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
This past week, I spent three days in Napa California attending PBL World which was run by the Buck Institute for Education ( bie.org ). A colleague from my school and I were enrolled in PBL 101 an intensive course for those new to Project Based Learning. To say the experience was transformative, would be to sell it short. Simply put, everything I thought I knew about PBL was renovated. I learned that what I thought I was practicing was not Project Based Learning as it should be done. I learned so much that I need to write about it in order to process it all. I plan on posting about each of the days individually over the next couple of weeks. So without further ado, let me talk about day 1. This was written on the plane ride back, so please forgive any glaring proofreading errors. Day 1 Keynote The first part of the keynote was by John Mergendoller of the Buck Institute and his focus was on Gold Standard PBL. It was a very interesting time to attend PBL World.