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EdCamp Still Rules

  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

If My Students Are Being Asked to Take Risks, Why am I Playing It Safe?

When I looked at my first set of AP Physics 1 video projects on momentum, I thought they were very good.  Groups took them into some very unexpected and interesting places.  I'll share more examples in future posts as the inspiration strikes me.  This project in particular struck me because in it I saw the seeds for something greater. In this project, I saw the possibilities for tying together seemingly desperate content areas such as physics, art, and history.

Watch it and hopefully you'll see what I mean:




I realized that all of my students showed great ambition in their projects.  They all took risks both emotionally (acting like a fool because the script called for it) to physical (playing simulating collisions while riding in trash cans and tacking each other in the snow.)  It was me who lacked the real ambition to try to find the ways that this project could truly bring in standards from other content areas.  I can just imagine this video becoming so much more if I had asked the group to include more of a historical framework for the project after an initial viewing.  Why not also tie in standards from the visual arts as well?  The only reason, is my fear of failure.  If I am asking my students to take risks as they design and create their projects, why am I not doing the same in the design of what they are asked to learn? Alright, I'm going to have to do some serious research into other content standards to incorporate.  I will see how they did on these standards, but these scores won't be a part of the grade.  I have to start somewhere.  I already tie in literacy standards into my projects, but what about other areas? Any ideas of a good place start looking for standards in other content areas for the high school level?

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