EdCamp Grand Rapids definitely met and even exceeded my expectations! It was a fabulous day of learning and networking!
The first session I attended was facilitated by my friend Pat Harju (@scout7). While Pat and I had never actually met before she's been a twitter friend of mine for quiet a while. It was awesome to meet her in real life! She does some amazing things with her second graders. Her session was all about skyping and then blogging. Skyping with students is something I've never done before. Pat listed quiet a few resources that she uses. Her students have skyped with some authors and have done some mystery skypes as well. Here's Pat's presentation about Traveling the World with Skype. The rest of her session was all about blogging, and some how not sure of the specifics, but I was up front taking control of her computer sharing some of the things my kids do on their blog.
Thanks for letting me hijack part of your session Pat! It was definitely one of the highlights of my day!
During the second session my partners in crime; Aimee, Emily, Kristi and myself facilitated a presentation on the Tech Tuesdays for elementary teachers we started in our school district. Prior to arriving at edCamp Grand Rapids we had one brief teasing discussion that we should present. I think our discussion lasted maybe 30 seconds. But as we stood in front of the session board that morning we felt compelled to share what we had started. While we didn't have a presentation prepared, we shared our TechTuesdayTeachers Blog and TechTuesdayTeachers Wiki and used those as our talking points It was a fabulous discussion. We found out that other educators had started tech tuesdays but only in one building where there were maybe 2-3 teachers attending which made it hard on the one who was facilitating. We got some great feedback on what we are doing and I think we inspired a few others to try organizing a tech tuesday on a larger scale than they might have tried before.
Lunch for the day was on our own and our PCCS group used the time not only to grab some grub but to talk about the sessions we all attended. It was awesome hearing what they choose to go to. By this time my brain was already spinning. But in a good way. We also found out that we had been invited to present about our Tech Tuesdays to our districts Ad Council (big meeting with all of the administrators)! YEAH!
Emily and I spent session 3 tweaking our Apptastic presentation for session 4. We had a moment of panic when we realized that Ron Houtman, one of the organizers, switched us to the ustream room. While we were prepared to facilitate a conversation for those physically present I think the idea of people watching us on the internet was a little unnerving, at least it was for me! So after a few "holy cow" moments, Ron switched us back to a normal room! Thank goodness! Our presentation went well here and it was neat to see what other apps that people were sharing. There were a couple like: puppet pals, tinker box, ibrainstorm, Tour Wrist, and Sock Puppets that I can't wait to check out.
Overall it was an incredible day. And while it was a LONG day I wouldn't trade it for anything. I had some amazing conversations with awesome educators! Oh and I almost forgot...they gave away some great prizes too. I came home with a years subscription to Simple K-12. If you want to check out all of the tweets from edcamp check out the archive of tweets. Great stuff!
The PCCS Crew!
