My experience during the EdcampHome 3.0 time was, I didn’t attend.

 

Wait….what?

 

Ok, that’s not true, I did attend, for about 15 minutes.  The great thing about summer is our daughters are swimmers.  After basketball, I’ve found swimming to be a great spectator sport, lots of drama in the pool, outstanding personal efforts, and in the end, it’s you against the clock. The problem with an outdoor season in Iowa, we have storms, which we did have one a while back and the meet that was cancelled happened to be rescheduled on the same day as EdcampHOME. *sigh*  So, I got home, logged in, and found my home network wasn’t able to deal with Google Hangouts that night as I could not get into a session.

However, being the flexible, reflective, connected educator I am (bonus points for all those buzz words), I do have a few take aways:

1) This one is the biggest one – EdcampHOME is the PERFECT example of what flipped PD can look like.  I didn’t make it and I feel bad about it, but as I go onto the website, each session was recorded for later viewing!  There were two separate sessions and every one of them is here.  Want to know more about coding?  25 minutes of viewed can help you learn more!  A new 1:1 school?  There are two different sessions dealing with that topic!  Want to flip your classroom (heck yes!)?  There were two or three sessions!  If I can’t make it to a staff meeting, why can’t I click on the link where the meeting was recorded?  Or why can an admin go through the big points, send it to us ahead of time, we watch, and come with questions?  I love how this group models exactly what a flipped PD experience might look like.  On top of that, because this is actually the third EdcampHOME, yes, you guessed it, all those sessions are on the web site too!  Hours of teacher created ideas, thoughts, and discussion at our finger tips!

2) PLN building at it’s finest too!  I’m a lover of Twitter (as you may have guess if you follow me), but Google+ certainly has it’s benefits.  As I’d log in, I’d have teachers, administrators, educators adding me into their circles.  While my Twitter PLN is wide ranging with educators, gardeners, authors, those in the whole food/slow food movement, and a few others, my PLN on Google+ is pretty narrowed on education. It’s more a Facebook flow and not to say that there still aren’t a wide range of posts that come up, I know logging into that, my focus is definitely on education.  That’s certainly not a bad thing and in fact, I’ll log in to there to simply narrow my own focus.

3) Again, we are modeling what we’d expect of our students.  I got home from the swim meet about 8:15 CST time, trying to get into the last session at 8:30.  That means 9:30 P.M., EST, which means there are some teachers giving up their summer evenings that could have been spent sipping their adult beverages, reading a book on the deck who are instead taking an active role in their own learning.  There was no stipend, no release time, no flex time involved.  It’s events like this which make me proud of our profession and how much time we spend bettering ourselves for our students.  We casually toss around “what’s best for students”, but knowing there were dozens and dozens of teachers giving freely of their time,that’s huge.  Even afterwards, people like me, who didn’t get to participate live can use the resources and people to help better our classrooms.

From what I’ve read, the live event was great.  I’ll keep trying to make one happen, but until then, I know that as long as this event continues, there will be hours of information that I can take in at my own pace.

Isn’t that what we want anyway?  Students learning what they need when they need it?

The link to EdcampHOME 3.0 with the other two Edcamps archived – http://tinyurl.com/n9mej6d