Edcamp West

Welcome to Edcamp West!

Join us for a morning full of teacher-driven professional collaboration among educators throughout Central New York. Unlike traditional conferences, edcamp sessions are not planned or scheduled until the morning of the event using a scheduling board on which attendees can place an index card with their session on it. The sessions range from basic conversations around teaching methods to sessions sharing digital projects by students or sessions based around just having fun. Many edcamps include sessions about using technology in the classroom, but a technology focus is not necessary. However, it is suggested that you bring a laptop to an edcamp as many presentations will be interactive.

What is Edcamp? A Brief History

What began as an idea has transformed into a movement! From Portland to Pittsburgh, Seattle to Stockholm, Abu Dhabi to Atlanta, and in hundreds of towns and cities around the globe, authentic professional learning is energizing educators. Edcamp — participatory, teacher-driven professional learning events — are multiplying on a national and international scale, creating local and global communities of passionate educators.

The first Edcamp was organized by a group of teachers who came together in Philadelphia in May 2010 for BarCamp, a computer science un-conference. At BarCamp, people create discussion sessions on the day of the event based on the interests in the room. The entire day is personalized and learner driven. It’s a place where everyone is a learner and everyone is a leader.

After experiencing the passion, sharing and excitement that surrounded the event, a handful of educators decided it was too good to contain. They exchanged contact information and, with Google Hangouts and face-to-face meetings over a period of months, tweaked the design and adjusted the BarCamp concept to accommodate teachers and administrators.

TENETS OF EDCAMP:

Participant-driven. Sessions are determined the morning of the event, and there are no prescheduled presentations or keynotes. The goal is to keep sessions spontaneous, interactive and responsive to everyone’s needs.
Free to all attendees. This helps ensure that different types of teachers and educational stakeholders can attend.
Experience, not Experts. All teachers and education stakeholders are professionals worthy of sharing their expertise in a collaborative setting.
Reliant on the Rule of Two Feet. Participants are encouraged to actively self-select the best content and sessions. Edcampers should leave sessions that do not meet their needs. This provides an effective way of “weeding out” sessions that are not based on appropriate research or not delivered in an engaging format.

CONNECTING PEOPLE AND GOOD IDEAS

And so it began. During the first Edcamp people who had learned about EdcampPhilly on Twitter went back to social media to share what they were learning and what the experience was like. Tweets went out and were read by educators around the world. People began to reach out to better understand what it took to host an Edcamp. By the end of 2010, there were eight Edcamps around the US. Just as with Edcamp Philly, educators continued to document their experiences online, sharing blog posts and tweets after the new Edcamp events.

And the movement began to grow, more and more quickly!

Suddenly, we reached a “tipping point,” which Malcolm Gladwell describes as the point when an event or idea reaches enough critical mass to become mainstream.

Since the original Edcamp in 2010 there have been over 1500 Edcamps around the world in 35 countries. Embracing the belief that fellow educators can be some of the most valuable professional development resources for their colleagues, the Edcamp movement has been recognized by countless organizations, including the United States Department of Education, the Bammy Awards for Education, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), the TEDx program and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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