The Reflection Journal of Adobe Train the Trainer Programme 2017

Week 1

As part of creativity, I believe there must be a culture to embrace failure. because it is the essence of what human beings are all about. Giving learners the chance and opportunity to fail is a way of improving and making themselves even stronger and better. Because the GenZ students would have to embrace an unknown future, with collaboration, they'll just be a lot stronger together!

Lesson Plan

I think my lesson plan is going to center on using Adobe Spark for faculty members in my institution, how to make snapshots of learning in videos, posters or pages. This is to summarise the student's learning and make it more effective for retention.

Weekly Reflection and Creation with Photoshop and Illustrator

Weekly Reflection: It was interesting to consider the choice of failure in my context. As I been through quite a rough ride in my post graduate recently. I was expecting much more than whatever grade that I received, but things such as Ken Robinson helped me embrace creativity in education again.

Week 2

Re-sharing from somebody who posted this on the facebook group

Weekly reflection (Week 2)

If I discuss about constructivism as one of the critical components for creativity, If we are able to observe and mimic the experiences of learning and doing. The incorporation of constructivism guides learners to create schematic diagrams and meanings of concepts through an internalisation process. Creativity is best at work when the person is in flow, also known as the zone, is the mental state of operation performing the task and in complete control of it.

Lesson Plan

Building on the lesson plan last week, the lesson will require learners to take part in using the Adobe Spark software for faculty members. I was thinking of asking them to relate some of the important contents during revision classes. Also, to make faculty members create interactive pages/posters/videos for students to understand concepts easily. This is to help 21st century learners who are digital natives to understand contents more intuitively. They would also have to think about the resources they have to put online, and curate relevant ones in a single page.

As faculty members might cover a wide range of topics for a subject, it is important for a summary of what is learnt during the whole term is given to learners for better understanding of the topic. Each learner is able to create a roadmap or a summary of what is covered during the entire term for a module. There will be a lot of interaction between learners for them to figure out the correct way of doing things, and also to search for resources online to make the contents relevant.

The Badge Design

I was thinking of a prism as a provider for education. We go through a prism of global perspective to reach our final goal at the end of this course. Adobe will be the platform to provide us new insights and perspectives for deeper learning.

Week 3

Weekly reflection (Week 3)

Using Adobe software didn't felt particularly difficult as I been using it for quite a while. But I do admit I get a little rusty with some of the features on inDesign and had to recap some video tutorials available here and on YouTube.

This design allowed me to use simple elements such as shapes to introduce the concept of Adobe Spark to my faculty members. I use fonts that look different from the rest to attract the viewer's attention. The learning materials were really relevant to me this week, as I try to help myself into designing a poster that I could easily do on Illustrator, that would take me 1/2 the time. But the grit within me allowed me to pull it through with a simple design. It also allowed me to incorporate some elements and design from my work experiences to the poster. I would actually give it a 6/10 for my content and poster overall.The instruction this week was a helpful guideline for how to approach those lessons.

The inDesign Process

Lesson Design

Building from the previous 2 weeks of work on the lesson plan, I feel the important element is to make learning meaningful for the users. Therefore, I have decided to allow the lesson plan to have time for creativity and space. That is to think deeply about the lesson that they want to change and incorporate using Adobe Spark. I'll work on it further as I progress!

• Duration: 2 hours
• Audience: Faculty Members
• Date: 29 November 2017

Week 4

To begin, Adobe XD is a new tool that I've experienced through my years of using Adobe Products. It's almost 6 years now, I been very dependent on many of them these days for my work and personal things. One of the things I found amazing about Adobe XD was the ease of use. It took me some tutorials I viewed from Edex.Adobe and YouTube videos that I found. With some trial and error, i was able to overcome difficulties that I faced initially.

The XD Experience (A reflection)

I went through several tutorials to reach a working prototype with Adobe XD, it wasn't difficult, but some of the things I went through felt familiar to me. Best of all was seeing some examples made me tempted to follow and edit one based on it, but it didn't felt original in that manner. There were a ton of beautiful layouts that I could tap on. So in the end, I decided to fully try the entire experience myself. Have a go at it and tell me what you think about it. I used examples that I'm familiar with and tap on them to understand how should my design look like. I found it important in this week's lesson to have a reference point to understand design in a better and meaningful manner.

The Lesson Plan (Continuation)

This week's lesson allowed me to incorporate some elements of direct instruction into the lesson. It was important to note that direct instruction was important as a form of demonstration for the learners to experience the product(i.e. Adobe Spark). 15 minutes of guided practice with demonstration will be given to them. I found it necessary for learners to be comfortable with the tools through the guided practice, and facilitating them along the way as they edit their own customised spark page. So in summary for this week's update, here's what I've got:

1. Informing learners what Adobe Spark is all about
2. Let learners think about what Adobe Spark can offer in terms of assessment, pre-class assignments or off-class readings.
3. Create a standard page using Adobe Spark Page highlighting how learners can benefit from this tool.
4. Allow learners to tweak the page and suit it to their preference and use in their curriculum. This process will happen one step at a time, this is to allow both guided and independent practice to fall in place sequentially.

Week 5

Week 5 makes me revisit something that I do pretty often in my own time, where I create educational videos for faculty members to understand better. This is really exciting!

The Experience was 1/3 fun, 1/3 challenging, 1/3 creatively-challenged.

I did a storyboard to prepare myself for the video tutorial on Adobe Spark with QuickTime screen recording. Then, I went on to get some background music for the clip. I think I used a lot of cross-fading techniques in this tutorial, tried to do a bit of noise reduction (but failed big time). My voice was pretty monotone and soft. There were a lot of cropping and cutting of clips to reduce the length, that was pretty tough on my end.

All I can say is.. this is really crazy stuff. But overall, this was a great introduction to get me started on making video tutorials online.

Learning Paths in the Lesson Plan

Now then, I'll progress towards my lesson plan. This week, I'm thinking about how I can create group work by assigning faculty members who are doing the same subject area to come together to have an Adobe Spark page created. For example, it's like finance with finance, business with business faculty members,etc. They can explore new options together instead of following the conventional ideas. I'll issue a problem about the classroom problems. I'll let some of them share their ideas and how their Adobe Spark page looked like.

A rough lesson plan (Updated for Week 6)

• The importance of incorporating technology - 5 minutes
• Introduction to Adobe Spark - 5 minutes
• Peer Sharing - Sharing of the problem at hand and how is it going to be solved - 10 minutes
• Guided practice and demonstration of the Adobe Spark - 10 minutes
• Faculty members will share their ideas as they work collaboratively in pairs. How they can solve their class engagement through Adobe Spark - 30 minutes
• Think-Pair-Share - What are the things they have learnt using Adobe Spark?What are the affordances and constraints that the software has. - 10 minutes - 3 volunteers

Week 6

It's time to unleash the wentigo! This week I was meddling around (more seriously) with Adobe Character Animator and tinkering about how I can use this particular video for my future classes when I was teaching Adobe Spark. So there was this kid in me that wanted to try something funky, but I decided to go on 'reserve' mode. The media encoder felt like a big 'minus' point for videos to be converted, it made it slightly more difficult for my character animation to come alive on YouTube. I mean, practice makes perfect, and with more guided practice, I'm pretty sure I can come out with something soon!

The full video of messing around

Week 7

This week had me pondering what to say about creativity. There was a lot of editing to be done, removal of background noise as I realise it was pretty noisy as I recorded the stuff. Nevertheless, it was a fun experience doing it. It reminded me about my experiences of editing interview videos, where I had to cut segments when necessary. It was valuable learning audition had so much to offer, yet I don't have the luxury or resources to try everything out.

I have also updated the lesson plan to prepare for the final touches on how Adobe Spark can be incorporated into the curriculum in higher education.

An example of how faculty members can use Adobe Spark to tell stories, experiences and concepts to the students in their classrooms, regardless of whether it is during class time or outside class time.

Example 1: About Willpower

Example 2: About Gratitude

Week 8

The entire experience thus far

Preparing for unexpected areas are expected when conducting training. I feel that there's more than just technical errors/glitches that can occur during training. Some human errors can occur too. At times, I find myself confused at what I am teaching. It even gets worse when I'm teaching all my learners the wrong approach. So preparations was one of my key takeaways in this week's session. It is to help me alleviate the stress that may occur if I am not prepared. 8 weeks of intensive work on the various Adobe tools that could be incorporated into classroom for teaching and learning purposes. Some of the tools were so familiar to me, as though I was using it just yesterday. Some of them felt so alien to me, there was a struggle for me for areas such as (Adobe XD and Character Animator). Overcoming some of these made me a more competent person in using the Adobe software. Moments of creativity and looking at Ken Robinson on his aspects of creativity and education, it was enlightening and fruitful. Gathering perspectives from different Adobe educators has helped me understood education from a global perspective and recognizing different challenges that may surface along the way.

Updated Lesson Plan

My lesson plan has been updated to be more detailed and descriptive, following the template that was provided in the earlier weeks(Week 3). There were some significant changes that I made based on feedback from the peers at Edex (thank you for that!). I want to be certain that faculty members in my institution are able to use the relevant resources from adobe Spark appropriately. I don't want them to concentrate too much and rely on technology tools, but I want them to be aware that these contexts can be transferred over different sets of tools as we progress through he technology advancements.