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 blog owes a lot of inspiration from this post by George Couros . Sometimes as a teacher I have to deliver content to a large group. Today, in AP Physics 2 was a good example. We are covering magnetic force. I can predict the force and motions experienced by an object when acted on by a magnetic field. This is a very complicated topic that students can't experiment with at the atomic level. I can set up a demonstration that shows what happens at a macroscopic level but it doesn't help students understand what is happening at the subatomic level. The biggest difficulty is not mathematics. It is spacial reasoning and conceptualizing what is happening. It is a process which involves "right-hand rules" which provide simple models for how charges behave in a magnetic field. Here is a sample question students learned today from scratch. Ok, enough with the physics talk. What is my point? I feel that as educators, the current wisdom