Today we learned about EdCamp in class. They are completely free and built to help build communities and make better educators. It is a great place for teachers to share different pedagogy and help teachers build different techniques.

We then had the opportunity to make our own EdCamp. We put our interest on post-it notes and voted on three different EdCamp styled projects we could do. The great part of the post-it notes was seeing how many different areas of expertise our class had.

Our group did a discussion on mindfulness. One group did inclusiveness and one quote that stayed with me for my teaching practices was: “You got to teach with high structure and a lot of warmth”. Another group did a Favourite teacher. That group found that the thing that made a teacher for them impactful was someone who would do something completely different from every other teacher.

The process of EdCamp seemed beneficial for our class because we all were able to have a discussion and provide different points of view. It was important that it does not happen all the time but for a refresher every now and again. Our group topic moved to many different topics, which were all really beneficial to discuss. Overall, this class was a great time to learn from my peers. However, it could have been better if we had time to become experts and really think about an idea that we wanted to talk about before class started. Because we came up with our ideas in class, the discussion was unstructured. This was great because we got to talk about many different areas but it weakened our knowledge of mindfulness.