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
Yesterday was the second year I've introduced the idea of a passion project to my AP students after hour AP test has been administered. I have to say that although last year was a success, this year feels infinitely more exciting. Why? I think we had a better kick-off/brainstorming day than we did last year. I have to thank at Denise Krebs and Gallit Zvi at T he Genius Hour Guidebook and Don Wettrick at The Innovation Teacher for their tremendous ideas and resources. First was defining the purpose of the passion project. It is a matter of framing the project time as time to for learners to do something for themselves, not time to create something for their teachers. Compliant students are very quick to see this as a task to be completed rather than an opportunity for themselves. I ran into that in a handful of situations last year, and it really bothered me. I wasn't prepared for it. I didn't realize that many times, students aren't comfortable explori