Update! Here’s a link to the schedule!!!!!

 

 

Warning: That’s no moon! Please read carefully, as It’s a giant post filled with answers to the most pressing questions you’ll have!

What time is Edcamp?

Edcamp is happening THIS SATURDAY on May the Fourth be with you, 2013. Registration  and schedule building will start at 8:15. We’ll start kickoff at 9:00. First sessions start at 9:30. We’ll have lunch at some point, and wrap up with a shared debrief and Smackdown that should finish around 4:30.

How do I get to Edcamp?

Here are some helpful directions to help you get to and find parking at Microsoft’s new offices at 1CC. Please note that we’re NOT at the NERD this year!

Directions and Parking for 1CC

Please note that parking is a bit pricy at $25, so we strongly encourage taking the T or carpooling!

UPDATE: Or you can park here for only $8! It’s a little further to walk, but way cheaper!

The entrance you’ll use to get into the building is directly off of Main Street at the corner, next to the globe sculpture.

What will we have to eat and drink?

Please bring a water bottle this year! Microsoft has excellent water filtration systems where you’ll be able to use to fill up your water bottles at no cost to us, you, or the environment! We’re not providing any bottled water this year! We will have coffee with breakfast and an assortment of soft drinks with lunch.

Breakfast will be a selection of fruit, muffins, and bagels! Coffee will be served!

Lunch will once again be an assortment of sandwiches, wraps, and chips provided by Baker’s Best and paid for by our wonderful sponsors.

We’ve done our best to try and meet a variety of dietary needs, please forgive us if we didn’t meet yours. There are some other food vendors close by if you prefer those options.

After the day is over, please join us just around the corner at Meadhall for some snacks (on us!) and adult beverages (on you!).

What will people be wearing?

We’re going all fancy this year with preprinted name badges. We’ll have badge holders with clips. If you prefer a lanyard, please bring one!

If you’re looking for assistance at any point in the day, look for an organizer. You’ll be able to tell who the organizers are, because we’ll be wearing these sweet track jackets.

If you were smart enough to prepurchase an Edcamp Boston tshirt with your registration, have we got a treat for you! Check this out!

Boom! So awesome, right? Are you now disappointed that you didn’t purchase a shirt in advance? Well, we have a very limited number of extra shirts that will be available for purchase the morning of the event! Would you believe these will go for only $20 (cash only!)? We promise we’ll totally put that money towards future Edcamp awesomeness.

What sessions will there be?

We don’t know yet! Edcamp is completely based around the interests, passions, and questions that we all bring with us the morning of the event! During the first hour or so we’ll collaboratively build the schedule to fit our needs. If you want to facilitate a session, you just go up to the board, slap a sticky note with a catchy title on it, and then get out of the way so other people can add theirs. It sounds crazy if you’ve never been to an Edcamp before, but we swear that it works every single time.

What should my sessions look like?

A good Edcamp session should involve the people in the room as much as possible. We’re all called participants for a reason! Don’t stand in front of the room and lecture at people or give a presentation from a slide deck. Have a real conversation. Invite questions and responses from everybody in the room. Do something hands-on. Practice awesome pedagogy, basically.

Since this is the third Edcamp Boston, and New England has hosted a whole bunch of Edcamps by now, we’re really looking forward to all session facilitators bringing their A-game. At this point we should mostly be past just sharing lists of tools. We should be talking about how we’re actually doing stuff in our classes. We should have grand debates about the future of education. We should be talking serious pedagogy, teaching, and learning. Less tools, more teaching and learning! Bring it.

What should I do if I go to a session and it doesn’t work for me?

Hey, it happens to all of us sooner or later. Maybe you realize the conversation isn’t going in a useful direction for you. Maybe you misunderstood what the session would be about by the title. Maybe it’s not your kind of thing. Maybe you get really engrossed into a side conversation with somebody and decide to take it out into the hallway. Maybe there’s another session at the same time you also want to check out! Or, unfortunately, maybe somebody’s lecturing, or running a session that feels like a sales pitch instead of a discussion.

Vote with your feet.

If, for any reason, you decide you’d rather be elsewhere, just leave the room! It’s totally cool. It’s not rude to leave the room during an Edcamp. It’s just you recognizing that, in that moment, you feel your learning would be maximized by going somewhere else. You are not insulting the facilitator, who should expect that some people will move in and out of the room during the session time.

If it doesn’t move you, get moving.

How can I connect online and share all of the learning I’m doing?

Thanks to the untimely passing of Posterous, this year we’re going to try out a new site, MightyBell. You can easily add any kind of document to it you wish (photos, written reflections, PDFs, etc) to it either directly in the website itself or via email. So in these few days beforehand, join up and say hi.

Of course, you can also join us on our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. We have a pretty great list of participants who are already on Twitter if you’re looking for some new friends to follow.

And of course, use hashtag #edcampbos on Twitter ad any other website that uses them (Instagram, Vine, Flickr, etc, etc, etc)

This post was too long! Can you remind me what I should bring, then?

Sure!

• Water bottle
• An empty stomach so none of our food goes to waste
• Lanyard
• Cash (if you want to buy a t-shirt)
• Great ideas for sessions
• An open mind for learning
• A MightyBell account already set up for maximum sharing
• Laptop/iPad/personal learning device of choice

Will I learn something and have fun?

Yes! May the Fourth be with you!