Edcamp GP

Saturday I attended the first ever EdCamp for the Grande Prairie area, sponsored by the Educational Technology Council of the ATA. I love the EdCamp concept and wish that teachers could do this in their schools every week, or at least once a month.
Teachers need to be given these opportunities to share. To hear others' successes and not-so-successes. Teachers need someone to bounce ideas off of and debate professional and philosophical perspectives (which is always my favourite thing to do!).

What I took away from this activity:

1. New Tools! (and some I have forgotten about)

• Polleverywhere.com - online and SMS polling
  and
  Socrative.com - web based student response system
  I like the idea of using these tools to check student understanding during an activity. Socrative.com provides more options and would probably be my choice between the two.
• TodaysMeet.com - create a chat room
  Useful to have students engage in a conversation when they may not be able to talk, like during a movie, presentation or lecture. Would be good for the teacher if students had questions during a lesson, I can see potential for hearing from the introverts.
• Flipboard app - social media and news aggregator
  I love Zite and this is like Zite but I can add my Facebook, twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Google Reader etc. and it is very visual.
• Qwiki app - turn pictures and videos into a movie
  I could definitely use this in science, students could take pictures of concepts or during experiments and put them into a video to share.
• Educreations.com and app - make a video of a lesson and share online, browse already created lessons as well
  I would love to get students to create these videos explaining concepts we are learning, and then I would also have a collection of lessons for students who may have been away or need a review.
• Storify.com - curate information from social media and turn it into a story
  I love this. I see so many uses for students to create current event stories while requiring students to analyze and synthesize information. This is a tool that could be used for developing many 21st century skills.
• Piktochart.com - create drag and drop infographics
  When I briefly tried it out I was having some issues, they seem to recently have updated their site so maybe there are things being worked out still, but this could be a useful tool for teachers and students to display information and data. This tool would also require significant higher order thinking skills to determine what information should be displayed and how.

2. New Ideas and Challenges

• Standards based assessment in high school, especially for grade twelve. I can't wait for it! Although I can see some students having a problem with it.
• Should we have no zero policies? Can't believe we talked about this, but we did, and it was a great conversation which also led to a discussion about the value of marks and grades (which leads back to standards based assessment).
• High school credit recovery - this was a totally new topic for me and I found it a little contradictory to want to give zeroes but then allow students who have failed into a credit recovery program. How many students who end up in the credit recovery program are there because of unnecessary zeroes?