This week we skipped are regular class on Tuesday in order to partake in an EdCamp on the Wednesday. This was such a cool experience! There was people from all over the place that attended from students to experts in specific topic areas. It was quite intimidating as it was my first time doing something like this but it was super cool and I would love to do it again. Now that I have done one, I think I would be more prepared and less nervous if I did another one.

Originally, I started by joining the inquiry based learning room as this is something I am super interested in. This room was full of people that I did not know and was extremely intimidating. Everyone else in this room seemed to know each other and were chatting and I was kind of off in the corner by myself just listening. The others in this room all seemed to be older than me and were talking about their upcoming practicum. Their conversation was pretty focused on this and inquiry based learning in terms of their approaching practicum which was not really the conversation I was looking for; so, I decided to utilize the hopping rooms to my advantage and switch to a different room.

The next room I joined was the “how to survive your first practicum” room. I came into this room in the middle of a conversation so I just listened but the one piece of information that really stood out to me was a tip that an educator shared. She said the when you are on practicum you should do whatever you can to get involved in the school community. She recommends doing things like coaching, chaperoning a dance etc. Anything you can do to get involved in the community, make connections, and get your name out there. I thought this was genius and really took this tip to heart for future reference. After this tip, there was a call out for some people in the overflow room to join the original room. Since I had shown up late and was not super immersed in the conversation yet, I decided I would jump to the other room so some of the people that were more involved in that conversation could stay. I switched over and one of the ladies immediately engaged me in conversation. It was kind of intimidating but she was super awesome. We talked about a spread of things before more people began to joint the room from what I talked about in the other rooms to first impressions with teachers and students to some of our personal interests to simple things like what to wear to practicums. Once a few others had joined, we began talking about first impression strategies with students. Some of the ideas shared about how to make a good first connection with students included creating a video about yourself to share, creating a quiz about yourself that students would take etc. Basically, you need to establish a relationship in that first day with students and let them see that you are human too.

Lastly, I jumped over to the indigenization of curriculum room before I had to take off a couple of minutes early to make it to an appointment. I did not have much time in this room but in the time that I did have I got a couple of useful tips. One woman suggested really utilizing the FPPL. She said that when using these principles, it is important to make reference to where they are showing up and how for students. This gets them familiar with the language and principles and allows them to see how we are actually utilizing the principles in learning. She also mentioned that including FPPL of every lesson when you are creating should be something we do. Overall, the FPPL can not just be “a poster on the” and as long as we are trying and have humility, people will answer you questions and respond to you trying your best.

In conclusion, what a crazy experience. It was not at all what I expected but it exceeded my expectations. I would definitely do this again and consider running one one day. I think the benefits are undeniable. As one final note, the resource documents that we now have are also a perk. Such a great tool for us to have in the future! I have linked the doc for future reference and so I can dive into some of the topics I did not get to make it to deeper!