Run your meetings edcamp style: The un-faculty faculty meeting

If you’re like most educators, you don’t have the time to waste on unproductive faculty meetings. That’s why administrators and teacher leaders should transform faculty meetings into engaging professional development (PD) opportunities. We did that in my school and increased faculty attendance by 10 percent on faculty meeting days! You can find out more about how we did this here.

Want to take it even further with engaging, interactive professional learning community (PLC)-style faculty meetings? You can elevate the motivation and learning to heights that seem unreachable. But they are reachable. How? Edcamp-style faculty meetings!

An edcamp is a participant-driven conference, commonly referred to as an “unconference,” for K-12 educators. Edcamps are typically free and built around community participation and organization. If you’re interested in empowering your faculty with the same motivation and learning that transcends to student achievement, you’ll want to replicate how we turned our faculty meetings into mini edcamps. Here are the steps that any school can follow.…Read More

10 reasons why you’ll love Edcamp as much as I do

Have you ever been in a professional learning (PL) experience where you don’t keep looking at the time, checking Facebook, or texting people? I have! I spend several Saturdays a year at an Edcamp, an unconference-style professional development (PD) for all educators. You might be wondering why I would give up a Saturday to attend an Edcamp, so here are 10 reasons why you will love Edcamps as much as I do.

1. You are with rockstar educators from all walks of life. The energy at an Edcamp is electric! Rooms are buzzing with passionate people ready to learn to support students and make positive change in schools.

2. It is the perfect place to build your professional learning network (PLN). You will meet many of your Twitter connections face to face and encounter new faces to connect with on Twitter. Edcamps build relationships that last long after the Saturday event. I now have plenty of people to reach out to when I do not know the answer to something.…Read More

The New Librarian: How to build a face-to-face PLN in 3 easy steps

By now the term professional learning network (PLN) is used very often, but much of the time it refers to the virtual type, meaning our online colleagues and networks. Being a media specialist can be a lonely profession and it’s not uncommon to feel like we’re siloed. As I have moved from being a classroom teacher into teacher leader positions, I’ve noticed it can get lonely and I find myself looking for a face-to-face tribe. Although I find this at conferences, they are infrequent and expensive.

So how can media specialists get out from the media center and network with like-minded educators without flying to ISTE or AASL? By getting involved in the “unconference” movement. Here are three different ways to do just that!

1. CoffeeEDU
I first encountered CoffeeEDU as “CoffeeCUE” and thought, “Cool. I like coffee.”…Read More