Saturday, May 30, 2015

Edcamp Boston: Limitless Learning

I just got home from edcamp Boston. I skipped the after party because I was saturated with new ideas.

My immediate takeaways are the following:
  • Rich text empowers students, and teachers who take the time to teach all subjects with rich text, teach well.
  • There are many strategies to make math learning accessible to our diverse learners. Partial notes and recording tools are two options that provide good support. 
  • High quality, collaboartive educational games will be here soon and there's opportunities to pilot those games in your school system now. 
  • Many systems are employing more strategic, collaborative, and inclusive professional learning that models successful teaching/learning venues.
  • There's lots to learn about successful project base learning (PBL) and the best way to begin is to embed standards into PBL learning design/activity and develop your leadership/coaching in this regard as you experience and learn more about that venue.
  • Successful STEAM depends on organization, time, safety, and child-centered learning design and collaboration.
  • It's important to make time to connect with educators outside of your system regularly via informal structures of share such as edcamps, unconferences, and Twitter chats.
I'm sure that there will be more takeaways in the days ahead, but in the meantime, I want to thank the dynamic edcamp Boston team for their time and leadership. I've included a storify below that includes today's specific takeaways.