Week 7 Reflection

This week in EDCI 336, we were introduced to the idea of EdCamps and the learning models TPACK and SAMR. The section of the lecture that stood out to me the most was on EdCamps, and how they can be highly beneficial to me as a future educator. Not only did we get to learn about EdCamps, but we got to make and participate in one ourselves. Please feel free to take a look at this sketchnote video all about EdCamps!

This experience was important to me because I got to take control of what I wanted to learn. Hearing stories and advice from my peers regarding the subjects I was passionate about helped me to feel motivated in my coursework. Often times when you are weighed down with schoolwork and stress, you tend to forget why you are working so hard. You forget your own personal interests and passions which motivated you to want to educate. Getting to learn about these subjects in a voluntary way, from my peers nonetheless, was a great opportunity to not only share knowledge, but get to know each other better. I can definitely see myself using some of the suggestions given by my classmates, so I can’t imagine how informative these camps will be for me when I am a certified teacher and I am learning from other certified teachers.

After this lecture, I walked away with a lot of things to consider. My classmates introduced new concepts and ideas I would have never considered. With this new knowledge, I can walk into future lessons with many different perspectives to consider and teach. These ideas can also help me in my current life, as I am now more open and sensitive to other peoples takes on different subject areas and concepts. I would really love to do another in person EdCamp at the end of the semester, as we will have more knowledge to share based on our learning from our courses. For the time being, here is a link to an open access GoogleDoc I created with some of the subjects that people were the most interested in:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Xnr2sVMlD8psWEjV8ppi_nl37I4SWjDxwMtlmwI4TN4/edit?usp=sharing

Feel free to add more subjects and share questions/ comments on each subject. Hopefully this can act as an online EdCamp that we can use to support each other, and refer to when we are creating lesson plans and projects!

Special thanks to Antenna for the photo on Unsplash

Special thanks for the photo by Jason Strull on Unsplash