Friday, November 11, 2016

Edcamp Beaver Dam

edCamp BD logo 2 PNG.png
Where can you spend a Saturday morning sharing ideas about a variety of education-related topics with educators across twelve different school districts and 14 different grade levels? At Edcamp! Last Saturday, Beaver Dam Unified School District hosted the second annual Edcamp Beaver Dam. In short, Edcamp is an unconference designed specifically for educators. It is a free sponsor-based professional development and learning opportunity where attendees create the agenda. Then they become note-takers and facilitators of the individual sessions. Edcamp prides itself in participant choice, therefore people are free to leave sessions at will to attend another without hurting anyone’s ego!

This year, more than 50 educators attended the Edcamp held at the Beaver Dam Middle School. At the start of Edcamp, attendees met to post suggestions for topics of interest for the day. Edcamp Beaver Dam used the Padlet Application to record suggestions. Next, the topics were sorted into categories for session assignments. This year’s schedule offered 28 different opportunities during four 50-minute sessions. The topics ranged from mental health, to G Suite (formerly Google Apps for Education), to student engagement and motivation, to mindfulness, reading strategies, and the growth mindset. After four engaging sessions, all attendees regrouped for the closing comments. Finally, the day concluded with a sponsor-based raffle. Attendees won prizes to be used in their classrooms. It was an amazing morning of collaboration and learning.