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!
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!