A Peek at My Week {8-03-14}

I hope this Sunday finds you well and ready for the first whole week of August!  I'm glad you are here.  It's time for us to all share what we've got planned for the week with A Peek at My Week.

I know many of you are getting ready to go back to school.  If you are one of those people, I wish you your best year ever!  I go back on August 26th, with students starting September 2nd.

On Monday, I am teaching a class about writing for my district.  I am very excited, but also a lot nervous. Last week I wrote about posting class information using LiveBinder and it generated a lot of questions and comments.  If you'd like to take a look at the LiveBinder I created, you can find it here.  It was pretty easy to put together and I like that it can be a resource that I can keep adding to.  Let me know what you think if you take a look.

On Tuesday, I am so excited to be attending EdCamp Lake Country.  This will be my second EdCamp and I am taking along a few teachers from school and our principal.  If you've never been to an EdCamp, you really MUST find one in your area. (You can find a directory of EdCamps here.)  They are amazing PD opportunities!

Also, this Monday and Tuesday, I will be doing a lot of shopping at the Teachers Pay Teachers Back to School SALE!  Many stores (including mine) are going to be up to 28% off with the code BTS14.  My cart is loaded and ready for check out.  I'm really glad I finished my Writer's Notebook Reference product in time for the sale.

An InLinkz Link-up

Have a wonderful week!

EdCamp - PD By Teachers, For Teachers

I've been looking forward to sharing this "tried it" for Tried it Tuesday with Holly from Fourth Grade Flipper for a long time!

Maybe you've heard of EdCamps and maybe you haven't yet.  One thing is for sure, EdCamps are an up and coming professional development experience for educators that are sweeping the world.

This past Saturday, I had the lucky opportunity to attend EdCamp Milwaukee (EdCampMKE) and my experience was unforgettable.

Source

I think I first found out about EdCamps from Krissy Venosdale @Venspired from this blog post.  If you want to know more about them, I seriously suggest you take a few minutes to visit her site. She is amazing!

So what is an EdCamp?

• EdCamps are usually held on Saturdays during the school year. During the summer, it's all over the place.
• They are FREE!  (But they usually limit the number of participants so be sure to get a ticket.)
• EdCamps are considered an "unconference" because you don't know the schedule of "classes" until that morning.
• To set the "class" schedule, EdCamp organizers call on participants to offer to "host" a session on a topic of their interest.  There are no "sages on the stage" or lecturing allowed.  It is truly collaborative.
• Session topics can seriously be about anything educational.  On Saturday, there were sessions that ranged from standards based grading to instituting a 1:1 program to how to organize your classroom for optimal learning.  To see our schedule topics click here.  There is surely something for everyone!
• When the session begins, anyone interested in that topic meets in the designated room and conversations begin.  One person may serve as leader, but usually it's just everyone contributing ideas and insights.
• If you don't like the topic or it's no longer meeting your needs, you can just leave the session and find a different one.  No one is offended or hurt.

Here are some of my pictures from my day at EdCamp:

Here I am with my friend Heather, who I brought along for the day.

Technology is everywhere!  

Getting ready to fill the board with sessions.

When someone wants to offer a session, the write it on a post-it, briefly share their idea with the crowd, then it gets put up on this grid. 

 (Thankfully, someone was sitting right there to put this all into an online document so we could read it.)

Here's Heather pitching our session on Teacherpreneurs.  It was a hit!! About 25 people attended.

We took a break to go outside at lunch.  It was a beautiful day.

Interested in attending an EdCamp?  You can check out this wiki to see when there is one near you.

If you'd like to see the Twitter feed from the day, you can check out #EdCampMKE.

Even though I gave up a Saturday to sit inside for EdCamp, I would do it again in a heartbeat.  I met so many wonderful educators, learned so much, and grew as a teacher in ways I had not expected!

What about you?  Have you tried out an EdCamp yet?  If not, don't wait!  Find one near you today.

A Peek at My Week {5/10/14}

Welcome to this week's edition of A Peek at My Week, my weekly linky party where we all gather to share what we've got going on both inside and outside our classrooms this week.

Before I jump into this upcoming week, I wanted to share that I just had the most amazing Saturday.  I spent the day with 250 other teachers at #EdCampMKE, an "unconference" in the Milwaukee area.  Now, you may be asking....what is an EdCamp and why would I give up a beautiful Saturday to participate?  EdCamps are the newest wave in teacher PD and they are AMAZING!  So amazing that I happily gave up a beautiful Saturday to spend it inside.  I am going to process everything and blog about it on Tuesday so please check back...there is so much I want to share!

This week at school, we are finishing up our Mythology Museums.  The kids were super excited for this project and I learned lots of new things today at EdCamp that I want to try to sneak in to make this project even better.  I was hoping we could finish last week, but we had a MAJOR glitch with our math MAP testing that totally threw my schedule for a loop and got us off track.

In writing, we are working on opinion writing and will write book reviews.  I found this fun lesson on Read Write Think that I am going to adapt.

We are going to begin by brainstorming a list of things we would want to see in a book review to determine if we wanted to read a book.  I'm *hoping* the kids come up with AT LEAST the following criteria (or they may receive a little help from me :)

• Title & Author of Book 
• Summarize the book w/o giving away the ending
• Your favorite part of the book 
• Why was book different or interesting to read 
• Give a recommendation (This book would be great for…)

Then we will read some book reviews that were written by kids from the Spaghetti Book Club website.

There are lots and lots of great reviews written by kids FOR kids on this website.  We will evaluate the reviews using the criteria that we chose from the beginning of the project.

After kids write and publish their book reviews that meet our agreed upon criteria, we are going to peer critique them using a rubric we create as a class. This is a really important step, I feel, because it also teaches kids to be more reflective of their own project.

I would also like to find a way to have the book reviews shared electronically.  I'm thinking of recording the kids reading/presenting their review and putting QR code stickers inside the covers of the books (if I can talk our librarian into that :) or some other forum.  Do you have any ideas?  Is there a way I can do this on Google docs to create a classroom catalog of book reviews through the years?  I'd love to hear your thoughts! :)

On Thursday, we are taking a field trip to Discovery World in Milwaukee.  I applied for and received a Kohl's Cares Field Trip grant last year so this trip is FREE for the students.  YAY!!  We will have a great time exploring this science and innovation based museum!

An InLinkz Link-up

I hope to see you back on Tuesday to read about my adventures in PD at EdCampMKE and on Thursday for Positive Thinking Thursday.  I wish you an awesome week!  Happy Mother's Day!!