Rich McCue

Week 6 – Professional Development with EdCamps

This week we are going to engage in some professional development and personal learning networking (PLN) development. 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 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.
  • Begin (or continue) 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:

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. I also use RainDrop as my general bookmark manager That said, all of these tools work in roughly the same fashion 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.

The Basics of Content Creation Infographic
CC-BY-NC-ND – https://Teacher.Challenge.edublogs.org

KM Curation Tool Demo (6 min)

EdCamp

If you are not able to make it to class this week, 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 learning pod for an Assignment 2 startup meeting.

Hands-on Lab Time

Feel free to explore the personal knowledge management and content creation tools we discussed at the beginning of class time.

Learning Pod Time & Homework

  1. Reading Break Surprise: No critical reflection or free inquiry post assignments this week! I hope this will allow you to have some downtime so that you can recharge your batteries for the second half of the course.
  2. Learning Pod peer feedback:
    • Spend 10 minutes reviewing the Week 5 Critical Evaluation post from a different member of your learning pod.
    • Please make sure that everyone in the learning pod gets one of their blog posts reviewed.
    • Please be professional and kind as you provide feedback to your peers’ blog posts. Use this guide as you review peer blog posts today, and until the end of the semester: Blog Post Peer-Review guidance <- IMPORTANT INFORMATION – Do not review any peer blog posts until you’ve read this document.
  3. Start planning Assignment 2 – Group EdTech Guided Inquiry with your learning pod. Then do other following:
    • Here is a Group Project Planning Guide for you to review if you would like some general guidance on how to plan for a successful group project. Make your planning & research visible to Rich via one of the following platforms (or talk to Rich if you’d like to use something else):
      • A Google Doc. Share to rich@msys.ca
      • An Office 365 document. Share to rmccue@uvic.ca
      • A new shared Trello Board. Share to rich@msys.ca
    • Every member of the Learning Pod, please Submit the Learning Pod planning document URL or website URL to Rich in the Brightspace Assignment 2A. If you have any questions about this scaffolding assignment, please contact Rich directly.

One comment

  1. […] 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. […]

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