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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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Google Keep On Task

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As we embark on our passion projects, I wanted to find a way to keep up to date on what my students were up to.  Last year, I had students create task boards using Trello.  While it was helpful in 1:1 conversations, the downfall for me as an educator was the amount of time it took to go into each board to see where students were at efficiently.  Now that Google Keep is a part of G Suite, I've decided to leverage it as a tool.

I use Keep everyday in my life as a task list an note taking tool, but I never used it in my classroom with my students.  The ability to share and label notes makes it quite powerful.  So how am I using it?

Today, I had students create a task list in their Google Keep and share it with me.




I then added a label to all task lists from the same class and archived the list so they wouldn't be in my home Keep page.



During class, I had students begin adding projects tasks to their lists.  Now when I go to that label page in Keep, I can keep up with all of my students in that block.



I like that this is a quick one page look at what students have done and have yet to do.  Items can be rearranged in lists. So, I'll be making sure my students keep them in order with the current task at the top of the list.  I realize it does not provide as much depth as a Trello board would, but I'll see how this tradeoff of detail for timeliness works in the long run.

I look forward to seeing how this works for keeping up with classes of 30 students with 30 different projects. Of course it will only be useful if the students use it.  So, I hope to make it part of our project routine.



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