Skip to main content

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


On March 25th, we held our first ever EdCamp Elmbrook.  I didn’t realize it then but was reminded that it was something I had initiated 8 months prior in July of 2016. That was a long time ago and it took a lot of work from a lot of different agents to make it happen.




The 1st Step

I’ll be happy to take credit for putting forward the idea of running and EdCamp in our district. But without the OK from my building principal Brett Gruetzmacher and our Assistant Superintendent of Teaching and Learning Dana Monogue, the idea would have stalled right there and then.


How Do We Put On An EdCamp?
As EdCamps continue to increase in their popularity as a form of professional development, more resources are available for educators to learn from others.  The EdCamp Foundation has a wonderful website that helped guide our planning process.


A Great Team
Once I got the ok and began searching out planning resources, I sent out a call for help to staff in our district.  I was surprised to see how many were willing to be a part of this endeavor.  Our final team included staff from all levels of instruction and administration. Members of the team were very willing to take on tasks that suited their strengths and run with them.





Our Space
With my building principal on board from day 1, we had a strong champion for allowing us to use our building space for our event.  Our custodial staff did a wonderful job of transforming our cafeteria into a space to hold introductions, lunch, and closing. In addition, our building staff was welcoming and let us use their rooms to hold our sessions.






Tom Juran enlisted his imaging students to create signage for our event which made our space even easier to navigate.





Sponsors
The most difficult part of planning our event, which was quickly resolved, was finding funding for our event.  The EdCamp Foundation provided an EdCamp in a Box which container $250 for our event which went to provide lots of supplies and refreshments for our day.  A bunch of sponsors jumped on board to help us with prizes for our raffle.  It was amazing to see how many in the educational community were willing to contribute to our cause with raffle prizes and great swag. Filling out the form on the EdCamp.org site brought even more sponsors to our cause. I really want to thank all of our sponsors.





But without the support of Dana Monogue and our district’s Teaching and Learning department, we would have had a lot of hungry campers.  It seems like without a 501 (c) 3 form status. Something to work on for next year.
Eventbrite for Registration
I have registered for many educational events using Eventbrite, but have never been on the administration side of it. I was amazed at how easy it was to use.  If was great to promote, allow people to register, check in on day of, and send our communications.  I am amazed at how user friendly it is.


The Attendees
EdCamps are participant driven.  So, people need to come and be willing to share and listen. Our pitch and plan session was a little messy as it was the first time we had ever done it.  But, we learned at lot.  We ended up with a great variety of sessions as you can see below.  Attendees did a great job of populating the session notes as well, so take a peak.









But, EdCamp is really about sharing in conversation and making connections in a face to face environment.



I look forward to sharing some of the feedback from our participants and reflecting on that in my next post.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Twitter Cards for Blogger

So, I’ve been seeing people with beautiful Twitter Cards in my Twitter Stream. They make it clear that there is a web page to visit and give a quick preview of what would be found. Something like the one below: I’ve been wondering how to get one of the cards to appear when I tweet out a link to my latest blog post.  Since I use Blogger, there is not a simple button to click to turn this on.  I had to find a way to paste new code into the HTML code of my blog.  It took some searching from multiple sites to get a completely functional.   This site though was quite helpful.  But, I’d like to walk you through my process and hopefully it helps a few out. There are a few types of Twitter Cards.  Two that at most frequently see are the basic summary card and the summary card with large image.  Below you can see the layout of each, but realize that they both have the same content pieces. This is going to look like a lot more work than it will actually be

Pear Deck 101 + Q&A

  Last week, I presented as a part of Pear Deck’s Pear Fair 2020. My presentation was Pear Deck 101 for Google Slides. During the presentation, there was a live chat. Many people said it went too fast for a 101 Session. Luckily, it was recorded so it can be rewatched.  Also, many said that they wanted to know how to build a Pear Deck first. I structured the presentation to show what Pear Deck was before showing how to make one. Perhaps that wasn’t the best structure. But, I’m going to stick with my philosophy of showing what something is before showing how to make it. The presentation, which can be watched below, was structured in several different sections What is Pear Deck? Providing an overview of the experience from the Teacher and Student perspectives. How do you build a Pear Deck in Google Slides? How do you start a Pear Deck presentation? How do you end a Pear Deck presentation? Here is the Slideshow I shared during the session bit.ly/pearfair101 Time really flew in the sess

Using Infinite Campus to Give Grades Meaning

At Brookfield Central High School have just passed the three week grading period and are approaching the first parent teacher conferences of the year. My thoughts are turning to clarifying my grading practices to students and parents as more scores are being entered into the gradebook.  I have completely restructured the grade reporting in my online gradebook this year.  This was due to struggles I had last year in trying to implement what I believe to be best grading practices into my grade reporting.  Much of my grading philosophy has been informed by Robert Marzano and Marzano Research, specifically the wonderful book Classroom Assessment & Grading that Works .   Traditionally, as I prepare for teacher conferences, I use a student summary report I print from our online gradebook to guide the discussion with parents.  Our grading program in my district is Infinite Campus (IC).  I really like the software and find it extremely easy to use.  Below you’ll see a sample st