Adobe Education Leaders

For some time now I’ve been looking for ways to reduce the hard copy side of my administrative workload. Whilst the obvious solution had been staring me in the face for some time, oddly enough it was only on a whim some eight weeks ago that I stopped into Form Central and began to investigate how I might streamline attendance and truancy compliance, which in our school is a nightmarish entanglement of checks and crosschecks amongst databases that don’t often talk to each other all that well, followed by a paperchase involving hardcopy handling by at least four people with no means of monitoring who had done what with what and leaving no long term record of actions taken for myself.

I have to say that I could not believe how simple it was to put an extensive form together from scratch. Reformatting our current truancy form, testing, debugging it, and sending off the first form to the respective recipients took less than fifteen minutes. There were some initial glitches but these were ironed out quickly.

So fast forward several weeks and it’s everything from student surveys to gauge the effectiveness of programs to individualized data collection for students requiring Special Provisions for Preliminary and HSC exams. Next stop, trying to show those higher up the food chain just what it is they are missing out on.

In other news………

Today also marks the official launch of ALIEN, the Adobe Leaders Information Exchange Network. It is envisaged that this network will enable Adobe Education Leaders in both K-12 and Higher Ed to connect and share ideas, information, resources, post event notices, moderate discussion forums, create networks and groups, post and link to content, create individualized pages and blogs, stream WordPress, post appropriate photographic and video content, share thoughts on rainy afternoons in a secure environment and more. Given the wealth and diversity of experience amongst the AEL community it felt like the time was right to step up and get this happening and contribute to growing the connectivity in the community at no cost to the users.

So step on board, it should be a good journey.

To submit a request for membership simply sign up and provide a link to your AEL profile.

This is inspirational. Watch developer Jesse Warden build out a game in 12 hours using Flash Professional, Audition, Fireworks, Photoshop, and Sublime Text. He is using the Corona SDK for development targeting mobile.

It’s great to see that the Creative Suite workflow is applicable even when targeting something non-Adobe like Corona! The big take-away though is what can be accomplished in such a short amount of time. I’ve learned much from short game jams and such – students can gain lots of experience across applications doing the same. Game development is a great way to teach workflow and get students familiar with the tools and platforms.

I built a Memory game (like Simon Says) in Corona SDK in 12 hours over Memorial Day weekend, recorded it, and compressed it to 7 minutes here. I used Adobe Flash, Fireworks, and Photoshop to do the artwork, Audition to do the audio, and Sublime Text 2 to code the Lua in with Ansca Mobile’s Corona SDK. I use Tower to check the code into Github.

If you want to get involved immediately – join the One Game A Month initiative! You don’t have to make anything complex… just hone your skills by building simple concept games. That’s what I’m doing. I know there are a few other AELs who have joined #1GAM / #OneGameAMonth as well – be heard in the comments and tell everyone how useful an effort like this is!

It’s easy to get started.

Imagine a situation where you finally have something you and others have yearned for for years and yet it has now become common and people have become blasé about it. You struggle to get everyone excited about it, to find it relevant to their work and daily lives, to take advantage of it. No, I’m not talking about the right to vote in the US. I’m talking about Adobe’s great tools and technologies.

After years of conversations and negotiations my institution, Indiana University (IU), signed an Enterprise License Agreement (ELA) with Adobe giving our students, faculty and staff access to Creative Suite, Captivate, Lightroom and others. At first they melted the wires downloading it, but now it’s become commonplace. Sure the Fine Arts, Journalism and IST students are still in hog heaven, but what about the Business or Chemistry students? How can we make it relevant to them? Think of how well Mendeleev could have presented the Periodic Table if he’d been able to throw together a mock-up in Fireworks. And imagine how much more accessible E=mc2 would have been to the average reader if Einstein could have added an Edge animation to his landmark “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” paper.

How can we broaden the conversation about Adobe tools? How do we get our entire school populations to think outside of the creativity box? This software is not just about makin’ thangs purty. This software helps us express ideas – sometime simple, sometimes complex. It should be an arrow in our communications quiver. We need to help our communities screw in and turn on the lightbulbs of inspiration. These tools are for everyone.

How. Do. We. Do. This?

First, we need be sure the tools are up to it. Are they simple enough to use? DW has a nice drop-down list to change the layouts. Can you make a “for dummies” layout that gives you just the essentials and removes the finery? if Adobe can simplify the UI for the touch apps, why can’t they give us an option for a simplified UI in the desktop apps. Sure, we want to power, but only when we need it. The rest of the time we want simplicity. Imagine Steve Jobs designing an SUV. It would be able to 4-wheel up the mountain when necessary, but the rest of the time it would be a car simple enough for anyone to drive to the grocery store. Can we get reach those heights of UI simplicity for PS or IA?

Second, we need someone – the community? Adobe? – to examine the WHOLE education space, not just when the teacher is in the classroom with the students, and develop relevant examples to seemingly mundane activities for all to see. Adobe Connect for office hours? Not really flexing the muscles of the product, but it is simple, relevant and gets people using the tool. A time-lapse profit chart in a Business student’s company case-study report? It will not only blow away his professor, but it will give the student a deeper understanding of the content. It might even be their gateway drug to other CS apps… The list goes on.

I have the greatest respect for those who work and teach in the visual and creative arts. I am envious of their talents. However it is far too easy for the Adobe Creative Wow Factor, exemplified by their work and the praise it justifiably receives, to so dominate the conversation. It can seem unattainable to and shut down the imaginations of those who exercise less artistic pursuits.

We need inspiration. We need examples. We need to show a broad spectrum of use cases from across the academic spectrum. Adobe tools for the poets and scientists! Adobe tools for music and pre-med! Adobe tools for the researchers! Adobe tools for the secretaries! If the tools can be used by everyone (jury is still out on that question), then lets show everyone using them.

This may not seem relevant to you. You may be in a school where getting the software is a struggle. It was a struggle for us too. That’s why keeping it, by showing its ROI, is so important.

Stand up and be counted! Share your thoughts.

In New South Wales, Australia; students who study art in their senior high school years have the opportunity to have their assessment submissions displayed at a number of prestigious galleries, notably the New South Wales Art Gallery and other galleries such as the Armory at Newington, Hazelhurst Gallery, Newcastle Art Gallery, University of Western Sydney, Wollongong City Gallery to name a few. The exhibitions are chosen from selections of works that were at the top range of the marking scale. Students whose works were pre-selected are then placed into a pool of works from which gallery curators make their selections. The Arts, and in this case Visual Arts are a valued part of the educational curriculum in NSW. Out of the approximately 80,000 students that sat for this years HSC (Higher School Certificate) 10,000 or so chose Visual Art as one of their HSC subjects and submitted Bodies of Work as part of their assessment. Of those 10,000 about 200 were chosen to have their works exhibited across a number of Galleries and exhibition spaces in Metropolitan Sydney and regional NSW. There isn’t anything comparable to it anywhere else in Australia or on the planet. This is certainly a model for Art education that should be looked at seriously by any country that wants to give their high school students a rich and immersive experience in Visual Art. As an art educator and an AEL it’s so pleasing to be a part of this extraordinary process and; last but not least, spot where Photoshop and Illustrator feature in the student works.

“ARTEXPRESS is an exhibition of bodies of work by secondary school students submitted for the Higher School Certificate examination in Visual Arts in New South Wales, Australia” @Board of Studies NSW.

View my post at R.E.W.I.R.E.D

Images courtesy of ArtExpress @ Art Gallery of NSW

ADAA 2011 Finalists

I strongly suggest that if you are interested in digital artistry (including; installations, app development, browser-based design, mobile, animation, game design, print, et cetera) you head over and check out the Adobe Design Achievement Awards finalists for 2011.

You can read about each finalist, view team members, see samples of the work, and even comment or share via social media. Really amazing work from people all over the globe can be seen over at http://www.adaagallery.com/.

Plus, if you want to attend the awards ceremony in Taipei, there is an open invitation this year!

Earlier this year we decided to upgrade our two Mac Pro editing suites with Mercury Playback Engines. I had been impressed with the demos I’d seen at the AEL Summer School and set about trying to source two NVIDIA Quadro’s. After trying for 3 months to get a price out of NVIDIA and many fruitless e-mails we bought directly from Apple. The difference has been staggering, after a slight issue installing the cards they have worked faultlessly and have handled everything we have thrown at them.

Perhaps the most remarkable project was last July, I designed an installation for the BA(Hons) Digital Media Production course end of year show. I wanted 24 iMacs synced together running video showreels of our graduates work. This was going to be quite a tall order as all the videos would have to be edited frame accurately and all be exactly the same length. I wanted to put in our course logo and branding, synced to appear at the same time at regular intervals. 24 iMacs were chosen so that we could actually spell out he name of the course 1 letter at at time on each screen. Each video was 15 minutes in length and featured 3 students short videos with motion graphics in between. How to edit them in Premiere Pro was a bit of a nightmare to work out, but eventually we came up with the solution of setting up 24 layers of video and turning on and off the layers that required rendering for each movie. We could sync up the motion graphics across all layers and drop the videos in between. We had 24 separate videos to render, each one took about 7 minutes and we were able to set up batch renders of all 24 movies movies together in Media Encoder. The edits, encoding and syncing were performed by our Tech Demonstrator Jason Watkins. The Mercury Playback Engine worked perfectly with no errors at all and apart from a bit of tweaking to get the right combination of videos it couldn’t have gone smoother.

The only problem was then how to sync 24 Macs? Fortunately we had been researching this area for some time and managed to sync 4 Macs for another project a while ago using Max MSP. This led us to an application called MultiScreener, this small application is loaded on to each machine and one machine is set to the master clock, all the others are set as slaves and immediately lock on to the signal generated by the first machine. All the machines are connected by network hubs daisy chained together.

When we set up the installation there was a little trepidation because of the time spent editing and rendering the 24 videos but the whole show ran perfectly. The show ran for 9 days without a hitch with several thousand people viewing the final piece, we received excellent feedback.

The syncing was the easy bit but with out the Mercury Playback Engines I don’t think we would have been able to edit so many videos so accurately. Our Mac Pros have been given a new lease of life and we have managed to achieve solutions that we had never considered feasible before.

You can see a video of the installation here:
Showreel

Normally a school’s connection with the wider world via the internet is primarily a receive model – great volumes of information demanding a faster internet connection with all of the associated filtering issues this brings. Sometimes a school will want to reverse that and start to broadcast - sometimes not to broadcast to the whole world, but to its own students, staff and the wider school community. My first experience of this came via something we called PuppyCam – a primary school teacher had a dog which was due to have a litter of puppies and she wanted the pupils in school to be able to see them in class. All that was required was a laptop near the litter, a webcam to peek over the edge of their box and a connection to our Buckinghamshire Adobe Connect server, and we were in business. A blog post more than three years old (slightly younger than the puppies in question) gives a little more information on PuppyCam…

This spring a similar situation occurred in a school that didn’t take the initiative and ask – but on learning about the surprise Spring project for Year 2 pupils (aged 6-7) it seemed to me that our Connect server was again the answer. The Spring project was a delivery of an incubator with eggs in it – eggs which would shortly hatch into chicks, which would remain in the classroom for two weeks in total. The suggestion of broadcasting the incubator via Connect so that the pupils could watch them hatch in case the chicks decided to arrive outside school hours was taken up by the school, but there was a problem: no webcam. A cursory glance around the classroom showed an Avermedia Visualiser (document camera) which turned out to communicate just fine with Flash Player, and could therefore be used as the camera via which any activitiy in the incubator could be broadcast. Continue reading…

Adobe has a new all-in-one content creation and publishing tool parked in a cloud.  Project ROME is revolutionary and a true paradigm shift for content creation and publishing applications.   ROME can be run as an Adobe Air application or accessed directly from a light-weight internet cloud (browser-based web application).  The application is light-weight, but incredibility rich and diverse as a creation tool.  Adobe has extracted some of the best tools from various Adobe applications like Flash, Premiere, InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator and suspended them into a one-stop creative experience for the end-user.  Join the new and growing cultural revolution for creative educators!   Project ROME can be run from a simple Netbook laptop to a high performance desktop computer, the choice is yours.  Project ROME is available through Adobe Labs probably for a limited time.  I would encourage all educators to sign-in and reach for the stars, pushing the boundaries of the creative process.

Project ROME for Education - http://rome.adobe.com/education (For educator evaluation only)

Project Rome For Education Pilot Program – Institutions interested in a pilot, apply today

Project ROME - http://rome.adobe.com

Dave Forrester

Adobe Education Leader

3 years back, I was working in a training firm and I was running around Singapore to conduct various trainings on Adobe’s products to local schools from the Primary – College schools. I’ve seen some awesome capabilities of some students who totally excel and rock in specific areas. (Animations, Videos & Web)
Today, I’m featuring one of my ex student from Ngee Ann Secondary School and Temasek Junior College. He’s Tan Kang Soon and he excels in animation and not just using Adobe Flash’s tools to create Motion Tween but Frame-by-Frame Animation (Here is something about frame-by-frame animation: http://animation.about.com/od/flashanimationtutorials/ss/flash29walkcycl.htm) . His capability to draw using just the mouse and visualizing how the character’s movement will be is totally FANTASTIC and I would say his works produced are pretty much on par with a few from the professional industry.
I’ve recently caught up with him and here are some of his works that he has created and all of which are his personal rendition of the characters in the animation created with Adobe Flash.

So how do you find his work? Pretty Cool eh? Enjoy and will be putting up the next post soon. Cheers