Student EDcamp Reflection

I was pretty excited to try this out! My first hour did a *beautiful* job. It went exactly as I hoped it would. As the day went on, we did not have as much success. I kept tweaking things to see what worked. We turned in iPads, so I thought it would be a great day to do something like this. I let the kids choose their own topics of things they were interested in, didn't have to be school or content related. In the first class, we did two 12 minute sessions. The 2nd, 3rd, and 4th class, we tried two 10 minute sessions. Then I did 3 8 minute sessions for the rest of the day.

Before class, I organized the seats into 5 different groups. I spent a few minutes explaining the process and gave some examples of topics. Then I asked kids to raise their hands and suggest topics. I wrote them on the white board that was divided into the schedule. I set a timer for each session, and then I rang a gong to move to the next session.

I used proximity monitoring to keep kids on topic. When kids got stumped, I tried throwing out some guided questions. For example, I asked the food group, "What's your favorite dessert?" or "If you had to eat one thing the rest of your life, what would you pick?" or things like that. I think if we did EdCamp more often or at a time when the kids weren't so keyed up, it would have been a little smoother. Still, I'm glad we did it! 

The EdCamp sessions went SO SO SO good. I was so impressed by how students were able to keep a conversation going about a book! Having the students make a Sway for their topic was also a great way for students to organize their thoughts and have a starting point for the conversation. I highly recommend having students create some sort of presentation to prepare. Whether it be a Sway, powerpoint, poster, pic collage. Just something that students can show at the beginning of the session to start the conversation. 

If you think that some students might not be able to keep a conversation going, I recommend posting sentence stems of questions to stimulate conversation.

I can't wait to continue to do EdCamps in my classroom! 

My initial plan was to have each student stand in front of the class and read their essay:| I'm so glad the thought of using the process of Edcamp came to mind instead. Students were more engaged in listening to the presenters, there was more conversation taking place than I've seen in the past, and students were less anxious knowing they only had to present to a small group and not the whole class. Since students selected their own topics of interest for this essay the Edcamp process worked great for sharing. 

A few take away for me were: 1. Direct instruction in accountable talk. Some groups had a difficult time keeping the conversation going the entire 15-20 minutes. Reviewing accountable talk and have the talking stems out may have helped with this.  2. Group topics of similar interests in the same session. Several students wrote about video games, so lumping them into one session didn't allow a student to spend the entire hour only discussing video games. They really had to choose which game that wanted to discuss. 3. I'm still thinking about what to do when no one picks a student's session to go to? For today's purposes moving students into a group with no students worked, but sort of defeats the purpose of selecting what they're interested in. However, at this age I think many students went were their friends were:/ 

Overall it went really well. I'm looking forward to our next Edcamp, the last week of school. Students will have the opportunity to share something they are truly passionate about.