Miles Merrill.

The students were all encouraged to take back what they learned from the workshops to their group with the aim of using their new skills and knowledge to help with their solution pitch on Day 3.

Makerspace

Following the workshops, the students met back with their groups to work on their solution pitch as part of a large makerspace session.

It was a pleasure to be involved with this event again and it is always a joy to see students collaborating, problem solving, designing and creating.

...this is what school should be like all the time.

In an interview I did with a teacher for a video story about this event (stay tuned to CreateEdu TV), a teacher said to me that this is what school should be like all the time. Great engagement, amazing creativity, so much learning and a wonderful way to help prepare these future leaders to help solve some of the big problems the world is (and will be facing) in the near future.

On Friday August 2, Over 60 NSW and other Aussie educators from K12 & Higher Ed visited Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Adobe for a day focused on Artificial Intelligence and its impact on Education. This event was run by the NSW Department of Education T4L team and was sponsored by Intel. It was a wonderful example of how education and industry can work together to share and learn from each other.

Education leaders from the following schools, universities & organisations took part:

• Wollongong Catholic Education Office
• Department of Education NSW
• Macquarie University
• The Media Lab
• Aurora College
• CSIRO Education and Outreach (Digital Careers)
• Association of Independent Schools of South Australia
• University of Newcastle
• Robert Townson High School
• HETI higher education
• ACARA
• Sylvania Heights PS
• University of New South Wales
• Mayfield West Demonstration School
• Ravenswood School for Girls
• Killara High School
• #aussieED
• Catalyst Lab Innovation Program
• Transport for NSW
• Dept of Education Victoria
• UniSA
• Roseville College
• Australian Academy of Science
• University of Technology Sydney
• LCT Centre for Knowledge-Building, University of Sydney
• Intel
• University of Wollongong
• Forestville Public School
• University of Newcastle
• Gradient Institute
• Google
• Microsoft
• Amazon

The Adobe part of the day was run by Jamie Ragen (Adobe – Manager Solution Consulting, Digial Media) and myself. The main focus of our presentation was the use of AI in Adobe applications. Adobe’s AI engine is called Adobe Sensei.

Jamie ran through a number of demonstrations of Adobe Sensei in action within Photoshop, Premiere Pro, XD, Rush and other Adobe apps and I helped to put these into an education context.

It was a pleasure to host so many education influencers in the one space.

Special thanks to my friend Jo Cohen and the team at NSW DoE T4L for coordinating this amazing day.

This week, hundreds of TAFE NSW students graduated from a wide range of certificate courses related to Creative Industries. It was a pleasure for Jerry Wong and me to represent Adobe at the ceremonies held at the Nepean Campus in Kingswood and the Cambelltown Campous.

Michael Cullen, Regional General Manager for TAFE NSW and George Verghese, Head of Skills Team for Creative and Design ideation both presented inspiring messages of congratulations to the graduating students and their families.

It was great to catch up with Adobe Education Leader Craig Daalmeijer-Power who is the Head Teacher at Nepean Arts & Design Centre for TAFE NSW.

Congratulations to all the graduating students, especially those who were the first in their families to receive a formal certificate qualification. The work that TAFE NSW is doing in Western Sydeny to help provide employment and training opportunities is outstanding. It is always inspiring to see our students are improving their lives and the lives of people around them with digital creativity skills and the use of Adobe products.