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EdCamp Still Rules

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  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
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3 Tools for Virtual Learning

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This week my building principal gave me the opportunity to provide virtual PD for our district on 3 tools that I think are great for supporting virtual learning: Pear Deck, Scientifically, and Flipgrid. I created informational slide decks and recorded one of the webinars I did for each of the three tools. I won't go one much more, but wanted to make these resources available to all. If you have any questions about the tools feel free to reach out to me on twitter @mo_physics or email at mohammam@elmbrookschools.org



Please note that these webinar videos were the first presentations I've ever done using Google Hangouts Meet so please forgive the informal nature of the presentations. They are the raw video from the session. I could easily have spent hours making them perfect, but I figured the true purpose was not aesthetic perfection but timelessness of the information.

Pear Deck

Use Student Paced mode to provide asynchronous instruction or formative assessment in which students progress through a Google Slideshow at their own pace. Like traditional slides, each slide can contain text, images, links, and embedded videos. In Pear Deck, interactions can be added to slides for students including:
  • Text Response
  • Number Response
  • Multiple Choice
  • Drawing 
  • Draggable
Teachers can monitor student responses in real time.

Screencastify

Screencastify can be used to create screen recordings with or without live audio. These recordings are saved to Google Drive and can be downloaded or shared via link.
Screencastify is great for teachers looking to create tutorials or short lessons.
Screencastify is also great for students looking to create in order to share their learning. 



Flipgrid

Flipgrid is a free video creation and submission platform that can be designed for many purposes. These include, but are not limited to
  • Student submissions private to student and teacher
  • Student submissions that can be viewed by classmates
  • Students submissions that can be viewed and replied to by classmates
These videos can serve many purposes including assignment submissions, discussion topics, and reflections.Student created videos can be shared beyond Flipgrid via web link or downloaded.







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