Ed Camp 123 Reflections

I previously wrote about my experiences attending my first EdCamp back in August at EdCamp Reno. This post is my reflection on EdCamp 123, the first (of hopefully many) Cap CUE Ed Camps in the Sacramento region.
Marie Criste from Roseville and I were the ones were organized this event and it was great that my district of Rocklin Unified stepped up to host the event. 
 
Since EdCamps are organic PD events where the attendees create and pick their sessions we had no idea of what expect. We had the attendees write their ideas of things they could share about things they wanted to learn about. 

Once all the attendees were finished, we had our "team" of helper go over these ideas and then try to put some order to them. In the end they came up with 8 different topics - here they are: 

Here are some of my takeaways

• EventBrite : Ever interested in planning a event? This made everything so easy from signups, communication out the attendees and the super simple scanning of people as showed up for the event
• Twitter – Just like so many other conferences and events that the Ed Tech community attends, the platform for sharing was Twitter. Since this was a local EdCamp and for many their first Ed Tech PD (oh…. I even bumped into some college students who wanted to attend) many of them hopefully got to see the sharing that can take place with Twitter. I was hoping to give a little lunchtime Twitter demo (shout out to Joe Wood and CUE Rockstar Tahoe where he did this) but we ran of time. I was able to briefly give them the feeling of what Twitter is like by passing out my Twitter sticky notes and have them write their thoughts down. We then had them post them to a wall to give a sense of what posting and commenting is like.
• THE SQUAD – it takes a village! In managing this event we needed to have a team help run and organize this event. This group (and there are too many to mention them all) did everything from running a green screen photo booth (Corey Coble and the super cool green screen app DoInk) to having a social media director (Roland Aichele) tweet out the highlights of the day. Plus the Cap CUE Board of Directors who did so much and were most pouring over all those sticky notes.
• And most importantly, all of you who stepped up to be "room facilitators" where they guided these conversations while not being the experts.  Thanks to all of you who helped make this event incredibly smooth on our first time trying this type of thing.

The Learning! Well… to be honest… running an event makes it hard to participate in the experiences but I was able to bounce around some and spend a few minutes in many of the sessions. Since my district sent a fair amount of the attendees, many of them asked for a session on Schoology. It was interesting to see how the teachers who had already dabbled in Schoology went to the morning session and the later ones were with teachers who have little experience with it.

I spent the most time in Video Making session (kind of one of my passions!) I was able to quickly demo some tools like stop motion and Adobe Voice (iPad only). I did really like the conversation about how many in there felt frustrated that Apple is so far ahead in terms of video; as a Google and Android fan boy wish that there was parity amongst these two platforms but it's just not there yet.

Other sessions in which I bounced into seemed like there were engaging and lively. Several attendees asked me before the day started "so, who is going to do the talking in these sessions? Is it really just all of us?" Well, from what I saw, that is just exactly what did happen. And at the end of the day we asked the attendees to share some of their thoughts from the day and the overarching theme was: "didn't know what to expect and walked away lots of great ideas"

In the afternoon, I did an impromptu audio recording / podcasting session and have about 8 teachers want to learn something new. We talked about both tools (like Spreaker on the phone and Audacity, Blab.im and  Sound Trap on a computer) plus ideas like school news and interviews where both teachers and and students can easily use. We even chatted live for a little while with the Nevada CUE which was happening the same time in Las Vegas. 

And here are just some of the quotes from that survey I mentioned. 

If any of you attended this Ed Camp please leave a comment about your experiences as well.

And one last big Thank You to Marie Criste again for doing so much of the heavy lifting, from planning and organizing to getting tons of sponsors to kick in. You're awesome!