Joe Dockery is an Adobe Education Leader and CTE Instructor at Mount Si High School in Snoqualmie, Washington. He teaches video production, computer animation, computer graphic design and web design. He primarily uses Camtasia Studio, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, and Adobe Photoshop in his classroom.

An Interview with Joe

Question: How has the learning curve in your classes increased since introducing video tutorials for class?

Answer: When I do technology staff development at conferences, I have a huge range of ability/experience levels in my workshops. There will be participants that have never used the software and people that teach it to others. Using video tutorials (produced by Camtasia Studio) allows me to effectively teach everyone in the workshop new material.

Another great part about it is that the learning doesn’t stop with the three hour workshop at the conference. Participants go home with a disk full of tutorials and links to tons more so they can continue to learn from me or even use the tutorials to teach their classes!

Question: When do you feel your students interact with your content the most: inside or outside of the classroom?

Answer: The other day I had a teacher from another school district come observe my classroom. As we talked in a corner of the room my 3rd period class came into the room, logged onto the computer, put their headphones on and started to learn. The computer lab is lit by small warm lamps at each computer station housing a powerful dual monitor HP workstation and a Wacom tablet. One monitor shows the application the student is working with and the other the Camtasia tutorial.

About five minutes into the class a student quietly asked their neighbor for help and then removed a blue cup from on top of the small lamp, revealing a red cup, and then continues working. The red cup is my cue to step in and deliver level two tech support.

Since I have switched over to using Camtasia video tutorials in my classroom, management issues have simply disappeared. When I used to use direct instruction, there were often a couple students that were always bored because I went too slow, and a couple students were frustrated because I went to fast. A couple were lost because they missed instructions due to absences.

This method is so much more effective at delivering instruction that all my classes have been able to move through more material. For example, in my video classes we completed seven projects last semester when I would be lucky to get through 4-5 in the past. In a three hour teacher workshop, I can now bundle an entire semester’s worth of lessons, and they can continue learning long after the evaluation has been turned in.

Question: How did you become an Adobe Education Leader, and what does that mean for you as an educator?

Answer: I started presenting workshops at educational technology conferences in 1999 and would always stop by the Adobe booth to see what was new and show them how my students were using their products. Finally they asked if I wanted to become an Adobe Master Teacher, which changed to the Adobe Education Leader program when we merged with Macromedia. The best part of this program is the opportunities I get to work closely with a wide variety of outstanding educators from across the globe.

Question: Are there any examples of your projects that you’d like to share

Answer: Storytelling: These examples are from a week long workshop on Digital Storytelling.

Stop Motion Animation: This page has an example section for my week long stop motion animation workshop.

Wacom Tablets and Photoshop: At the bottom of this page you will find links to a couple of my students’ online portfolios.

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