To cap off an exciting week for Adobe in Education, on Friday 5th October about 16 participants from the 2018 ACCE Conference chose to take part in the Adobe Masterclass Post-Conference event at the Adobe Sydney office.

Craig Daalmeijer-Power (Adobe Canopus Leader) from TAFE NSW and Rob Hurley (Adobe Campus Leader) from Ballarat Grammar helped me run this event.

Craig Daalmeijer-Power

Rob Hurley

Craig, Rob and I ran a series of workshop electives based on the needs and wants of the participants. We covered a wide range of Adobe related topics such as …

• Photoshop tips & tricks for teachers
• Real time animation with Adobe Character Animator
• Working with the free Adobe Spark tools
• Publication with Adobe InDesign
• Simple animation with Adobe Animate
• Multimodal Text with Adobe Spark
• Video production with Adobe Premiere Pro (Beginners and Advanced sessions)

The Royal Randwick Racecourse in Sydney was the venue for the 2018 Australian Council for Computers in Education (ACCE) Conference in Sydney on October 2-5. Adobe was proud to be an affiliate partner for this event and we invited participants from the Adobe Education Summit to be join in.

The ACCE Conference happens every two years in Australia and is hosted by one the state based ICT in Education groups. This year, it was hosted by ICTENSW.

The opening keynote presenter this year was Professor Tim Bell from the University of Canterbury in Christchurch New Zealand.

Professor Bell is well known for his Computer Science Unplugged programme which has been very popular among international mathematics and computer science educators since it was launched in the early 1990s.

Brett Salakas from MLC (Sydney) & Zeina Chalich also keynoted the topic Power up your PLN, sharing the value of the #aussieED network via Twitter

Adobe had a dedicated workshop/presentation space for the conference. Chris Woldhuis (Adobe Education Leader) and Assistant Principal at Northern Beaches Christian School ran a session about multi-camera editing with Adobe Premiere Pro.

Max Schleser (Adobe Education Leader) and lecturer at Swinburne University ran a session about virtual reality & 360 video with Adobe Premiere Pro.

Ross Johnson (Adobe Education Leader) and NSW DoE teacher, presented about doing assessment with Adobe Acrobat DC titled Maximise your feedback with Acrobat.

Clara Galan & I were given the opportunity to do one of the closing keynotes which we titled – Preparing students for the automated workplace

The next day, Brett Kent (Adobe Education Leader and NSW DoE teacher) and I ran a series of workshops including …

• Making Photoshop puppets come alive with Adobe Character Animator
• Make digital posters and turn them into simple videos with the free Adobe Spark Apps
• Digital portfolios with Adobe Spark Page and Spark Video
• Teaching mathematics through animation with Adobe Animate

All my resources for the ACCE Conference can be found on the Adobe Education Exchange via – http://bit.ly/adobe-ACCE18

The APAC Adobe Education Summit is one of three major worldwide events run by Adobe to support the work of their Adobe Education Leaders (AELs) and Adobe Campus Leaders (ACLs) around the world.

Check the recordings of the Creative Catalyst Talks from this event.

This year’s APAC summit was held on October 1 & 2 at the Adobe office in Sydney. It began with a delightful opening reception dinner event featuring a whisky tasting & history lesson from whisky chieftain Juliette Bentley.

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The next morning saw the start of a big day of learning activities and fun which began with presentation from the Global Adobe in Education team. Clara Galan flew in from San Francisco to be with us and Tacy Trowbridge and Matt Niemitz joined us live from the US.

Click here to see Clara’s presentation – Adobe Education Programs overview

Click here to see Tacy’s presentation – Adobe Edu Worldwide Overview

Click here to see Matt’s presentation – Adobe Education Exchange Update

Creative Catalyst Talks

We then enjoyed a series of outstanding short Creative Catalyst Talks about a wide range of education topics.

Max Schleser, Adobe Education Leader from Swinburne University in Melbourne presented the topic Cinematic VR & 360˚ video production.

Craig Daalmeijer-Power, Adobe Campus Leader from TAFE NSW presented the topic Drones, AR, VR, AI, What’s Next?

Sjaani van den Berg, Adobe Education Trainer presented Buzz Words, are we teaching to these standards?

Heath Henwood, Adobe Campus Leader from Rockhampton, QLD presented Transforming students through connecting technology and relationships

Brett Kent, Adobe Education Leader from the NSW Department of Education presented Education strikes again

Kev Lavery, Adobe Education Leader from TAFE QLD presented Essential Graphics & End Screens

We were very pleased to welcome Seiko Koike, Adobe’s Education Marketing Manager for Japan to this Summit and enjoyed her presentation titled Emerging CPS in Japanese Education

Joel Aarons, Adobe Education Leader from the Victorian Department of Education and Training presented Lessons Learned and Lessons Taught – Media Arts in Primary School

Juliette Bentley, Adobe Campus Leader from Mt St Michael’s College in QLD presented Making Sparks Fly

to be continued …

Clara Galan (from San Francisco) is Adobe’s Global Community Lead for K-12 and Higher Education and she has made her first trip to Australia this week for the Adobe APAC Education Summit and the ACCE Conference.

She has meet with a number of key Adobe education customers while in Sydney and earlier today I took her to the wonderful Pymble Ladies College where she was interviewed by the Kim Maksimovic and Anthony England for a series of podcasts they are doing on women in leadership.

Clara is looking forward to meeting about 30 Adobe Education Leaders and Adobe Campus Leaders from around Australia at the Adobe Sydney office next week.

Make sure you tune in live on Tuesday Oct 2 at 9AM AEST to hear from Clara as well as a great set of  Creative Catalyst Talks at the APAC Adobe Education Summit. Click here to download the PDF flyer.

On Wednesday 19th September, I had the great pleasure to meet Adobe Sr. Solutions Architect John Penn II who presented at RMIT in Melbourne. Following being part of the Photoshop product team for a number of years, John developed a passion for how Photoshop can help law enforcement solve crimes. He approached the Adobe CEO with a request to focus full time on this passion and he now dedicates his work to helping law enforcement solve cases with digital imaging technology.

John has helped investigators all over the world solve crimes with the aid of image manipulation. He has a particular passion for working with investigators who focus on crimes against children.

Click here to see a special Adobe blog highlighting his work.

Swinburne University invited me to run a Photoshop workshop for teaching & admin staff on Monday September 17.

About 30 registered for this event and most were new to Photoshop, or only had a rudimentary understanding.

We went through a range of simple (and some more advanced) techniques that are practical for an education context.

All my resources for this event can be found via – bit.ly/adobe17Sept18

Special thank you to Sofia Ridwan, Swinburne’s Manager, Collaboration and Partnerships for her help is making this event happen.

Following a wonderful Adobe Day with a number of Year 7 & 8 students from Nerang State High School, about 30 teachers from 13 Gold Coast schools took part in an Adobe professional learning event on Thursday September 13.

The highlight of this event for me, was having five local Adobe Education/Campus Leaders run workshop options.

Lucy Carr, Adobe Campus Leader and media teacher at Miami SHS ran a workshop titled Premiere Pro beginners workshop: getting to know the interface and editing essentials. Lucy is also the State Conference Convener for ATOM QLD.

Kesh Chinia, Adobe Campus Leader and Senior Digital Solutions Teacher at The Southport School, ran a workshop titled Going to the next level of image manipulation with Photoshop.

Stephen Henderson, Adobe Campus Leader and computer science teacher at Somerset College, ran a workshop titled How to integrate Adobe into Assessment.

Damien Airey, Adobe Campus Leader and English teacher at the host school ran a workshop titled Flipped Learning with Adobe Presenter.

Rose Duggan, Adobe Education Leader and English teacher from Merrimac SHS ran an Adobe Spark workshop.

I am looking forward to returning back to this spectacular part of Australia to see how these teachers will be creatively applying the skills they learned during this event.

The resources I shared for this event can be found on the Adobe Education Exchange via – http://bit.ly/adobe-GoldCoast18

Nerang State High School, near the Queensland Gold Coast, was the venue for a day of digital creativity and professional learning.

The day began with a selection of about 60 of Nerang’s most talented Year 7s & 8s gathering together to enhance their digital literacy skills with Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Pro.

Two not-for-profit organisations,  AWLQ (Animal Welfare League QLD) and LIVIN (a mental health awareness group) were chosen for the students to use as the stimulus for a range of digital posters and videos made with Adobe Creative Cloud applications.

Katheryn from AWLQ brought in two dogs and spoke to half of the students.

In a relatively short amount of time, the students produced a wide range of creative digital assets for both organisations.

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Ben and Josh (Year 8) decided that they wanted to interview Katheryn. They began by filming with an iPhone from a distance of about 3m away. I told them that they were too far away to capture good audio and provided them with one of my wireless microphones and a camera to use. I encourage them to use a range of angles and they produced a great short interview good enough for TV with just a brief intro on how to use Premiere Pro.

Special thank you to Adobe Campus Leader and English Teacher Damien Airey at Nerang State High School for organizing this day and inviting me to be involved.

It was a pleasure to visit the Mooloolaba campus of TAFE QLD last week to share some recent Adobe applications and updates.

Most of the students and teachers who attended this session were from Gaming and IT courses. They were all experienced and, in many cases, very passionate Adobe users.

My resources for this event can be found on the Adobe Education Exchange via – http://bit.ly/adobe-11Sept18

Queensland’s first Adobe Mini Creative Jam was held on Monday 10^th September at Griffith University, Southbank campus in Brisbane. This was a collaboration between Griffith University, Queensland University of Technology and TAFE QLD.

The aim of this event was to help the students improve (and show off ) their digital creativity skills with Adobe’s Creative Cloud tools.

Over 30 students registered for this event which involved the students working in teams to create digital assist for a not-for-profit charity fundraising campaign. For this event, we asked YGAP to brief the students about the Polished Man Campaign.

The students then formed groups and had about 3 hours to build their assets in preparation for a showcase judging session. They were encouraged to make any of the following assets with the time & skills they had available – video, animation, poster, flyer, banner, mobile app, website, spark page, podcast.

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The judging panel for the showcase was made up of representatives from Griffith Uni, QUT, TAFE QLD and Adobe. Each group/student shared what they had produced and pitched how the assist/s could be used by YGAP for future Polished Man campaigns.

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Congratulations to the following winners of a12 month Adobe CC Licence (retail value of about $900)

Levi Miller & Aidan Gorman from Griffth University (Gold Coast Campus) as well as Arnn Baet from Queensland University of Technology.

Special thank you to Professor Ming Cheung (Head of Design at Griffith) and Daniel Della-Bosca for their support in hosting and judging this event.

Also thank you to Kev Lavery (AEL TAFE QLD), Richard Turner-Jones (Adobe expert), Manuela Taboada (QUT) and Amrita Deshpande (Adobe Education Trainer) for their support in judging and helping to make this event a success.