Edcampbos

Yesterday I attended #EdcampBOS  - Edcamps are informal sessions by and for teachers, where anyone can present, and the focus is on collaboration and connections, group expertise, tech tools, and instructional design.  When teaching a #gafefsu is the weekends align I attempt to bring the class to experience the edcamp model for part of the day and then focus on the class materials in the afternoon.  Of course, it's always great to model the "building of the wall/schedule and typically if the days align our students present their projects to an authentic audience.  Where this was our first full day session, we modeled topics we would teach in our class.

We start out by sharing the Edcamp video and we sign folks up for the event.  The EdcampBos folks are awesome to support us on this initiative.  In the past, we have brought students to #EdcampGrafton.
What is EdCamp?

To kick the day off we met at Burlington, Microsoft lobby, what a beautiful building!  We discuss the setup for the day and then we modeled two sessions, require students to attend one and pick two choice topics.

Here is a link to the Edcamp wall with links to notes

Session One we offered reflecting with podcasting using Anchor.  This is the tool we used earlier in the month while attending SXSWEDU in Austin.  We modeled how we used to reflect multiple times during the day.  We also challenged the group to reflect on their learning at EdCampBos.

Here is our podcast reflection using anchor with Craig here 

Session Two we wanted to show all the different things you could do with Google Slides.  We initially started out with "designing and assessing with Google slides".  Too boring so we went with "pimp your slides" We showed a variety of topics, Slides Carnival saving direction to Google, using the insert camera function to take a picture/evidence of work and add to a slide.  We got a lot of wows on this one!  We then showed inserting a YouTube video with stop and start times and presenting QA in slides. Another big hit the new CC in slides. We then moved onto PearDeck.

I think teachers were pleased to see how easy it was to approach new features in slides and I would have to say a big success!

After lunch we regrouped with our class and this is the magic of an edcamp.  They experienced it with a larger group of teachers and loved it!