@ADOBEUK

We’ve had a couple of weeks now to catch our breath since we launched Creative Cloud and Creative Suite 6 at the end of April. We’ve had such a great response from everyone about the new products that it’s definitely made all the hard work worth it.

Now we’re excited to announce that Creative Cloud is available as of today (11^th May), and follows the shipping of Creative Suite 6 earlier this week (7th May). Our industry standard products are available to buy just as they ever were as individual point products or as a collection (Design Standard, Design & Web Premium, Production Premium and the Master Collection).

But for the first time, we’re also giving our customers a radical new way to access our tools and services through Creative Cloud, a membership based offering in which you get the complete Creative Suite 6 – including the likes of Photoshop, Premiere Pro, InDesign, After Effects, Flash Pro, Illustrator and Dreamweaver.

As well as the CS6 product line, with Creative Cloud you also get Adobe Muse, our new visual web design tool, and Edge, the HTML5 animation app. To this, we added a lot of services including Business Catalyst for web hosting, Typekit for fonts, and up to 20 gigabytes of cloud storage for syncing and sharing your files. Soon, we’ll also add access to our iPad publishing service for making digital editions of content such as magazines via InDesign.

Perhaps most exciting of all is that you get all this at a great price – £38.11 (ex VAT) per month based on an annual subscription). There’s also a special introductory offer for existing CS3, CS4, CS5 and CS5.5 customers who can access Creative Cloud at £22.23 (ex VAT)!

We could wax lyrical about this all day, so if you want to find out more, then check out Adobe TV to find out more about our new product portfolio.

We’ve been tempting you with sneak peeks for the last few weeks and today we made the exciting announcement that the Adobe® Creative Cloud™ Student and Teacher Edition, and Adobe Creative Suite® 6 will be available for institutions, educators and students next month!

This new release comes with supporting educational resources designed to schools and colleges to enhance their classes and better prepare students for the workplace.

We are extremely excited about this new release which we consider to be groundbreaking. More than 100 education institutions worldwide participated in the beta programme for CS6 and Creative Cloud – here’s what some of our UK Adobe Education Leaders have to say;

“Adobe CS6 is a revolutionary product release that gives me and my students the opportunity to create real-world projects with tools that are, quite simply, the best in the world. Having access to these products means my students are a step ahead of most of their peers when they start their careers. With the economy still recovering from recession and the demands on today’s workforce so great, it is imperative that young people have experience in using technology in order to succeed. These tools are an important part of that. For my students to have the same power at their fingertips as real producers creating major motion pictures is truly amazing.”

                Renaldo Lawrence, Advanced Skills teacher, St. John the Baptist School

 “Adobe Creative Suite 6 has evolved to the next level and will empower my students to be even more creative. The whole suite has become much more integrated, so experience in one programme will now make it much easier for myself and my students to use the entire suite. The Adobe Touch Apps and the Creative Cloud means my students can now use a tablet as a great prototyping tool. They can design and plan on their tablet, then upload to the Creative Cloud, and in an instant their design appears in Dreamweaver for additional coding and development. Brilliant!”

Andrew Field, Head of ICT, Neale-Wade Community College

 The Student and Teacher Edition of Adobe Creative Cloud will be available for £18.26 (ex VAT) per month based on annual membership. For information on Adobe licensing go to www.adobe.com/uk/aboutadobe/volumelicensing/education.

For more detailed information about educational upgrade policies and pricing, as well as the full portfolio of suites, please visit www.adobe.com/uk/education.edu.html.

I have always been a firm believer that students should be encouraged to be as creative as possible and know that using digital tools in the classroom is a sure fire way to stimulate this in a fun and engaging way.  At Neale-Wade Community College we teach digital creativity skills from animation, to image manipulation to web and games design and the results have been truly stunning.

 A product which I am hugely passionate about teaching is industry-standard animation software Adobe Flash.  Not just because it enables students to create some great animation, but also because of how engaged they are in it and the creative potential it allows them to explore. I have seen students become enthusiastic and excited about ICT who previously didn’t give it a second thought and the great news for us as a school is that our ICT grades have really improved as a result!

 One way I encourage creativity in my classes is to set a brief which is open-ended, so students can experiment with the tools and techniques and take it in any direction they want.  For example one project I have set at GCSE level is to design a 30 second pizza advert using animation, sound and graphics. The brief was deliberately vague, which really paid off as the adverts produced were all individual in style and incredibly creative – I may be biased, but I honestly believe they could easily be the product of a world class advertising agency!

 I would urge any teacher keen to explore iOS, Android and desktop app and computing development to focus time and energy on Adobe Flash... To hear more about how you can use Flash to enliven the school curriculum and see some practical examples of what we’ve done at my school watch this short presentation: http://eseminars.emea.acrobat.com/p88305918/

I could talk all day about the importance of digital skills in education. So am really excited around the increased focus on encouraging students to design apps for smart phones as part of the digital-economy drive. It’s a great example of the way perspectives are changing. We’re moving away from just using computer-assisted instruction to improve student test scores, and more towards exploring how technology skills actually help students succeed in the real world.

The unprecedented speed at which mobile and tablet devices are evolving is just mind blowing, as is the rate at which the integration of these technologies into everyday life and the workplace is happening. So it’s hugely important that schools mirror this. The digital creative skills that are essential to these industries should be a key part of preparing our young people for College, University and later on, their careers.

As a teacher, there’s nothing I love more than seeing my students have fun in the classroom. I get great pleasure in seeing them excel of course, but if they are passionate and can have fun whilst doing it, that’s even better. Integrating these sorts of digital tools into everyday lessons, means they do just that.

Renaldo Lawrence is an Adobe Education Leader, to find out more about this “quiet revolutionary” check out his profile on Merlin John Online: http://agent4change.net/innovators/864-the-innovators-24-renaldo-lawrence.html

I’ve been an Art teacher for many years now, and have seen the subject change almost beyond recognition from when I first started teaching. Students now have video, web and image editing tools as well as oils, watercolours and acrylics at their disposal to tell stories and express their creativity. And the results are, quite frankly, awe-inspiring.

At my own school, we introduced digital tools to the core Art curriculum to give our students the best learning experience and early access to tools that they will be required to use when they start their careers. And we get them started young; we have students as young as eight using the likes of Adobe Flash, Dreamweaver, Premiere and Photoshop.

I tend to set open briefs for my students – firstly to give them the freedom to experiment with different digital tools, and secondly to prepare them for working life when, at some point or another, they will be faced with having to respond to a brief that requires them to problem solve and recommend a solution.

Contemporary artists are doing wonderful things integrating digital tools with traditional art materials, and this is something I try and reflect in my lessons, letting students use the media they best respond to. For one project, my class of seven year olds painted insects they saw on a trip to the Natural History Museum and then used Adobe Flash to transform those painting into animations of their bugs scurrying over a grassy background.

Some of the work my students are producing thanks to these tools is truly outstanding – check it out here http://www.artatsidcot.org/  I’ve also created a Photoshop Pingpong! teaching resource on the Adobe Education Exchange www.adobe.com/go/aeeuk which you may find useful for your school.