Catholic College Wodonga is a co-educational Catholic school in the north east of Victoria, near the border of NSW. On Friday 9th March, I had the pleasure of working with a number of students and teachers, sharing the value of Adobe tools to enhance creativity.

Adobe Campus Leader Lisa Mason, is the Year 10 Coordinator and Media teacher at this school. She ask me to work with some of her students throughout the day ans she organised a special presentation for interested students and staff.

If you are interested in joining Adobe’s global Education Leadership Program, apply to join the Adobe Campus Leaders Program via – https://edex.adobe.com/campus-leader

I had the pleasure of spending a day working with a group of senior secondary students from Wagga Wagga Christian College in NSW on Thursday 8th March, 2018.

A number of the students had been exposed to Adobe Premiere Pro and this day was an opportunity for them to develop their video editing skills to the next level.

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I was very impressed with the way the students picked up the skills & techniques so quickly and adapted them into a range of creative video stories.

Special thank you to David Crick who helped organise this incursion.

The Big Day In events for 2018 commenced in rural NSW at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga (CSU) last Wednesday 7th March.

About 600 students from around the NSW Riverina region (and beyond) listened to a wide range of presenters from the IT industry, all with a similar aim to encourage the young audience to consider a future in IT and develop their digital communication skills.

The BiG Day In is an IT careers conference designed by students for students. It is designed for both high school (Years 9-12) and University students interested in careers in technology and I have had the pleasure of being a regular presenter at these events throughout Australia over the past four years.

Special thanks to John Ridge and Kerrie Bisaro from the Australian Computer Society Foundation for the great work they do in managing the the Big Day In events.

The next event goes over two days in Sydney at UTS on 20th & 21st March.

One of my favourite Aussie rural cities is Wagga Wagga in southern NSW and on Tuesday 6th March, I had the pleasure of working with a number of Year 9, 10 & 11 students and teachers from Wagga Wagga High School.

Video production is now considered a standard digital literacy. Student who develop skills in video production give themselves an edge when it comes to branding themselves and enhancing their ability to communicate.

Adobe Premiere Pro is well recognized as an industry standard video editing tool. As part of the Adobe Creative Cloud, all NSW government schools get it for free (thanks to the NSW Department of Education).  It is always a pleasure to show students the potential of what they have and how it can make a difference for them.

Refugee connection

Wagga Wagga has been a refuge for many fleeing Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other war torn parts of the world. One of the classes I was teaching had two boys who had recently arrived from Iraq with their families as refugees. For these boys, it was the first time they had experienced the power and potential of digital video editing. Their faces glowed with amazement and in their broken English they expressed their thanks and gratitude at being introduced to a whole new way of communicating. Opportunities that many Australian students take for granted.

For students like these, having access to tools like Adobe Premiere Pro, Photoshop, InDesign etc opens up a whole world of possibilities that was previously hidden to them. This reinforces the decision made by the NSW Department of Education and the Victorian Department of Education & Training who central purchase the software allowing their students and teachers access without the schools having to budget for it.

The look on the faces of the refugee students as the realised they could manipulate video and tell a digitally creative story was priceless.

Working with the Wagga Wagga High Teachers

After school, the English department as well as a number of technology teachers joined in on a professional learning session based on multimodal text with adobe Spark.

Special thank you to Josh McKenzie – IST, Multimedia & VET Entertainment teacher at Wagga Wagga High for organising this day.

Last Wednesday 28th February, a number of teachers from NSW Government, Catholic & Independent schools visited the Adobe office in Darling Harbour for four hours of intensive digital creativity with Adobe tools.

Adobe Education Leaders Brett Kent and Chris Betcher helped out with this event by offering some great breakout workshops.

Brett Kent sharing his knowledge of Adobe Photoshop

Chris Betcher (right) sharing the benefits of Adobe Comp, Acrobat and InDesign

With the help of Brett & Chris, we were able to cover a wider range of Adobe tools including the three Adobe Spark tools, Photoshop, Adobe Comp, InDesign, Premiere Clip, Acrobat, Muse and Premiere Pro.

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Find out more and register for future NSW PL events via – http://bit.ly/adobeNSW17

A full list of all Adobe PL events (face to face and online) can be found via – http://bit.ly/adobeEDU-events

The Southbank campus of TAFE QLD was the venue for an Adobe professional learning event for Brisbane based educators on Tuesday 27th February, 2018.

This was the first of a series of events Adobe Education has planned for QLD educators. Click here to find out about future QLD events.

It was great to again work with Adobe Expert Richard Turner-Jones who ran a breakout session on Acrobat and InDesign.

Adobe Campus Leader, Juliette Bentley (left) also shared her time to run a breakout session on Adobe Spark.

Jason Lane (Adobe Campus Leader) also shared his passion for animation with a breakout workshop on Adobe Animate.

Special thank you to QLD Adobe education Leader Kev Lavery from TAFE QLD for helping to put this event together.

When Swinburne University in Melbourne advertised that I was running an Adobe Character Animator workshop, it filled up so fast there was a waiting list. So, on Thursday 22nd February, we ended up running two workshops with a total of over 50 lecturers from a variety of faculty areas throughout the University.

Adobe Character Animator allows users to manipulate a 2D digital puppet by tracking  facial movements via a webcam, thus providing real-time animation that can be recorded and used for a variety of purposes. Traditional digital animation is very time consuming with each movement needing to be manually key-framed in a timeline, as a result, not practical for most educators. Character Animator, which is now a fully fledged part of the Adobe Creative Cloud, provides the opportunity for all teachers to include small animations into their lessons to help engage their students.

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Students can also use Adobe Character Animator to help them present their learning and produce creative assessment options.

Special thank you to Linden Clark, the Project Coordinator at Swinburne’s Learning Transformations Unit for organising this event. The Learning Transformations Unit is responsible for resourcing and preparation Swinburne staff. Adobe has had a close relationship with the Swinburne Learning Transformations unit for a number of years and are proud to support their Digital Aquarium space.

If you are interested in finding out more about Adobe Professional Learning opportunities in Australasia go to the Coming Events Spark Page

Also, subscribe to my monthly newsletter on the Adobe Education Exchange

Northern Beaches Secondary College, Freshwater Senior Campus visited the Sydney Adobe Office on Friday 16th for an Adobe Day based on online production with Adobe Muse and Photoshop.

The theme for this day was preparing for the future workplace and the first activity was for the students to use Spark Post to list some job skills that will be valuable for them when they leave school.

Building on this theme, the students had a tour of the Adobe office and witnessed first hand a modern IT workplace in action. This was invaluable for a major industry study that they are all working on.

Back in the training room, the students were introduced to Adobe Muse as a way of building a website. They built their own sites and learned some techniques that will help them with a range of future assignments at school and beyond.

They also learned about the importance of compressing large images with Photoshop prior to adding them to a website.

A special thank you to their teacher Andrew Lai for organising this event. Andrew is part of the international Adobe Education Leaders program and a very strong advocate for the use of Adobe tools in education.

Thirty Year 12 students from St. Francis Xavier’s College, Hamilton traveled to Sydney from Newcastle to spend a day at the Adobe office focusing on enhancing their video production skills with Premiere Pro & After Effects.

An important part of the HSC for these students is a major industry study that features the use of a range of multimedia software. Not only were these students able to enhance their use of a range of Adobe products, they also had the opportunity to explore Adobe as a multi-national company with 55 offices all over the world.

We spent some time going through a range of video capture techniques and how they can be manipulated with Premiere Pro.

One of themes throughout the day was understanding what job skills will be most required in the future. The students were exposed to some recent research about the future workplace and then applied their newly found knowledge to a range of short Adobe Spark projects.

On Tuesday 13th February, group of Year 12 Media students from Mater Maria Catholic College in Sydney visited the Adobe Office in Darling Harbour for the first Adobe Day for 2018.

Part of the HSC Multimedia course involves doing an industry study and a major project that involves a range of digital technologies. The students worked on a range of techniques with Premiere Pro, Photoshop & After Effects to build a video story.

Stay tuned for a video story on CreateEdu TV about this day.