Weekly Reflection – Topic 9

Hi everyone! This week we did the EdCamp conference and I joined the breakout room about student skills. I think EdCamp conferences are an awesome idea for educators. Sometimes going to a conference can be so boring because they are not something you are actually interested in but being able to choose your own topics and have colleague led discussions would make them so much more engaging! I think being able to set up an EdCamp conference for your school district or even just for the school you are working in could be very beneficial to the educators.

When I joined the breakout room about student skills we talked about a few different things such as general student skills versus social skills. For just general student skills, we want to help students improve things like typing, spelling, writing essays by hand, and teaching confidences/assertiveness to reduce bullying. For social skills, we want to help students with their collaboration skills, team building, public speaking skills, sharing ideas with other students, etc. Socialization in schools has decreased greatly due to things like social media so we as educators need to work to build peer socialization back up. Many teachers have completely taken away presentations because it is anxiety inducing but we emphasized that anxiety comes from the fact that educators are not preparing students for presentations properly. We believe scaffolded learning of how to present to a class will be so helpful for students in the future. Down below I just took a screen shot of our main discussion highlights and our proposed EdCamp workshop objective for this issue!