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
Too often the grade is the goal for our students, and we lose sight of learning in pursuit of a number. School needs to be something bigger than a grade. Couros, George & Novak, Katie. Innovate Inside the Box: Empowering Learners Through UDL and the Innovator's Mindset . IMPress. Kindle Edition. Reading the new book by George Couros and Katie Novak Innovation Inside the Box has me rethinking how I communicate purpose in my classroom. It is so easy for me to fall back into a mode where I accept compliance from my learners as an excuse to not define the purpose of what we do in class. Too often the compliance mindset sees the grade as the goal. It is the grade that is earned not the process or even the product. So, once the grade or credit has been earned the work can be forgotten. In the 1972 film The Candidate , Robert Redford play presidential candidate Bill McKay. The clip below shows the ending of the film when -- Spoiler Alert -- McKay wins the election. “What do we do n