The beautiful Vivanta by Taj resort in Sri Lanka was the venue for the fourth and final Adobe Education Leaders Seminar for 2016. This was was very well organised by the Indian Adobe Education team who invited me to present along side some of India’s top Higher Education leaders.

Sand projection art

This event brought India’s eminent thought leaders, industry professionals and education leaders together to connect as a community and share best practices on how institutions are catalysing creativity and embracing digital transformation in the classroom.

The welcome reception event was a great opportunity to meet the delegates.

Meeting Shigeru Aoyagi – Director & UNESCO Representative to Bhutan, India, Maldives & Sri Lanka

Meeting Baljeet Singh Juneja (Adobe Solutions Consultant) and Student rep Shrenik Ganatra

The next day was packed with customer presentations and Adobe sessions. I was very impressed with the passion these India education leaders had for enhancing ICT and Creativity opportunities for their students.

Kulmeet Bawa, Adobe’s Managing Director for South Asia welcomed the delegates and set the scene for a day packed with information and inspiration about how and why Adobe’s set of industry based creativity, document and marketing tools can be (and are being) used to enhance education in India.

Mr Shigeru Aoyagi, from UNESCO shared a range of education initiatives and gave us some international reflections on how digital technologies are impacting education.

Mr Suhas Bendre, Director – Creative Design at Cognizant shared how educational institutes need to evolve with the times otherwise risk becoming irrelevant.

I was most impressed with Professor Mangala Sundar from IIT who showed a wide range of examples of how Adobe tools are being used to enhance the teaching of Medicine, Mathematics, Chemistry and Physics through animation, image manipulation and video.

Roychand Chenraj Jain, Chairman of the JGI Group spoke about the secret art of entrepreneurship.

Another special highlight for me was listening to Indian/US student Shrenik Ganatra, previous finalist of the Adobe Design Achievement Awards, share his passion for the use of Adobe tools in his design work and studies.

It was a privilege for me to share some of the research Adobe and others have been doing on how best to prepare young people for the future workplace.

My colleague Baljeet Singh Juneja (Indian based Adobe Solution Consultant) did a number of demonstrations on the power of Adobe tools, including how to convert a paper based university admissions form into an interactive digital document that can be completed via a laptop, desktop, tablet or phone via Acrobat Pro and the Adobe Document Cloud.

Mrs Garima Babbar, Adobe’s ‎Head Strategic Alliances – Education and Skill Development for India, hosted a distinguished panel including Dr Sandhya Chintala (VP & Executive Director at NASSCOM) Professor Ashok Kolaskar (VC of The Neotia University), Professor Ashoke Sarkar (Director of BITS Pilani) , as well as Adobe’s own Sunil Mohapatra (Director, Digital Media Sales).

The Adobe Team for this event

I would particularly like to congratulate Sudhish Sitaram (Adobe Marketing Specialist) for the work that he and his team did putting this event together. This image above is both of us standing at the entrance of the Gala Dinner which was also a highlight.

It was delightful to reunite with members of the Western Australian Adobe Education Leadership Community (left to right – Darren Smith, Petra Trinke, Drew Mayhills, Chris Schnell & Me) at a special Adobe in Education event hosted by North Metropolitan TAFE on Monday 13th June.

About 50 WA teachers from a wide range of education sectors registered for a range of workshops including:

• Adobe Spark – (making the most of some of Adobe’s free apps)
• Using Adobe Acrobat Pro to save time in the classroom
• Working with Adobe Captivate 9 to build great online learning activities
• Using Photoshop and After Effects to turn a 2D photo  into a 3D parallax image

My resources for this event can be found on the Adobe Education Exchange via: bit.ly/adobe-13June16

My final Big Day In event for 2016 was in Brisbane at The University of Queensland on Wednesday 8th June.

About 500 QLD students from a wide range of schools listened to representatives from a wide range of IT companies. I particularly enjoyed hearing from Anna Emmerson, Site Reliability Engineer at Google. A local girl, studying at St Peter’s in Brisbane and UQ, Anna was able to encourage the students (especially the girls) to work hard so that they too can potentially work at a company like Google.

It was great having Richard Turner-Jones with me for this event. His demos were very popular.

Richard Turner-Jones (Adobe Solution Consultant based in Brisbane) and I had the pleasure of running a series of workshops for students and teachers at Marymount College on Queensland’s beautiful Gold Coast.

Richard focused on Adobe animation solutions, including the new Character Animator product which came with the 2015 version of After Effects. This software became world famous a few weeks ago when the makers of The Simpsons used it to go live to air in the US at the end of an episode. Click here to find out more.

I showed the students a mix of the Adobe Spark tools, Photoshop & Premiere Pro.

In the afternoon, after school, a number of teachers from the Gold Coast region as well as teachers from Marymount College came together to meet with Richard & myself for a professional learning session on Adobe tools in the classroom.

It was great catching up with Rose Duggan (AEL) and two of her colleagues from Merrimac State High School.

Special thank you to Katrina Nicholson from Marymount College for organising this great day of Adobe in Education activities.

On Saturday 4th June I had the pleasure of presenting at Bradfield Senior College’s Creative Careers Day which was part of the 2016 Vivid light, Music & Ideas festival in Sydney.

Finishing a recorded panel session to a live audience at the start of the event.

Meredith Melville-Jones (Director of Bradfield College) and her team have set up this event to provide an opportunity for students  to connect with experts from the creative industry to discover where the jobs are, what skills are needed and valued and the steps they should take to forge a creative career.

After being part of the Human Library, where I was placed in a room and participants could come and ask questions, I ran a workshop titled Video Literacy. This involved having small groups of participants produce a video story about the event using Adobe Premiere Clip.

Premiere Clip is great because it is available for both iOS & Android devices and it’s really simple to used as a tool to film and editing a short video story.  Here is a sample of what one of the groups achieved in just 15 minutes of filming and editing …

http://premiereclip.adobe.com/videos/7oC7aCTDZ_v

It was delightful to meet with about 300 students in our Nation’s capital today at the 2016 Canberra Big Day In at the University of Canberra.

Designed by students for students, The BiG Day In is a series of IT careers events throughout Australia, sponsored by Adobe.

Throughout this year, there have been eight events so far with two more to come. By the end of this year a total of 161 speakers, 165 exhibitors & 69 organisations will have been involved in delivering events nationally involving over 6,500 students exploring careers in technology.

It was great to hear from Professor Lawrence Prachett, Dean of Faculty of Business, Government & Law at the University of Canberra, welcome the students to his university.

Mrs Meegan Fitzharris, ACT Minister for Higher Education, Research & Training also spoke to the students and encouraged them to consider ICT as a career and studying at one of the great universities in ACT.

It was a pleasure assisting two of South Australia’s most active Adobe Campus Leaders Lorraine Nitschke  and Giovanna Iannicelli in the running of the 2016 BETA (Business & Enterprise Teachers Association) Conference in Adelaide on Saturday 28th May.

About 70 teachers from Adelaide, and as far away as Coober Pedy, spent the day at the wonderful Next Generation centre which is part of the Adelaide Oval complex.

It was a pleasure to do the keynote session titled Creativity in Education is no longer an option, it’s an absolute necessity.

I also ran a workshop on Photoshop Tips & Tricks and another one on Adobe InDesign.

Resources that I shared at this event can be found on the Adobe Education Exchange via: bit.ly/adobe-beta16

Ben Forta’s finished off his tour of Australia for this year in Brisbane by spending a day with Queensland teachers and students at Clayfield College on Monday 16th May.

We began by spending some time with a group of Year 9 Clayfield students. Ben introduced them to ProjectM (Adobe Spark) and we enjoyed seeing what the girls were are to produce with these digital storytelling tools.

Later in the afternoon, a number of teachers from Clayfield and from around Brisbane joined us for a special professional learning event.

Special thank you to Clayfield College, especially Andrew Russell (Head of Technology) for helping to make this day a great success.

DATTA Vic is Victoria’s teacher professional association for Design & Technology subjects and Ben Forta and I were invited to take part in their conference this year on Friday 13th May.

Ben keynoted the first day of the conference with a great presentation titled The Case for Creativity in the Classroom.

I ran three workshops for theses Design & Technology teachers on Flipped Learning, ePortfolios and a overview of the Adobe Creative Cloud. Resources from both Ben’s keynote and my workshops are available on the Adobn Education Exchange via http://bit.ly/adobe-dattavic16

Ben Forta (Adobe’s Senior Director, Education Initiatives) and I visited Chifley College Senior Campus in Sydney’s west on May 12th, 2016.

The aim of the day was to enhance the student’s video editing skills with Premiere Pro CC. So we used the opportunity of Ben’s visit to Australia for the students to interview him and produce some stories about what was then ProjectM and what is now Adobe Spark.

Here is a video produced by one of the production crews and edited by Casey who had never use Premiere Pro before this opportunity.

Ben Forta at Chifley College, NSW from CreateEDU TV on Vimeo.

Here are some images of the students in action …

Planning their video story

Capturing their footage & still images

Filming the software in action

Interviewing Ben

Editing with Premiere Pro

Ben and I were very impressed with the work achieved by these students, most of whom had never use Premiere Pro before.

Special thanks to Chifley College teacher Andrew O’Brien for organising this special opportunity for his students.