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
“How do you react when your students don’t grasp a concept or skill the first time you teach it?” Bell, Kasey. Shake Up Learning: Practical Ideas to Move Learning from Static to Dynamic (Kindle Location 780). Dave Burgess Consulting, Inc.. Kindle Edition. If you listen to the talk in educational chats today, you will hear phrases like “fail forward” and “FAIL = First Attempt In Learning”. The general idea is that we don’t expect success the first time we try something. So, we shouldn’t expect students to master a concept or skill the first time they try it. Teachers and students need to be ok with this fact. There is a lot of debate in my school around applying this idea to summative assessments, not just formative. I have a very strong opinion on this topic, but this is not the post for that. (But, I imagine you may already know where I stand on telling a student it’s time to stop learning.) For the sake of this post, let’s look at pre-summative assessment learning. If