edcamp

#EdCampQC 2.0

/ Alicia Ray / 1 Comment

I honestly didn’t think they could do it… truly, I didn’t!  There was no way that the #edcampqc group that organized the first EdCamp Queen City at Hawk Ridge Elementary School could possibly outdo themselves.  The sequel is NEVER as good as the first, right?

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Wrong!  I’m a firm believer in giving credit where it’s due and the organizers for #edcampqc are amazing!  This team has got it together; everything seemed to run very smoothly and whoa – look at this session board (with collaborative notes) the participants created!

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I attended Something Gaming first where I learned more about ClassCraft and shared my 3dGameLab course I have created for my Battle of the Books students.  Stepping out of my comfort zone I am considering having students create their own games to show mastery of content.  We talked about the resource GameStar Mechanic which looks very exciting!  I hope to be able to incorporate this into the media center or with my Battle of the Books team this year.

Following Something Gaming, I hit up the Twitter as a PLN session.  It was the very first Twitter session I had ever attended where EVERY SINGLE PERSON was a Connected Educator on Twitter!!!  It was awesome; there was so much energy in the room!  This allowed us to take the conversation to a new level by discussing an educational revolution and how to pull more people onboard the Twitter train.  One idea was to show reluctant peers the difference between twitter for personal use and twitter that is used professionally.  Derek McCoy (follow him on Twitter: @mccoyderek) shows the difference using current feeds of two people, like Charlie Sheen vs Steven Weber (follow him on Twitter: @curriculumblog)

The third session had so much goodness packed into 45 minutes that I couldn’t possibly attend all of them, even with the rule of two feet!  This is honestly the very first edcamp that I have relied on the collaborative docs to fill me in on the conversations.  With topics like Genius Hour, Inquiry-Based Learning, Personalized Learning, Green Screen, Teach Like A Pirate, and a discussion on School News, I was torn.  I ended up in Green Screen and walked away with new ideas for this week.  Thanks to Megan Mehta (follow her on Twitter: @megan_mehta) we stopped by Starbucks before leaving Charlotte to grab green Starbucks straws and coffee stirrers to use in puppet shows with green screen! GENIUS!!!

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Lunch was superb.  Ooo-Wee BBQ was soooo delicious & I just had to purchase ice cream from a legit ice cream truck!  Being from a small town in the country, I didn’t have ice cream trucks while growing up.

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Finally, my last session was Digital Formative Assessment.  I signed up to facilitate this session.  Many of the teachers in this session learned about Kahoot! in an earlier session, so we did a mini-smackdown of Digital Formative Assessment tools including GoFormative, Kubbu, Plickers, and ThingLink.  We also touched on GooseChase, a terrific scavenger hunt app!

As if the day couldn’t get any better – I won an autographed copy of Teach Like A Pirate by Dave Burgess!  Thank you, Dave (follow him on Twitter: @burgessdave)

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It was an excellent day and I am already looking forward to my next edcamp experience!  These things are the best educational rejuvenation!  I get to see my fabulous Professional Learning Network (PLN) and I always leave with so many new ideas that I can share with my peers at work and implement in the classroom.  I am constantly amazed at the people that I meet and humbled to be considered a member of their PLN.  If you’ve never attended an edcamp, you should seriously find the next one coming your way, clear your schedule, and attend!  I have never been disappointed!  If you are near me – I will even drive you there; no excuses!

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#EdCampLDR

/ Alicia Ray / 1 Comment

Here is another enthusiastic blog post in which the words awesome and amazing are overused brought to you by another edcamp!  If you’re still on the fence about edcamp, I highly recommend that you just go for it!  Find an edcamp near you, and you can write your own enthusiastic blog posts rather than read mine :-)… well, go ahead and read mine, and then share yours with me so we can be excited together!

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All across the nation edcampers are uniting in EdCamp Leadership in which leaders in education, administration, central office personnel, and teachers from PreK to university are gathering together as change agents.  You can follow along with all the awesome using the hashtag #edcampLDR – catch up with today’s edcamp and continue to watch and participate from afar on Twitter while the rest are held on Monday!  These are the people responsible for #edcampLDR in North Carolina.

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The Friday Institute in Raleigh, NC hosted #edcampLDR today, July 10.  As with edcamp custom, participants created the session board upon arrival by suggesting topics they want to discuss with other educators across our state.  I personally was hoping to see Game-Based Learning and Gamification, PBL, Twitter, and lots of discussion on how to be a better leader in my school.  I was not disappointed in any aspect. Our session board was created and we were off. edcamp2     You can check out the session notes here.  There were some great discussions, fabulous resources, and wonderful ideas shared among the participants.  One of the best parts of the day was the photo booth that was set up by Strawbridge Photography!

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I didn’t need to see guitars or microphones to know we were hanging out with Rock Stars today!  One of my favorite Rock Stars to show up today was our very own State Superintendent, Dr. June Atkinson.  She is a true leader and a change agent.  I had the pleasure of meeting her once before and was thrilled to see her again.  For me, it validated edcamps and what we are doing there as she saw merit in our purpose, prioritized edcamp on her busy schedule, and even joined in on our first session asking questions and contributing to the All Things Twitter conversation.

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The last part of the day was the Smackdown.  This was different than what I had experience because they did an “edu-smackdown” in which participants not only showed apps and websites that were great for education, but also shared an “a-ha” moment for the day.  The complete list can be found here, and I will be using several of the apps/sites as part of my on-going EdTech Summer.  Check back for more details about that.

For now, I am utterly exhausted from all the awesome today.  What was your biggest take-away from #edcampLDR?

#EdCampMaker

/ Alicia Ray / 1 Comment

My first experience at a “themed” EdCamp was nothing short of wonderful!  The team that put EdCampMaker together really outdid themselves.  After a somewhat slow start due to a bad wreck on the interstate and multiple events on Elon’s beautiful campus, the organizers decided to change the rules a bit.  Rather than having multiple break-out sessions, we opted to stay together as one big group sharing ideas on various topics throughout the day.

Check out the session board and collaborative notes here.

We began with an activity involving 30 spaghetti noodles, one string of yarn, a long piece of scotch tape, and a marshmallow.  Directions: create the tallest tower of spaghetti noodles with the marshmallow at the top; height of tower will be the distance measured from bottom of marshmallow to top of table.  My group, which included the fabulous Chris Tuttell (@tuttelltweets) had a spectacular idea to create tripods of spaghetti noodles using tape to bind them together.  We failed to place the marshmallow on top until the final seconds, only to find our tower was not strong enough to hold the marshmallow up.  After a brief discussion amongst the EdCamp group, we decided that sometimes simple is best.

Then, we began to delve into discussions around makerspaces, what works and what doesn’t.  We talked about how to better our own makerspaces and how to empower our students to unleash their creativity.  One of the Board Members of Elon University posed an excellent question about placing tutorial videos on YouTube of various makerspaces.  I thought this was a brilliant idea; it seemed so obvious, but I believe we all felt that mouth wide open – Ican’tbelieveIdidn’tthinkofthat – moment.

The remaining sessions were Community Spaces, Coding, Minecraft, Robotics, 3D Printing, and Soft-Making (crocheting, etc).  I was the most excited to gain more knowledge about 3D Printing.  Great resources are available for 3D Printing, and many can be found on the collaborative notes for that session.  Perhaps one of my favorite parts of the day was actually the name badges.  The coordinators of EdCampMaker spent the time creating each participant a name badge made from a 3D Printer.  Then we had glitter pens to decorate and make it our own!  I seriously felt like a little girl again playing with the glitter glue.  Other EdCamps are really going to have a hard time impressing me with the name badges.

Finally, the end of our day was spectacular.  We were able to “plearn” (Play + Learn…one of my new favorite words thanks to Twitter) in various makerspaces in the conference room.  We got to play with a MakeyMakey, a 3Doodler, an Osmo, Minecraft, LittleBits, 3D Printers, and a Sphero Ball, just to name a few!  I made some awesome glasses with the 3Doodler and fell in love with the Osmo.

Let me just say that I have never won a door prize at an EdCamp before… this was my 5th EdCamp experience, and I always walked out without so much as a t-shirt or bag swag… This EdCamp ended that streak.  In true Oprah fashion, “You get a MakeyMakey, and You get a MakeyMakey, and You, and You!”  Yep – that happened!  Each person at EdCampMaker got a MakeyMakey to take home!!!  As if it couldn’t get any better, I also won (genuinely won per ticket drawing) the 3Doodler Pen with filament!!!  I get to make even more of those cool glasses at home!  My students are going to be so thrilled to get to “plearn” with these new gadgets in our own makerspace at school!  Somehow I also ended up walking away with a Tinkercad shirt, too!  Remember that I mentioned falling in love with Osmo while there… I ended up buying one as soon as I got home.  It came in last weekend and my 5 year old daughter and I have been playing with it since!  She begs me to play the Osmo.

My biggest take-away from this EdCamp, besides the awesome prizes and swag, was that Makerspace isn’t just the future anymore; it’s what’s happening now in education.  All the ‘cool kids’ are doing it. I believe MakerEd takes engineering, problem-solving, creativity, and critical thinking to levels that we cannot fathom on a standardized test.

Beware! Shameless Plea for Donations Ahead: I have written two grants to get my school more materials for MakerEd.  I am still hoping one, or both, will be funded. In my high-poverty rural school (96% free and reduced lunch), I can’t and won’t ask the parents to supply my makerspace.  If you’d like to help my students reach their fullest potential, please consider donating to my DonorsChoose project, which only has 35 days remaining (ends on June 15, 2015).