I had the great pleasure to again be a judge at the Melbourne edition of the Young ICT Explorers competition.

Young ICT Explorers is a non-profit competition created by SAP the global market leader in enterprise application software. The aim of the competition is to encourage school students from Years 3 to 12 to create their best Information and Communication Technology (ICT) related projects.

The competition’s aligns nicely with the new Digital Technologies curriculum and enables students to apply what they learn at school to develop a technology related project of their choice. Students have the opportunity to present their project to a judging panel of academia and ICT industry professionals who make a judgement on the bases of creativity, uniqueness, quality, level of difficulty and project documentation.

It is so inspiring to see what these talented young students have been able to achieve as they have developed their coding skills. As I said to the audience of students, parents, teachers, judges and competition organisers, the future of the world is in great hands with this inspiring young people.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Close to 500 teachers attended the 2017 Ignite, Innovate, Integrate ICT Conference in Melbourne on Friday 11^th August.

This is very much an event run by teachers for teacher through the initiative of the leadership of Kingswood Primary School in Dingley Village.

I ran three Adobe workshops throughout the event featuring a range of video tools such as Premiere Clip and Premiere Pro. I also ran a workshop on Flipped Learning that featured the use of Adobe Presenter Video Express and the very popular Adobe Spark products.

It was great to see Victorian Adobe Education Leader and Media Arts teacher Joel Aarons also running three workshops with a string Adobe focus.

A highlight for me was reconnecting with Hugh van Cuylenburg from The Resilience Project. Hugh was the School Captain of Carey Grammar School when I was there as a teacher. He is now a well-known former educator and motivational speaker. Following post graduate studies into mental health and resilience, Hugh has developed and facilitated programs for schools a wide range of corporate and sporting organisations including the Australian cricket team and 11 AFL sides.

Hugh van Cuylenburg – Keynote presenter

 Another highlight was hearing from Dr Karl Kruszelnicki. Dr Karl is the Julius Sumner Miller Fellow at Sydney University, where his ‘mission’ is to spread the good word about science and its benefits. He has degrees in Physics, Maths, Biomedical Engineering, Medicine and Surgery and has worked as a physicist, tutor, filmmaker, car mechanic, labourer, and medical doctor at The Children’s Hospital in Sydney.

Dr Karl Kruszelnicki – Keynote presenter

Another highlight for me was awarding a 12-month Adobe Creative Cloud licence to Rachel Bryant, a teacher from Willmott Park Primary School in Craigieburn, Melbourne.

Congratulations Rachel

Special thank you to the team from Kingswood Primary who have been running this very impressive event now for 6 years. I’m looking forward to next year.

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 …