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
I like Star Wars. I like it a lot. There are so many great lessons and quotes from the films. Yoda has to be one of the most quoted educational scholars ever. That includes even in the newest episode “The Last Jedi” He has a great line about failure There is great power in learning from failure and I think many educators are embracing this. At times, though, I feel like rather than learning from failure, we’re failing and just redoing. I’m forgetting to make the learning from failure intentional. Am I placing as much importance on the learning as I am the grade recovery? Am I failing my learners in the process? When I think about the teachers in Star Wars films, they are not so good at providing safe environments for learners to fail. Ben Kenobi who allows his student Anakin to burn in lava and leaves him for dead Yoda who lets Luke go off and have his hand cut off by Darth Vader Luke who is driven to the point where he almost murders Ben Solo while he sle