The Northern Territory Parliament House in Darwin was again the host venue for Skills 2021, a special all-day event run by the Northern Territory Department of Education. This year was bigger than ever, with about 1000 students from all over Darwin taking part in a wide range of hands one activities and presentations.

The aim of Skills2021 is to provide students with opportunities to learn about new technologies and future careers in our digital world. The event gives the technology sector opportunities to interact with schools and demonstrate their technologies and work to students.

Technologies on show this year included …

• NAO Robot
• Sphero Spark+
• Samsung VR Gear – Oculus
• Minecraft
• Strawbee
• Raspberry Pi
• The Adobe Spark tools and more …

The NT Minister for Education the Hon. Eva Lawler MLA visited the students in action and was interviewed by local Channel 9 & ABC News crews about the day.

Mark Christie, Director eLearning Systems at the NT Department of Education, started this event three years ago. He was praised by the Minister for his work and also interviewed.

It was lovely to meet with the Minister and see how passionate she is towards enhancing technology and creativity opportunities in her schools.

I enjoyed sharing the power of Adobe tools like Spark Post, Spark Video, Spark Page and others to a wide range of students, teachers and other visitors.

It was also wonderful to catch up with my friend Pip Cleaves who was running  activities for  Code Club Australia.

Here are a collection of images from the event …

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Special thank you to Mark Christie and his team for putting on another great Skills 2021 event.

Special congratulations to Western Australian Student Elliot Tawns who, overnight in California, was announced as the second place global winner of the Adobe Certified Associate (ACA) World Championships.

The ACA World Championship is a global competition run by Certiport who mange formal certification for Adobe, Microsoft, Autodesk and other software companies. The aim of the competition is to tests students’ design skills using Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.

More than 110,000 students entered worldwide, and 47 finalists came to California to compete in the world championships. Students are selected from those who have successfully completed an ACA certificate and then go on to win their regional competition. The regional winners are invited to represent their countries at the World Championship where they are asked to create a designated design project for a chosen nonprofit client chosen by Certiport.

At the age of 21, Elliot (from Shenton Park, West Australia) is studying Printing and Graphic Arts at North Metropolitan TAFE in Perth who have been very successful in the regional competition in recent years. Click here for an article written when Elliot won the national competition.

Click here to see samples of Elliot’s art via Instagram.

Click here if you are interested in finding out more about Adobe Certification for your students or staff.

On 2nd August 2017, I had the pleasure of meeting a working with all the teachers at Enfield Public School.

After watching me present at the Schools of the Future conference at the Opera House earlier in the year, Assistant Principal Grace Lattuca invited me to run this session with her teachers.

We focused on the Adobe Spark apps as well as Premiere Clip.

It was also a pleasure to introduce these teachers to the ongoing work of Seymour Papert through the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at MIT.

All my resources for this session are available on the Adobe Education Exchange via http://bit.ly/adobe-enfield17

Special thanks to Principal Mr Rick Daly and his team for inviting me.

Located on 20 hectors about 25 minutes north of the Sydney CBD, Pymble Ladies College is one of Sydney’s premiere girls schools.

I was invited by Kim Maksimovic, Pymble’s IT Integrator, to present a range of workshops on Adobe Spark, Photoshop, Muse and Premiere Pro to a number of the teaching staff from various faculties as well a group of keen students after school.

It was lovely to reconnect with Kim after working with her students and colleagues at her previous school, Roseville College in Sydney.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I first heard about Pymble Ladies College from my past Principal and mentor Dr Helen Hughes. Helen was Pymble’s Deputy Principal prior to moving to Melbourne to take on the role as Principal of Strathcona Baptist Girls Grammar School from 2000 to 2014. I had the please of working with Helen for 13 years.

Helen Hughes & Me at my farewell from Strathcona in 2013

The following video features interviews with participants and leaders of the 2017 DigiCon Conference which was held at ACU in Melbourne last week (July 27 & 28).

DigiCon is the pinnacle event for DLTV (Digital Learning & Teaching Victoria).

Special thanks to Brian Chau from Adobe for his filming and everyone who contributed to this video story.

It was great to have Adobe help sponsor the 2017 DLTV DigiCon Conference at the Australian Catholic University Melbourne campus.

About 350 teachers from around Victoria have registered for this two day event which was highlighted on the first day by keynote presentations by Tony Brandenburg and Bec Spink.

Tony Brandenburg

Bec Spink

There were a wide selection of workshops throughout the day, including one ran by Brian Chau and myself titled Turning STEM into STEAM.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I also had the pleasure of speaking at the networking event at the end of day 1.

It was a personal great plrasure to catch up with old friends from my time at DLTV & VITTA as the Vice President.

With Roland Gesthuizen & Donna Gron

Tony Brandenburg, Tony Jones, Ian Woodside, Paula Christophersen & Me – some Victorian ICT in Education history in this picture

Donna, Tony & Me

The Victorian Department of Education and Training have announced today that they are currently updating its eduSTAR Secondary School Software Suite to provide their secondary schools with access to a wide range of Adobe Creative Cloud software.

This also includes BYOD access for students to a wide range of Adobe’s design & web Creative Cloud applications.

This is a similar arrangement to what the NSW Department of Education have been providing their students and teachers and a wonderful opportunity for Vic Gov Schools.

More information on this and planned PL opportunities can be found via: http://bit.ly/cc-edustar

Please share this news with your Vic Gov Secondary Colleagues.

It has been just over a week now since the 2017 Adobe Education Leadership Community Nth American Summit commenced. I’m back in Australia, everyone else is back in their home states and countries but I suggest that we are all still living off the wonderful experience we enjoyed at the Adobe Head Office in San Jose, California.

This video, hosted by Remy Mansfield, summarises what we experienced. Please enjoy …

Day 2 of the 2017 Adobe Education Leadership Community Nth American Summit was packed with many great opportunities to learn and network.

The day began with an address my Mark Rupert, Senior Director – Adobe Education. Mark outlined some of Adobe’s current and future directions in the Education space. Both Mark, Remy Mansfield and Matt Niemitz confirmed Adobe’s commitment to the AEL program and thanked everyone for their commitment to help inspire and empower the next generation to be lifelong creators.

This was followed by a series of 5- minute presentations by AELs beginning with Andy Phelps’ session titled – Learn Production by Doing Production.

Judy Durkin did an Adobe Spark  session titled – Students Grade Students.

Penny Ann Dolin’s session was titled Learning to See Photographically.

Mark Martin’s session was titled Preparing Learners for Life Long Creativity

Ann Bown-Crawford did a presentation titled Student Voice + Digital Arts = Leadership/Social Change

Dan Armstrong’s session was titled Engaging with people to create positive change

Mark Shufflebottom did a session titled Quick tips to boost creativity in the classroom

Then we moved into the following Creative Classroom Workshops run by the AELs such as …

• Virtual Interviews: Comparing and Contrasting Communities through video (Meredith Blache and Kathryn Riley)

• Start Smart – Tips for a Successful InDesign Book Project (Kathy St. Amant)

• Focus on the Process (Kevin Brandon)

• The Energy Bus (Dan Armstrong)

• Cinematic Interactives with Animate CC (Joseph Labrecque)

• The Paradox of Purpose and Perfection (Rob Schwartz)

• Make it on Mobile: Concept idea using Mobile apps. Seamless collaboration (Chana Messer)

• Integrating VR / AR and next generation storytelling into your classroom

• 3D The New Future Of Digital Creativity (Stephen Burns)

• Personalized Learning in the Digital BioLab (Robert Simpson)

• Adobe XD: UI and UX Simplified (Matthijs Clasener)

• Curation, Collaboration, and Design (an SFMOMA/CAST Young Curators Project) – Jeff Larson

• Instructional Design and Creativity in Online Classrooms (Deila Bumgardner)

• Mobile Photography and Creativity on the Go (Nicole Dalesio)

Here are some images from the Summit dinner held at the The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose …

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

The 2017 Adobe EDU Leadership Community Summit started today at the Adobe Headquarters in San Jose, California.

About 40 AELs from the US, Canada, the UK and Europe as well as a large representation of  Adobe employees linked to education have registered to be part of this year’s Summit which has returned to San Jose.

Day 1 was about reuniting with the new look Adobe Mother Ship each other as well as meeting new members of the community through an optional maker-space event we called the Creative Recess. As you can see from this image below, we have a packed program ahead of us.

Enter a caption

One of the highlights was seeing vector images from Adobe Illustrator or Adobe Capture being converted into wooden carvings using a 3D Printer style drill box called a Carvey.

Another highlight was a seeing the sun go down during a BBQ outside the main Adobe Cafeteria area.

Here are some images of Day 1 …

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

We are all looking forward to the rest of the Summit.

#AEL17