From the tranquility of Asilomar, the AEC Summit re-located to the creative activity of the Adobe office in San Francisco.

The final few hours of the Adobe Education Community Leadership Summit were spent with a wide selection of Adobe’s various product teams. The AELs had the rare privileged of interacting with Adobe employees who have direct input on the features of Adobe products. It was great to see the how enthusiastic the various product team members were to get feedback from these outstanding educators.

Our final day at Asilomar was spent working in groups to come up with ideas on how we can further enhance and grow the wider Adobe Education Community and encourage a stronger emphasis on creativity in education throughout our networks.

We collectivity came up with so many great initiatives and committed to supporting each other in this important work.

Tomorrow, the Adobe Education Leaders have been invited to the Adobe San Francisco office to meet with a wide range of Adobe Product team members. They will hear the latest news about their favourite Adobe software and pass on information from an educators perspective. This will be a great way to finish off what has been a really successful Adobe Education Community Leadership Summit in North America.

Saturday July 18 was Day 2 of the Adobe Education Community Leadership Summit in Asilomar, California.

This day was dedicated to enjoying some outstanding Creative Catalyst talks by a group of very talented educators who shared bits of their story and their passion.

The rest of the day involved generating ideas on how to build the Adobe Education Community and leverage the leadership talent at the conference.

The first of a series of three Adobe Education Community Leadership Summits commenced today (Friday July 17) at Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove, California.

About 40 Adobe Education Leaders are meeting this weekend from around the USA, Canada, UK and the Netherlands. In September, AELs from around the Asia Pacific region are meeting in Sydney for a similar event and in October, the European Summit is being held in Rotterdam.

It has been great catching up with so many on the wonderful educators who are instrumental parts of Adobe Education Leader community. I’m looking forward to sharing with and learning from this dynamic group of passionate educators over the next couple of days.

On Wednesday July 15, I had the pleasure of visiting the 2015 iD Tech Camp for girls called Alexa Cafe at Palo Alto High School in California.

Alexa Cafe is a summer camp for girls aged 10 to 15 with a focus on coding, web design, visual design and video production. I spent some time doing video interviews with instructors and students in three of the camps. One was based on video production with Adobe Premier Pro and the other two were focused on web design and image manipulation with Adobe Muse, Lightroom and Photoshop.

Alexa Cafe girls working with Adobe Premier Pro

Image manipulation with Adobe Photoshop

With an emphasises on entrepreneurship, leadership, brand identity, and philanthropy, each Alexa Cafe project is based on a social movement. The videos were focused on bullying and the website projects were telling a range of important stories on a variety of issues that were important to the girls.

Stay tuned for a video about this year’s visit. Here is the one I did with Mick McHugh at last year’s camp as seen on Adobe CreateEdu TV …

[vimeo:https://vimeo.com/104794703%5D

Here is a story from the QLD local news paper TheSatellite about a recent Adobe Day at Forest Lake State High School …

Not so sure about the best tech guru line in the opening paragraph.

I’m looking forward to going back to Forest Lake State High again in August.

Here is my blog post from that day.

• Teachers – have a look at the education professional learning opportunities available via the Adobe Education Exchange?

Over the past week, I had the pleasure of attending the student showcase events for the first ever Australian versions of the Adobe Youth Voices (AYV) Program.

• Victoria event – June 19 – ACMI (Melbourne)
• NSW event – June 26 – Quakers Hill High School

It was a joy to see the video work that a large number of Victorian and NSW State School students created for the AYV program. AYV is about giving students a voice and providing them with the software and skills to collaborate and communicate their stories creatively.

Special thank you to the Victorian Department of Education, the NSW Department of Education and Communities and iEarn Australia for their partnership with this program.

Stay tuned for a CreatEDU TV story about the showcase events and links to the best of the students work.

• Quaker’s Hill High School students fine tuning their video skills at the Adobe Sydney office

Special congratulations to Kyle Falzon from Central Institute of Technology, Western Australia for winning the 2015 Australian Adobe Certified Associate (ACA) National Championships.

Kyle will be representing Australia in the 2015 ACA World Championships to be held in Dallas Texas in August.

Special thank you to XCERIO Digital Skills Institute, Adobe’s certification partner, for organising this year’s competition.

Click here to find out more about being certified in Adobe software and potentially being involved in the 2016 ACA championships.

• Check Adobe Learn & Support for help with over 100 Adobe products ?

It was a pleasure to visit Adelaide again to run a range of Adobe in Education workshops with a wide range of South Australian educators.

On Tuesday June 16, I ran two workshops with Catholic Education South Australia. These were based on developing multimodal text skills with a range of Adobe software including Adobe Voice, Presenter, Muse, Clip, Premier Pro, Acrobat Pro and Adobe Slate.

The teachers worked well with a partner to produce some very creative stories with Adobe Voice and Premier Clip.

On the afternoon of Wednesday June 17, I had the pleasure of running an Adobe Photoshop workshop with about 30 South Australian State, Catholic & Independent school teachers at Cedar College in Adelaide’s northern suburbs. This was organised by the Business & Enterprise Teachers Association of South Australia.

We went through a range of Photoshop techniques such as shake reduction, Save for Web, Batch Resize, Content Aware Fill, Filter Gallery, Puppet Warp and others. I also ran some short demonstrations on how manipulation images with Photoshop can be published with Adobe Voice & Adobe Slate.

Special thank you to Lorraine Nitschke (Adobe Campus Leader) for organising this event.

• Have a look at the education professional learning opportunities available via the Adobe Education Exchange?

About 350 students and about 30 teachers from around the Australian Capital Territory braved the cold and made their way to The University of Canberra for the Big Day In event on Thursday June 11.

This event was opened by former Labor Senator The Hon Kate Lundy who inspired the students to keep developing their ICT & Media skills for not only their future, but also the future of the country.

Lawrence Crumpton from Microsoft was the first keynote and was spell binding as he talked about the history of computing and outlined some of the amazing research and development that is happening at Microsoft.

Me & Lawrence

For this event, I invited Sian Beadle (Adobe Student Rep at Canberra Uni) to join me on stage to give her perspective as a young designer just about to hit the workforce after studying at Canberra University.

It was a pleasure to meet and speak to so many young people who are in the last years of  secondary schooling about to go into further study &/or work.

Cheryl White from XCERIO looked after the Adobe stand and promoted Adobe Certification to the students, teachers and local Canberra University staff and students.

Sian, Me & Cheryl

Of course a trip to Canberra is never complete without a visit to Parliament House. This trip was extra special as Cheryl and I also had a meeting in The Hon Mr Pyne’s office (Federal Minster of Education).

Other Big Day In posts …

• Gold Coast
• Sydney, NSW – UTS
• Wagga Wagga, NSW – CSU
• Newcastle, NSW – University of Newcastle
• Perth, WA – Perth Town Hall