I am so grateful that today’s 7th edcampNYC event was a great day for so many people! It could never have happened without my co-organizers, Ann Oro and Cathy Cheo-Isaacs, and the generosity of The Mandell School‘s administration and faculty (notably Peter Fletcher, Ben Chant, and Tiffany Della Vedova).

It was a big crowd that convened at Mandell‘s cafeteria with its lovely green plant-covered wall. I over-ordered from Whole Foods UWS catering menu thanks to the generosity of our sponsors, BrainPop and PledgeCents. Whole Foods also contributed extra items to our order so that our attendees could properly carbo-load before the first session began.

It was awesome that Hadley Ferguson, Executive Director of the Edcamp Foundation, could join us along with two other founders of the first edcamp, edcampPhilly, and the Edcamp Foundation (Kevin Jarrett and Mike Ritzius)! I was also glad to see so many new and familiar faces including Lisa Nielsen who helped gather a large contingent of NYC DOE teachers and leaders as participants and facilitators. Also in attendance were organizers of upcoming decamps, edcampBrooklyn and edcampStatenIsland!

The session board filled up with topics ranging from tweeting to coding, student voice to crowd-sourced funding, making connections to integrating makerspaces. The beauty of an unconference is that the schedule is BLANK until attendees gather and put up conversational topics that THEY CHOOSE to talk about. I stressed that whoever posted a session is responsible for facilitating a conversation rather than delivering a presentation. I also reminded people that the beauty of openspaces and the “rule of two feet” means that if you’re not being stimulated in a discussion, you are free to leave and move to another space. I joked that I always take it personally when people walk out on my sessions (#kiddingnotkidding), and I mentioned that following the hashtag for #edcmapnyc on Twitter is another way to peek in and learn from the discussions in other rooms as well.

Many thanks to Godwyn Morris, owner of Dazzling Discoveries, for hosting attendees to her Upper West Side Makerspace afterwards. So many people enthusiastically walked an additional 9 blocks north to explore Scratch 3D, 3D design with Tinkercad, Makerbot printing, and constructing simple machines with DazzLinks (a new product from Dazzling Discoveries).

Here’s a link to the 2016 edcampNYC session board: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1BPJFosW5joMUqKDZ8xlso2hHyokF_QipL6YfEJzYcUk/pubhtml

Here’s a link to the Tagboard of #edcampNYC tweets: https://tagboard.com/edcampnyc/search

Hadley Ferguson is the newly appointed Executive Director of the Edcamp Foundation. Her announcement coincided with #SatChat, edcampNJ, and edcampNYC! Hadley discussed her new role via #SatChat live from @edcampNJ – #SatChat is a weekly Twitter chat about education and administration which takes place on Saturday mornings. Hadley then hopped a train and joined us at edcampNYC! Kim Sivick was also in attendance at edcampNYC. Hadley and Kim (and an amazing group of inspiring and innovative educators) organized the first edcamp in Philadelphia (@edcampPhilly) in May of 2010 and founded the Edcamp Foundation. edcampPhilly started a movement that altered the traditional model of Professional Development, empowered teachers around the world, begat communities of educators sharing and learning together, and changed my life.

Besides having Hadley and Kim in attendance, it was gratifying to greet many familiar faces, many new faces, and even folks who had never been to an edcamp before. It was also awesome to follow the tweets generated during the day and gather/promote these from the @edcampnyc account. There were some great topics offered, and luckily many sessions had notetakers or someone who started a shared GoogleDoc. See our November 2014 session board with links to any notes below:

I’ve had a few people ask me for advice on how to organize an edcamp. Here are some bare essentials:

Attend an edcamp!

Reserve a Gmail account with edcamp***@gmail.com (where *** is your theme or geographic location).

Use the Google Drive associated with edcamp***@gmail.com to create a digital spreadsheet for your event’s schedule (this can be linked and embedded on your event’s website).

Use this Gmail address to reserve edcamp*** on Twitter.

Reserve edcamp*** on a blogging platform (like WordPress or Blogger) to communicate details about the event. Buy the edcamp***.org, edcamp***.net, edcamp***.com, or edcamp***.info domain name if you like.

Add your event’s info to the official edcamp wiki.

Find a space to host your event, preferably a school with a robust Wifi network, easy to locate rooms and bathrooms, projectors or screens in classrooms, a large common area for announcements and networking, space for a physical paper schedule, space for breakfast set up, and hopefully one who will foot the insurance bill.

Locate a breakfast sponsor.

See what help the Edcamp Foundation can provide in terms of sponsor and insurance.

Set up a ticketing page using Ticketleap or Eventbrite or Meetup to handle registration.

Promote! Use Twitter (get other edcamps to tweet about your event), your PLN, Google+, Facebook, call schools directly, contact graduate schools of education…

I went to the inaugural EdCampNYC in 2010 at The School at Columbia University -- it was a great event, and gave me what I'm always looking for at PD events: the time, space and people I need to solve problems that have been facing me. And to uncover problems I didn't know I had. And, most importantly, to absorb all the great work that people are doing in education.

I missed '11 and '12, but decided to go back this year for '13, and I'm very glad I did. Check out the session board (Basil Kolani has a photo of it on his site anotherthinkcoming.org). 

My biggest takeaway was a practical one: Google Apps Scripts. I've always been vaguely aware of them, and even tried to tinker around with a few, but never have I seen what they are really capable of. As you may have seen in my Saturday Twitter-storm, I was freaking out a little bit about the efficiency that Apps scripts can offer. Andrew Stillman has put together a collection of the scripts he has made (the one that blew my mind) on his organization's website, cloudlab.newvisions.org. These scripts make Google Apps exponentially more powerful by allowing teachers to add grading rubrics, create and distribute template documents and folders to students, batch change editing privileges via "Edit Embargo", and much much more. Suffice it to say that I will be spending a lot more time exploring these, and will be bringing them to faculty to begin testing. I'm also hoping to get some faculty playing with it for December's CS Ed Week's #hourofcode.

Next up, I led a session called "Integration: Moving Beyond STEAM (And other acronyms...)". Lots of great stuff in the session notes, and on the #edcampnyc hashtag on Twitter between 11/09/2013 11:20am EST and 12:20pm. My school is in the process of following up on a Strategic Plan and we have a task force setup to look at the future of Math and Science, and where STEAM fits into that. It was a fantastic conversation around integration, acronyms, project-based learning, blowing up schedules and academic departments, and some practical tips and tricks to do more integration of subjects in your courses. One I offered: a photography class or project where you have to first build your camera using a Big Shot Camera or similar. My biggest takeaway from that session: what are the universal and timeless characteristics of education, like problem-solving, resiliency, critical thinking, etc., and how are we using our various skills and expertise to fulfill those using the modern tools available to us?

I followed up with that by actually doing some constructing with Jaymes Dec and Dylan Ryder, and a small group of us used Lego WeDos, Scratch, and a variety of other doo-dads to build a little Rube Goldberg-esque machine. Basil and I worked in a group together, and he wrote about our work very nicely here. We may not have popped the balloon, but we did pierce it, and had a lot of fun constructing the system as we tried.