This week we are going to engage in some professional development and personal learning networking (PLN) development with Dr. Michael Paskevicius’ section of EDCI 336 in the form of an EdCamp. An EdCamp is an unconference, which is a user-generated conference. There is no rigid pre-selection of session topics planned in advance. Instead, ideas for collaboration and conversation are determined as attendees identify common themes/topics that they would like to explore, and what they can teach others about.
Before we start on our EdCamp we will talk about how Knowledge Management tools can be helpful tools to assist educators to collect and curate lesson plans, tools, and learning objects for their learners.
Week 6 Learning Objectives
- Understand how EdCamps can provide quality professional development opportunities as well as the cultivation of a local personal learning network for educators.
- Learn how an Edcamp is organized and is run, including the tools necessary for a face-to-face EdCamp and a virtual EdCamp.
- Assist in organizing, running, and actively participating in a class-based virtual EdCamp.
- With your partner, begin the topic and planning process for Assignment 2: Education Technology presentation.
- Describe how Knowledge Management tools can help educators collect and curate lesson plans, tools, and learning objects for their learners.
Pre-class Activities
What is an EdCamp? (4 min)
What an EdCamp looks like for participants (2 min)
Please review topics that have been discussed at other EdCamps for inspiration as you try to think of education or classroom topics that you might be interested in discussing or leading during our EdCamp on Friday. Might your group EdTech inquiry topic make a good EdCamp session topic?
With the other EDCI 336 class, we will vote on topics at the beginning of class on Friday and may group similar topics together. Please take a quick look at this EdCamp organizers checklist to get a sense of how you might organize an EdCamp for your school or school district one day. Feel free to make a copy of the checklist if you think you might like to use it at some point in the future.
Class Time
I hope that you are coping well this week. If you are in class on Friday, you can let me know how you are doing by filling out my optional weekly Check-in poll. If you can’t make it to class, please email me to let me your doing, so that I can better support you in the coming weeks.
Knowledge Management & Content Curation
Especially at the beginning of your career as a teacher, it can be overwhelming trying to keep track of all the great tools and teaching methods that we are introduced to in class and bump into as we talk to our peers. One type of tool that can be helpful to keep track of all these resources are digital note-takers/organizers. Some of the most popular organizers used by teachers include:
- Google Keep (free) – https://keep.google.com/
- Microsoft OneNote (free w/ UVic license) – https://www.onenote.com
- Obsidian (free w/ paid sync) – https://obsidian.md/
- Evernote (free w/ paid extra storage) – https://evernote.com/
Over the years I have used Evernote, Microsoft OneNote, and Google Keep, but a few years back settled on Google Keep as it was free, and worked on my Mac laptop, Windows computer, Android phone, and iPad (all of them are cross-platform now). If you would like to use a tool for curating resources, please choose the one that you think would work best for you, but in my video below I’ll use Google Keep. That said, all of these tools work in roughly the same fishing even though they implement their features in slightly different ways.
The infographic below is a great example of the process many use for content creation. I personally tend to focus on steps 1 and 2, and unless I really, really like a tool I’ll skip #3, sharing.
KM Curation Tool Demo (6 min)
EdCamp
Because we are holding our combined A03 & A01 Edcamp this week, if you are not able to make it to class on Friday, please work through the rest of this weekly post as it contains everything for the week, except for the student-driven EdCamp sessions on Friday. Also, at some point please connect with your partner for an Assignment 2 startup meeting (see details below).
If you cannot make it to class on Friday I’d encourage you to attend an online session or two of the Tapestry ProD conference for SD61, 63, 62 and 65. It does cost $10 but many of the online sessions look very interesting. If you attend the ProD conference please do your weekly reflection on a session topic.
Hands-on Lab Time
Work with the partner you selected (who should also be a member of your learning pod) to get started on Assignment 2, which is [FINISH THIS]
Work on Assignment 2 – Group EdTech Guided Inquiry with your partner. Make your planning & research visible to Rich via a new shared Trello Board, Google Doc, or something similar.
Learning Pod Time & Homework
- Weekly blog post to document your learning in class and to document progress on your inquiries (incorporate audio, video, and screen video capture into your blog posts this week).
- Review the 336 Blog Post Rubrics to make sure you’re including all the minimally required elements for your weekly blog posts.
- Here is a sample high-quality weekly blog post on the topic and/or technology of the week.
- Please critically discuss one or more of the EdCamp topics you attended (don’t forget to refer to the Blog Post Rubric to make sure you complete all the required elements for your post).
- Weekly Free Inquiry blog post:
- Document your free inquiry progress, reflecting on your progress, as well as identifying and evaluating helpful resources you found. Provide details on your learning progress (through success or failure).
- Employ a multimedia strategy in your post to help document your inquiry by using text and one or more other media to help make it more engaging (e.g., image, screencast, video, or other formats).
- Utilize social writing strategies such as hyperlinks to blog posts (e.g., trackbacks) or to articles/resources consulted, including web pages, images, videos, etc.
- Use the category, “free-inquiry”.
- Share your post with your learning pod at your next meeting (usually at the end of class time).
[…] Many instructors in this program have recommended many wonderful resources to us that will be useful in our future classrooms, but I admit I have been having a hard time keeping track of everything. Over the past few months, I have come across several posts and websites that I know will be helpful later, but that I haven’t really known what to do with in the meantime. There are only so many browser bookmarks one can have before they become too many to keep track of, and I have frankly been too lazy to come up with a better way to organize these. Therefore, I was a bit relieved to see that Rich would being going over knowledge management and curation systems in class this week. […]