Skip to main content

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

Resourceful Learners are Par for the Course



Today, we had a wonderful collaboration with our friends at Swanson.  Kate and Angela wrote a great post about the day that you can read here.


Sphero Golf!

If you have not explored Sphero Balls, today is the day to check them out! Sphero is a robotic ball that pairs with your iPad or Smartphone. Using a variety of apps, you can manipulate the ball's movement through coding, programming, or a simple finger swipe.






My big takeaways from the day were the following


1) Do have your Spheros fully charged before hand. We ran out of juice on a few.  So, a couple of groups had to call it quits and join others a few minutes before our scheduled end time.

2) Do set up your Spheros to pair with a specific device.  When you have 12 Spheros in the same space at the same time it’s important to make sure you have a system. Spheros pair via Bluetooth so they remember their previous connections.  The more Spheros you use with a device the more it will automatically pair with.  I’ve run into the issue many times where we’re trying to pair a Sphero but it is already paired with a different iPad that’s in the cart that had it in it’s memory. Quite frustrating! So try to set up a system of you have a set of devices and set of Spheros.

3) Keep calm and turn Bluetooth off and then on. That was a quick fix for losing connectivity with our Spheros.

4) You can never have enough Spheros! We had 12 for our activity today. It was great to see the collaboration among the students.  But, I can just imagine what it would have been like if we had even more!

5) Sometimes free exploration is better than a set list of steps.  When students get their hands on technology, what is exciting to you may not be the path they want to take.  There are so many different opportunities for “play” with Sphero different aspects will resonate with different students. Don’t limit their options.

6) Updating your operating system on your device will lead to a better experience.  The older iPads we brought from the high school lost connectivity quite a bit. But the newer iPads at Swanson worked like a charm.

7) Baby steps are key.  When using the Lightning Lab app, we probably should have taken a few steps back.  Rather starting with the coding block right away

IMG_1022.PNG

We probably should have worked with the drawing option.

IMG_1023.PNG

This would have been a much clearer entry point to the activity of tracing the polygons on the floor.  Then learners could have graduated to the coding blocks on a different day.

8) Sometimes golf is enough.  There is no reason why we couldn't have had all students golfing the whole time. The golfing did not seem to get old from my perspective.

9) Only a fool thinks the timing will be perfect.  It started with a bus that I though was late for us but was just parked on the opposite side of the school. Then we had snow on our way to Swanson.  We ended up arriving 20 minutes later than expected.  But, Kate and Angela were calm and helpful. I was met with an Americano and adults asking how they can help. That's what a true collaboration is.  It happens at the level of the teachers and the level of the learners.  It's a beautiful thing to be a part of. It takes a lot of effort to pull of an event like this but when I know I'm coming to my friends at Swanson, I know I'll be in good hands.

10) I am always impressed with how adaptable students are to new situation.  Like I just said, we had a few bumps in our road to perfection. As an adult I find myself getting rigid and feeling a sense of defeat when something doesn’t go as planned.  My students are quite the opposite.  They were offering up suggestions for modifying the plans when we reached stumbling blocks. They are the ones who help reduce my stress.  If personalized learning is learners being able to take the reins out of the hands of the teacher, these students are ready to drive the train.

It’s days like these that make me realize we our future is in good hands.  When these students see a problem, they don’t give up. They find solutions by themselves or through collaboration with their peers. We are a week away from the end of the term.  My physics students will be moving on to new classes. I'll miss the group that came with me to Swanson today. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Twitter Cards for Blogger

So, I’ve been seeing people with beautiful Twitter Cards in my Twitter Stream. They make it clear that there is a web page to visit and give a quick preview of what would be found. Something like the one below: I’ve been wondering how to get one of the cards to appear when I tweet out a link to my latest blog post.  Since I use Blogger, there is not a simple button to click to turn this on.  I had to find a way to paste new code into the HTML code of my blog.  It took some searching from multiple sites to get a completely functional.   This site though was quite helpful.  But, I’d like to walk you through my process and hopefully it helps a few out. There are a few types of Twitter Cards.  Two that at most frequently see are the basic summary card and the summary card with large image.  Below you can see the layout of each, but realize that they both have the same content pieces. This is going to look like a lot more work than it will actually be

Pear Deck 101 + Q&A

  Last week, I presented as a part of Pear Deck’s Pear Fair 2020. My presentation was Pear Deck 101 for Google Slides. During the presentation, there was a live chat. Many people said it went too fast for a 101 Session. Luckily, it was recorded so it can be rewatched.  Also, many said that they wanted to know how to build a Pear Deck first. I structured the presentation to show what Pear Deck was before showing how to make one. Perhaps that wasn’t the best structure. But, I’m going to stick with my philosophy of showing what something is before showing how to make it. The presentation, which can be watched below, was structured in several different sections What is Pear Deck? Providing an overview of the experience from the Teacher and Student perspectives. How do you build a Pear Deck in Google Slides? How do you start a Pear Deck presentation? How do you end a Pear Deck presentation? Here is the Slideshow I shared during the session bit.ly/pearfair101 Time really flew in the sess

Using Infinite Campus to Give Grades Meaning

At Brookfield Central High School have just passed the three week grading period and are approaching the first parent teacher conferences of the year. My thoughts are turning to clarifying my grading practices to students and parents as more scores are being entered into the gradebook.  I have completely restructured the grade reporting in my online gradebook this year.  This was due to struggles I had last year in trying to implement what I believe to be best grading practices into my grade reporting.  Much of my grading philosophy has been informed by Robert Marzano and Marzano Research, specifically the wonderful book Classroom Assessment & Grading that Works .   Traditionally, as I prepare for teacher conferences, I use a student summary report I print from our online gradebook to guide the discussion with parents.  Our grading program in my district is Infinite Campus (IC).  I really like the software and find it extremely easy to use.  Below you’ll see a sample st