Yesterday I went to to EdCamp Garden State. The first session I went to was facilitated by @mrfieldmanchs. The session was all about social justice. One of the main nuggets I came away with is that in order to have a discussion about social justice we have to start with the definition of privilege. According to the everydayfeminism.com, “We can define privilege as a set of unearned benefits given to people who fit into a specific social group.” Once we understand privilege we can have the hard conversations about our privilege and how that affects our students. I also noticed that I manterrupted @jacq_mccarthy during the session. I apologized to her after the session. At least I am aware of my micro-aggressions these days. The conversations were productive and reinforced that we need to infuse social justice across the year and not just fit them into separate months. 

Jacqueline (@jacq_mccarthy) ran a session on Buncee.  For those of you like myself who don’t know what Buncee is :

Buncee® is a whole new way of creating and sharing online and mobile greetings, memories, interests, new finds, business stories and more in a unique, fun and social way. By leveraging the capabilities of online tools and iOS devices, buncee makes it easy for even the most ‘non-technical’ individuals to create and share engaging and interactive multi-media creations that can be shared publicly or privately.

Our edu.buncee.com web-based platform provides users with multiple easy-to use tools to add personal photos, text, drawings, and online content such as YouTube videos, Soundcloud audio, flickr, Google, or public Instagram images into a digital canvas called a ‘buncee’ that can be shared among all your social and private networks with just a few clicks.

It was a great session. The part I liked the best was that she gave people the time to play around with the new tool.  I think of Buncee as an interactive flyer or slide show. There will be so many ways you can use this product!! I will be using Buncee in the future.

The final session I went to with great trepidation. I thought was going to be a whining session. The session was called teacher burnout. I went on the off chance that it was going to be about how to prevent it instead of just complaining how hard everything is in schools today. There was some complaining but the facilitator was writing down ideas on how what we do in our schools to prevent burnout as well as how to change our school climate. The room was sharing multiple ideas and it stayed positive for most of the session.

One nugget that came out of the session was that one teacher stated he received an email from his supervisor on Friday afternoon that they wanted to meet with them on Monday. The email did not have any details on what the tone or the reason for the meeting was. We discussed how much this bothers teachers. It ruins the nights and weekends of teachers. I understand that appointments need to be made but I am sure that teachers would much rather meet that day then chew on something for an entire night or weekend. Check out this link  for the sessions as well as the session notes.

Special shot goes out to reconnecting with my man TJ Mckinney (@tj9er) who was my pseudo roommate in college!! It has been years since we hung out! Kudos to Dan Whalen (@whalen) for organizing and running such a wonderful event!

Q1: What program do you use to make flyers in your classroom? #slowchatpe

Q2: What are your thoughts about Buncee? #slowchatpe

Q3:  How do you avoid burnout? #slowchatpe

Q4: What is one tip that helps keep your staff culture warm and friendly? #slowchatpe

Q5: What lessons do you keep for the end of the year to combat student burnout?  #slowchatpe