Photo by “My Life Through A Lens” on Unsplash
Today we started our day doing a peer review with each other for our WordPress websites. I really liked being able to see a peers format and ideas. It made me reflect on the fact that I want to take some time to work on formatting my website to look more user friendly and reflect my thoughts. It was a good reminder though that these spaces are a personal expression of ourselves and our creativity. It’s a really great way of capturing moments and the journey of our education.
Next we moved on to speak about this really neat concept I’ve never heard of before- EdCamp.
EdCamp is an idea that allows for opportunity to facilitate large groups for learning in a democratic way. The goal is to empower educators and give them the choice of speaking about something that is important to them. EdCamp gives space for collaboration and conversation that identify a common theme or topic to explore and what they can teach others about. It takes the pressure off of an educator or individual to be the expert. It’s a great space for individuals to share experiences, generate questions, be curious and explore a topic in more depth.
In class today, we ran a mini EdCamp to explore certain topics that were proposed in class. We all had the opportunity to come up with ideas. After everyone contributed, we were give stickers and we got to vote on our top three that we were interested in speak about in more detail. Through this voting system, Michael chose the top 4 and we got to chose which topic we wanted to follow and speak about in more detail. Ideally, this would last longer and the groups would be closer together which would allow peoples to vote with their feet, encouraging individuals to move from topic to topic. Today though, I stayed with one group. We spoke about how to incorporate and support gardening within a classroom. It was really great to hear a group of people who were passionate about a topic come together and purpose ideas and speak positively about a topic. To highlight some of the conversations:
-can be used in indoor and outdoor spaces
-community or collective gardening
-gardening is experiential but here is a lot of cross curricular and curricular outcomes,
-Also incorporates and highlights core competencies, SEL, sharing, leadership, mental health, Indigenous learning, collaboration, responsibility
-Sometimes you need to get creative
-Look for grants and work with administration for financial support
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash