Educamp Omaha Reflections

On Saturday, March 20, 2015 I attended my first Educamp professional development session. The format was unique – the attendees determined what the educational sessions were by volunteering to facilitate the sessions.  Interesting concept, but it made it hard to know what you were “signing up” for as far as the sessions go.

I chose my fist session because it had a catchy title, “Rocks or Sucks.” The facilitator demonstrated a program or app that can be used to facilitate debate and/or discussions on a variety of topics. The topic is flashed on the screen, then participants move to one side of the room based on their feelings (rocks or sucks) toward that topic.  Once you get to your side, you have discussion with like-minded peers. Then the facilitator leads a large group discussion on the topic.  It’s kind of a technology-enhanced version of some of the Kagan strategies we use. It was interesting and a good way to get introduced to some of the other attendees. The groups I teach are so small that I don’t see it being that useful in my classroom, but it was interesting to see it in action.

The other session I attended was taught by a member of our class – Nan. There were only four people in the session and it was on using Edmodo. There were two high-school teachers and one other elementary school teacher in the group. They had not used Edmodo before, and I just started using it last week. Everyone got a nice overview, but we weren’t able to go deeply enough for anyone to move forward in their use of the technology.  Maybe that’s not the point of this type of professional development. From my perspective, what we saw and heard today was more of a conversation-starter and an opportunity to be aware of the huge variety of tways to use technology in the classroom. During lunch, when I met back up with the other teachers I know, we were all talking about what we experienced and sharing what we heard. There was a different type of energy and shared experience at this conference.

My biggest take-away from the session was more practice and a (little) deeper understanding of twitter. I appreciated the tweets from attendees because I got to see what was going on in the sessions I was not able to attend.  One session I’m sorry I missed told about a global storytelling project. I was able to follow other people’s tweets to find this project and get an overview and can dig deeper into it on my own.