EdCamp Western Maine

EdCamp Western Maine was held at the Mt. Blue Campus in Farmington Maine yesterday (February 6th). There were quite a number of pre-service and first year teachers attending, which is really exciting!

Session 1) I brought a Google Cardboard. Most of the group hadn't seen it before. We played with a few apps, Cardboard, Street View and the NYTVR. I also showed the group Google Cultural Institute. Thanks to Sonja for taking the notes for the group. My resources are here. I will definitely bring a set to EdCamp Maine to play with.

Session 2) Sketch Noting with Dan Ryder. I was excited to finally learn more about this topic. I loved learning about visual vocabulary and once you have the six symbols down, the possibilities are endless. I have always written things in boxes and in a random fashion, so it was exciting to think about how Sketch Noting might fit into my own work. I also learned about Bullet Journaling which I would like to explore further.

What was also fun was it was the first time I used my Rocketbook. I learned about this from a tweet by Dan Callahan  The Rocketbook uses Frixon erasable pens. You then scan the pages into your smart phone and it sends the page to any of your cloud accounts that you set up ahead of time. I sent my notes to my professional development folder in Google Drive. Example: Page 1. When I am done with my Rocketbook, I can microwave it and it will be erased to use again.

Session 3) Design Thinking with Dan Ryder. I read Creative Confidence this past summer and have tried some of the activities in professional development sessions, so I was excited about learning more about using this method with students. I wasn't disappointed. Dan talked about cultivating empathy in his classes and how he is designing activities so that students learn how to tell about learning. We participated in an activity about how to humanize the process and then participated in a Flash Lab where we had 7 minutes to create an artifact to solve a problem - in this case create something that brings joy. He also shared different ways of giving feedback, for example using legos during a gallery walk of projects to give feedback. A yellow lego is for laughs and giggles, a green lego would be for inspiring, a white lego raises questions. Here's his blog post about using design thinking and empathy.

A terrific day. Thanks to all of the organizers: @jbailey8 @WickedDecent @MsRedmanEnglish @johannaprince @texastheresa @MichaelisMath