The day started with an excellent keynote by Jesse Brown (yes, that Jesse Brown) about how to take advantage of disruption. His biggest point for me was, of course, fail. Building failure into the model is also a feature of the growth mindset, which I'm still struggling to bring to many of my students.
Speaking of failures, I utterly failed to go to any sessions because I decided at the last minute that my presentations needed gifs (and why can't I stop typing figs every time?), but I've been creeping everyone's Slides ever since. There are terrific resources there; you should check them out.The sessions I most wanted to attend were Larissa Aradj's BreakoutEDU Digital and Arianna Lambert's Digital Breakouts using Google Slides, since I've gotten really interested in making digital breakouts for assignments (and tried one out a few weeks ago -- now there's a failure story for you). David Hann's Manage GMail flow with Tasks will (hopefully) save me bunches of time. Jason Trinh's creating reports with Autocrat is something I will be looking into if/when I can no longer use EasyGrade Pro.
The Demo Slam was amazing, as usual. I really could have used Zelia Capitao Tavares's fantastic
Can't wait until Google Camp 5.0!
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I'll end by including the slidedecks (and a how-to video) for my presentations, but one of the things I find when I'm preparing for presentations like this is that I always learn new things. For instance, while preparing for my first session -- which was about how to make a self-marking, non-multiple choice quiz that gives immediate feedback -- I discovered that I need to revise my previous blog posts, and specifically my comments about what query() does (because it doesn't do what I thought it did, for the most part) and because I also learned about arrayformula(). Always learning!
My second session was about tools and tips for flipping lessons. The most important take-away from this presentation, I think, is "What is the best use of face-to-face time with students?"
Part of my session shills for EDpuzzle, which if you remember I learned about at STAO in November. Since then I've jumped in with both feet and lately, I've been plaguing them with suggestions for new features.
Teachers learning about flipped learning & @EDpuzzle at #TDSBcamp. #edpuzzleworkshop #TDSB_TLT pic.twitter.com/61rNjAk6Er— Ms McPhee (JarvisCI) (@ms_mcphee) March 4, 2017
What did I learn through prepping for this presentation? I reread Flipped Learning by Bergmann and Sams and remembered the post-video reflection forms one of the teachers uses. I had let those go by the wayside since using EDpuzzle in favour of embedded quizzes, but I think I will start reintroducing two/three-question reflection forms as exit cards.
