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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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Can I Believe These Numbers?

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Our union put out the results of a recent district survey.  The number of those who responded to the survey was low in comparison to the total number of certified staff. But the number and comments related to personalized learning struck me as troubling. Based on this data, over half of the district staff polled are not onboard with the district's vision for personalized learning.  I would argue that not knowing the district vision for personalized learning is synonymous with not understanding what personalized learning is.  The mission of the Elmbrook School District   to inspire every student to think,  to learn and to succeed.   By personalizing learning, we hope to achieve that mission. I begin to question have we put the phrase before the meaning?  Have we thrown out this word without intention?  Have we made it to much of another thing to do rather than a method to achieve our shared vision. These numbers shake me to the core.  After the recent presidential
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These Honeycomb Kids Are Honeycomb Big

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What's a Honeycomb kid? It's more than just this... Today, some of my students from last school year took the reigns and presented at the Institute for Personalized Learning's National Convening . The focus of this presentation was sharing the elements of the honeycomb that benefitted their learning the most. In addition, they explained what these elements looked in practice. A year ago, I never imagined that a group of my former students would be presenting.  So how did we get here? Well we ... The first step in this process was realizing how strong my students were in reflecting on their learning in our classroom.  Reading their end of unit reflections made me realize that the learners were thinking deeply about what was helping them learn, not helping them learn, and ideas they proposed for the next unit. I then decided to introduce them to the Teaching & Learning elements from the honeycomb and rate how instruction in our course met those ele
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Mo Years Mo Blogging

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Two years ago, I published my first blog post. To celebrate 2 years and 144 posts, I thought I'd share 10 insights linked to my blogging. Pirates Publish Great PD Over the last two years, I have had the privilege to read some great books published by Dave Burgess Consulting, Inc . These include Teach Like a Pirate , Ditch that Textbook , The Innovator’s Mindset , Explore Like a Pirate , LAUNCH , and I just started Pure Genius .  These books are great because they are accessible and practical.  The collection of books are like the Marvel Movie Universe in that they are all connected and have a unified vision.  But, they each have their own focus.  Let’s hope there is no Civil War in the Pirate Universe anytime soon. I’ve loved using my blog to reflect on the books I’ve read as I read them. PLN I have a significant level of social anxiety with my peers.  So, I’m not one who seeks out conversations with fellow staff members.  My blog has allowed me to share what I d
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Open House by Teachers for Teachers

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I am part of our building's personalized learning leadership team.  One of our goals has been to support staff in the implementation of PL elements in their classroom.  To this end, we hope to go beyond explaining what they elements are and to delve into how they can be achieved in a classroom. Today, we had the opportunity to do just that.   Our team approached several teacher who we knew were having success with PL elements in addition to those who grants for PL proposals they submitted in the spring.  We ended up with a wide range of options that spanned almost all content areas.   NAME DESCRIPTION Chris Demos (Biology) Standards Guided Learning, Assessment AS Learning, Progressions Towards Deeper Learning : Learn how Chris has implemented a structure in which students are held accountable for demonstrating how they have met course standards by providing evidence and defending that evidence. John Wilkinson (Physics) Personal Learning Goals, Progressio
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IMMOOC WeMOOC Takeawyas

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Over the past couple of months it has been my pleasure to be a part of the Innovator's Mindset MOOC (massive online open course).  I was able to participate in the last episode of the live MOOC hangout which will be turned into a podcast. Below are blog posts on takeaways from the book when I read it this summer: Part 1: What Is an Innovator's Mindset? Part 2: Create a Culture of Innovation Part 3: Release the Kraken Part 4: Putting Mindset Into Action I just wanted to share some of my brief takeaways for the online community experience. There are so many talented people out there. I was amazed to read all of the brilliant blog reflections of my fellow #IMMOOC members. It was great to see all the different perspectives and paths people took from a similar prompt. Those posts shed new light on my own reading of the book. There are so many risk takers out there . To hear what others were trying out for the first time was awesome. It really serv
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My First Dip into WeVideo

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I took my first dip into  WeVideo today.  WeVideo is a video editing solution for those working with Chromebooks.  I have been using iMovie for video editing since I first started editing on a computer (before that it was to VCRs).  But iMovie on iOS devices is frustratingly limited and YouTube Video Editing is not quite user friendly yet.  WeVideo could be a great solution for those who have videoclips and photos in Google Drive and want to be able to create video using ChromeOS. Like I said, this is a first dip.  Down the road I hope to have a more in depth post about it.  but wanted to highlight a few basics with some GIFs. From the WeVideo top menu you can choose Media and upload files directly from Google Drive to your WeVideo Media Library. When creating a new project, it is easy to simply drop in videos and photos from your media, rearrange and trim. Once you've got a video or photo inserted, you can do a deep edit of the clip or image including adding
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