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EdCamp Still Rules

  Looking Back at 10 years of EdCamps Oh how the time flies, EdCamp Madison is turning 10 this year!  It will be held Saturday, February 3rd at Sun Prairie West High School. Which can be found at 2850 Ironwood Drive in Sun Prairie Wisconsin from 8:30 am - 3:00 pm.  Get more information and register here: https://sites.google.com/sunprairieschools.org/edcampmadwi/home   I will always remember sitting in my first EdCamp opening session at the very first EdCamp Madison and having no clue what I was in for. So, I’d like to take this space to go over some of the basic rules of EdCamp. No One Will Pitch It for You EdCamps are unconferences. By this I mean that they have a blank slate of sessions for the day. There may be a few predetermined sessions, but ultimately the session topics are determined by attendees during the pitch & plan session that opens the day. If an idea gets pitched there will be a session on it. If a topic doesn’t get pitched, there won’t be a session on it. So, it i

EdCamp Elmbrook 21

 


We had out 5th annual EdCamp this past Saturday and it was a very different PD experience. Due to the pandemic, we help the EdCamp virtually. That meant that anyone across the globe could attend. While we usually only have educators from out region attend, we had educators across the nation and in some in Canada attend. In addition, we had an attendee from Turkey!

The conference was conducted using Zoom and Zoom breakout rooms for the sessions. The team did a great job of organization and management. I could go on, but this is my first blog post in a while and I'd like to keep it brief. Below you'll find the session board for the day with notes docs linked. We had some wonderful sessions and the notes documents house some wonderful thoughts and resources. So, I recommend checking them out.


Although this EdCamp was only for the morning, there was a lot of learning to be had. We had no technology issues from our end as organizers but I can imagine participants may have had issues with connectivity. 
The major downside was the inability to connect face to face with educators and many times conversations don't flow as well virtually as they do in person. But I loved that we increased the pool from which educators were joining from. I also loved that it was a simple process for educators to be able to share their screens with others in Zoom. 
Overall there are pros and cons to a virtual edcamp. But at the end of the day I think we were all able to share our experience, learn from each other, and grow our network. So, I'm glad Andelee Espinosa and Lisa Camponeschi talked me into not skipping EdCamp Elmbrook this year and going virtual. Even more that the EdCamp Elmbrook team of Andelee, Andrew Flegel, Dan  Scott, Danielle Shryock, Emily Paprocki, Jen Townsend, Jill Michalak, Jon Vogt, Kayla Moffatt, Mary Beth Bartels, Michael Carini, Michelle Schueller, Mike Rakowiecki, and Trish St. George all pitched in to make the event possible.


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