Your Story Matters: A Reflection on the Adobe Education Summit
- Dustin Rimmey
- 3 days ago
- 8 min read
It is less than twenty-four hours since the Adobe Education Summit wrapped, and I am writing this on a train headed home.
Not a plane. A train. (#RimmeyOnTheRails) What was initially an economically efficient method of traveling because I forgot to book a flight, has become the best decision I've made about travel in a long time. I've now found that the best way to both clear my mind and process new information at the same time is watching the American West roll past me at sixty miles an hour. The best part (aside from this current connector train) is that I'm mostly unplugged. No wifi, no cell signal, just me, my thoughts, and whatever I downloaded or physically packed to entertain myself. It is now the best reset I could have planned...and I did not plan it at all (ah, kismet).
Initially I started writing this reflection yesterday, after the summit had adjourned. I was lying on my hotel bed, and then all of a sudden it was 8 pm. Was it the adrenaline finally wearing off.?Was my brain clocking out from all of the new information? Was it my body knowing that I need some sleep before I struggle to sleep on the trains the next two days? Now that I am upright, caffeinated, and moving at sixty miles an hour, here are my takeaways from an epic three days of listening, learning, and community.
Touring Adobe
Monday evening, we were welcomed to the Adobe Headquarters with a reception and a tour. In true Adobe fashion, one of the elements of the summit was to complete a Photo Walk! In the form of a bingo card, we were asked to capture a variety of different moments from the summit, in addition to showcasing our knowledge of some basic elements of design and photography.
The area I was in awe of, was the floor dedicated to Photoshop. The floor showcased artwork and had a ' 90s-themed room dedicated to the original release of Photoshop (and good god, did it make me feel old). I loved seeing all of the items created by students (the monster design contest winners) and some art books showcasing where Photoshop was used (I found multiple World of Warcraft books, and my nerdy heart was full!).
The highlight for most of us was taking a photo in the upside-down classroom. Needless to say, I had to enjoy myself!
The coolest thing was one of our bits-o-swag we received to enable our photography journey. With the advent of digital cameras, and the evolution to every phone having a camera embedded in it, I think it may have been my sophomore/junior year of high school where I last took a photo that required film to be developed.
I love my new polaroid camera! We were now armed with an analog camera and the ability to take 16 instant pictures to complete our photo walk. I think I only took 6 polaroids, as I was afraid to take a bad picture (not only because I may suck at photography, but I was more worried about camera angles and that pesky sun!).
Aside from thinking that a photowalk on the Adobe Campus is a cool thing, I really love Photowalks as a pedagogical tool. Photowalks they force deliberate seeing in a world that has trained us to photograph everything and look at almost nothing. When students are given a camera, a prompt, and a finite number of shots, they stop moving through space on autopilot and start actually looking at it. What is worth capturing? What tells the story I am trying to tell? What angle, what light, what moment?
To me, those are not photography questions. They are the same questions a historian asks when selecting evidence, a writer asks when choosing details, and a scientist asks when designing an observation. The photowalk is a thinking routine that instantly sparks creativity. The bingo card format Adobe used is exactly the kind of structured constraint that makes creative work more rigorous rather than less.
The photowalk also helped perfectly encapsulate the summit's theme: Your story matters. A photowalk is one of the most direct ways to help individuals figure out what their story might actually look like.
If you are interested in hosting your own photo walk, you can check out Adobe's toolkit here: https://new.express.adobe.com/webpage/m0KisfpQXaWhy
A Theme Worth Living By
Every summit has a theme. Most of them are forgettable by the time you board your flight home.
This one was not. I am adopting it as the new mantra for my classroom this year!
Your story matters.
These three words sound simple until you sit in a room full of educators and student ambassadors and higher education leaders who are all, in their own specific and irreplaceable ways, living proof that they are true.
The summit reinforced the theme at every turn, especially at the beginning of each day. Each morning opened with a series of Ignite Talks. These talks were three-minute bursts of inspiration from Adobe Creative Educator Innovators, student ambassadors, and members of the higher education community. Three minutes is not long. Three minutes is exactly long enough to say one true thing in a way that stays with a person.
The talks that stayed with me most were from students. Specifically the ones who talked about what happened when they were permitted to be creative; not as a reward, not as a break from real learning, but as the primary mode of learning itself. What unlocked. How they began to see themselves differently. Not just as students navigating a system, but
as people with something worth saying and the tools to say it.
One student described creativity as the moment she stopped performing for her teachers and started making things for herself. Another talked about how designing something, really designing it, with intention and craft and revision was the first time school had ever felt like it was actually for them.
Those are not small things. Those are the things we got into teaching for.
Your story matters. Not as a slogan. As a philosophy. As a promise.
What I Cannot Tell You (Yet)
Here is the part where I have to be honest: I saw things at the Adobe Education Summit that I am not allowed to talk about yet.
NDAs exist for a reason (booo!), and I will respect them. What I can tell you is that what I saw was genuinely exciting, the kind of exciting that makes you sit in a meeting room at Adobe headquarters and think about specific students by name and specific units by theme and specific moments in a lesson where this is going to change everything.
The moment those tools go live, I will be writing about them at considerable length. Loudly. With genuine enthusiasm and zero apology. (small spoiler: my guess about what Claudio showed at ISTE was right!)
Watch this space. And watch Adobe. Be Excited!
What It Means for myYear Zero Philosophy
I have been thinking about that theme since I boarded my first train of the day, and I keep returning to it in the context of what I am building for my US History and World History classroom this August.
History, at its worst, is a story told about other people: distant figures in distant times whose relevance to a student's own life requires a significant act of imagination to locate. At its best, history is a mirror. The events, the forces, the decisions, the consequences: they all connect back to something present and human and immediate, if you are willing to build the bridge.
Your story matters is the bridge.
The question I am bringing into Year Zero is not just "what happened?" It is "where do you see yourself in this?" When we study displacement and migration, whose story in this room rhymes with that history? When we study the tension between individual liberty and collective responsibility, what version of that tension are students already living? When we study the people who stood up and the people who did not, what does that ask of the person sitting at the desk right now?
Adobe's tools; Express, Firefly, the animation features we saw at ISTE, the things I cannot talk about yet but will be screaming about the moment they go live, are the mechanism that makes those connections visible. A student who cannot write a five-paragraph essay might still be able to design something that tells the truth about how they see themselves in a historical moment. And that design is evidence of learning in a way that a multiple-choice test rarely is.
Your story matters. It is going to drive my classroom. Watch for it in August.
The Community Is the Point
There is something the Adobe Education community did for me that I have not found similarly at any other conference, summit, or meeting. It makes you feel like the weird one finally found the right room.
From the moment I joined the community as an ACE Leader to finding out I was labeled an ACE Innovator, it has been nothing but love and positivity, mostly from complete strangers! The moment I posted my acceptance, I was showered with public and private messages with one common theme: you are going to love this.
That is the culture of this community. It is one of the few places in education where pushing for creativity, championing student voice, and believing that learning should feel like something are not considered the outlier positions. They are the baseline.
The summit was three days of that culture at full volume. Ignite talks and working sessions and conversations in hallways and meals with people who are building classrooms and programs and futures with the same fundamental conviction: that creativity is not a luxury, not a reward, not a Friday afternoon activity. It is the mechanism by which students find out who they are.
Your story matters. Every story in that room mattered. Including mine. Including yours.
Join Us!--Certifications
If any of this sounds like your kind of good time, here's how to join us!
Adobe Creative Educator (ACE) — Level 1
The starting point. A three-hour course on the Adobe Education Exchange covering the creative process and what it looks like in the classroom. Complete the course, submit a learning artifact, earn your badge. Free. Available to any educator in any subject area or grade level.
ACE Level 2
Builds on Level 1 with deeper application of creative tools and instructional design principles. Complete both levels, and you have the foundation for everything that comes next.
ACE Leader
ACE Leaders deliver professional development workshops for educators, championing critical thinking and digital media skills for career readiness. Applications open currently in the US Only.
ACE Innovator
The most selective tier. ACE Innovators are future-focused thought leaders who amplify student voice and champion creative teaching at scale through keynotes, conference presentations, published work, and direct collaboration with Adobe on product feedback and vision. Applications open once a yea.
Join Us!--Community Hubs
Adobe Education Exchange Community
The community hub — where educators connect, share resources, ask questions, and find their people. Free to join. Worth joining immediately.
Adobe Education Exchange
The full professional development platform: free courses, resources, and lesson plans across all of Adobe's education tools.
Whether you are brand new to Adobe tools or a longtime user who has never plugged into the educator community, the ACE program is worth your time. The badges are real. The professional development is genuinely useful. The community is the part that changes things.
Your story matters. Adobe has spent a long time building a community around that belief. Come find out what it feels like from the inside.
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