edCamp Howard-Winn Wrap-Up

This past Saturday, the Howard-Winneshiek Community School District hosted the first edcamp, unique and participant-driven development for educators. The event, brought together over 60 educators from Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. 

Edcamps are really more of a movement than anything, an acknowledgement that we as educators have so much we can learn from each other. The "unconference" format forgoes pre-set agendas, structured proposals, in favor of informal sessions run by people who are passionate about education and collaboration. Each session looks more like a conversation than an "info dump," and the process of sharing experiences, ideas and resources is just well inspiring. You can see the schedule that was formed here.

Here are a few snapshots:

This session discussed about Digital Lesson planning. Educators collaborating about the 21st Century learning skills for students. There discussion lead to the utilization of different Web 2.0 tools Edmodo, Schoology, Google Docs, etc. within the classroom.

Howard-Winneshiek Superintendent John Carver provides a session on how to expand your Personal Learning Network for educators. Wow, talk about exciting John is Skyping in Jerry Blumengarten @cybraryman1 for the session.

Shannon Miller from VanMeter joined #edcamphwinn for the morning sessions sharing her wealth and knowledge with integrating technology into the classroom. Shannon shared with educators how to organize bookmarks with Symbaloo within there classroom to assist students for finding resources. Check out the poetry Symbaloo for poetry in your pocket month.   

It's always wonderful to hear back from edcamper's about there experience from attending an edcamp. Here are a few blogs to check out Coffee with Cloe and AnIowaTeacher.  Over the course of the day there were plenty of resources and excellent resources tweeted out so if you missed something check out the Storify from the twitter feed for the day.