Author: Wesley Fryer

PLAYDATE OKC Google+ Community & Organizer Meetings

Please join our PLAYDATE OKC Google+ Community! We will use that G+ space to share resources, links, and our learning during and after PLAYDATE OKC!

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Also, if you are interested in helping us organize our first PLAYDATE OKC on Saturday, May 10th from 6 – 10 pm at John Marshall High School, please join our organizer team. We’ve had several initial meetings and are now expanding our group to include more people interested in helping.

Our next meeting is Wednesday, April 23rd via a Google Hangout from 7-8 pm. For future meetings we may move to Tuesday nights, but this week Wednesday will work best. Please RSVP to this event in our G+ community if you can or might be able to attend.

Thanks!

PLAYDATE OKC 2014: Saturday May 10th

You are formally invited to register and attend PLAYDATE OKC, coming to John Marshall High School in Oklahoma City on Saturday, May 10th from 6 pm to 10 pm. No presenters. No agendas. Just playing. That’s right, a FREE night of tinkering with apps, playing with technology tools, and collaborating with other innovative educators in and near Oklahoma City! More information is available on playdate.edcampOKC.org, including registration via EventBrite. Please help us spread the word! A PDF marketing flyer is available you can print and share!

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Find out if PLAYDATE is a good for your professional development by watching the 52 second video, “Is PLAYDATE Right For You?”

More information is available about the “backstory” of PLAYDATE OKC 2014! We’d love for you to join our volunteer organizer team!

Why EdCamp? A Crowdsourced Video Project

Did you attend EdCampOKC 2014? Have you attended EdCamp somewhere else? We want to know YOUR answer to the question: WHY EDCAMP?

One of our EdCampOKC 2014 organizers, Anne Beck, has agreed to put together these videos into a longer video we can share in advance of EdCampTulsa on Saturday, March 29, 2014, in Jenks. Here’s what we need you to do to help out!

  1. Record a 15 – 30 second video of yourself answering the question, “Why EdCamp?”
  2. Upload your video to a cloud storage site like DropBox or Google Drive. Set the sharing to public and copy the link to the video file.
  3. Email THE LINK to your video file to annebeck2586 [at] gmail [dot] com by midnight on Sunday, March 9, 2014.

Be sure you agree to our licensing terms: We’ll be sharing your video (along with others) on YouTube under a Creative Commons Attribution-Only License.

If you have questions about this project or run into trouble, send a tweet to Anne @MrsBeck25. She’ll share the compiled/composite video of submissions soon afterward, most likely by the end of next week so we can use it to help build more interest in EdCampTulsa!

Also, if you haven’t already, please register to attend EdCampTulsa on Saturday, March 29, 2014, in Jenks. Registration is FREE and available via EventBrite. There are 132 registered as of today, and the facility capacity is just 200, so you need to register soon. This may be our first EdCamp event in Oklahoma to sell out! 🙂

First PlayDateOKC Scheduling

One of the exciting ideas which emerged from EdCampOKC last Saturday was hosting a free “PLAYDATE” event in Oklahoma City later this semester. If you’re interested in this after reading this post, please complete this 1 question poll/survey also embedded below.

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Saturday April Gustafson and I discussed hosting a PlayDate in the evening on an upcoming weekend at John Marshall High School where April teaches science in OKCPS. We’re thinking maybe a Saturday night from 6 – 10 pm.  If you’re not familiar with the “PlayDate” concept, check out the official PlayDate Google Site. PlayDate conferences are a brainchild of the amazing #BurNTA teachers in Chicago. PlayDate events correspond very well with the ethos and philosophy of EdCamps. They explain PlayDate conferences this way on their site:

A new kind of conference.
No presenters. No agendas. Just playing.
Explore the things you’ve never had time to explore.

This is a new kind of conference. Think about the last time you attended an EdTech PD, conference or other professional learning event. Oftentimes, we leave full of new knowledge and a list overflowing with new apps, programs and skills to try out. However, once we return to “the real world” many of us lack the time and support to actually try out all of these new tools.

PLAYDATE is a space for us to come together and collaboratively explore these tools we’ve always wanted to learn more about. The concept is to invite educators from around the area to join together on one day, sit in a room for a few hours and just play. They will collaborate to learn about EdTech apps, programs and tools with one another. There are no presenters in the room, no experts and no agenda. Simply time to play, tinker, and explore.

Like EdCamps, PlayDate conferences are now popping up around the United States. The key elements for a successful PlayDate are summarized in Carolyn Skibba’s tweet today: The time must be “collaborative, self-directed, presenter free, & hands on.”

For more background about PlayDate conferences, read Jenny Magiera‘s November 2012 post, “PlanePlanning: The Birth of #PLAYDATE13.” You can also check out this 30 min video “What’s a PlayDate?”

What do you think? Would you be interested in attending a FREE Saturday evening “PlayDate” conference later this semester in Oklahoma City? The Saturday evenings we’re considering are Sat March 29, or any of the Saturdays in April Please add your thoughts as comments to this post, and submit this poll (several times if desired) to let us know what date(s) are best for you.

posted by Wes Fryer

Save the Date: Saturday, Feb 15, 2014

Save the date and make plans now to attend the second annual EdCampOKC on Saturday, February 15, 2014! This year’s conference will be held at Grant High School in Oklahoma City Public Schools. Registration is FREE and is available online now via EventBrite. Check out our schedule, which is almost entirely identical to the schedule we followed in our first conference in 2013.

EdCamps are different and unique professional development events. In addition to being FREE for everyone, EdCamps are:

  1. Collaborative: EdCamp is all about meeting other teachers and learning together!
  2. Participant-led: Each EdCamp session is a conversation among many rather than a one-way presentation of ideas by one person or a group
  3. Dynamically planned: We create the schedule together in the morning during our first event
  4. Fun: As an all-volunteer learning event, fun is both encouraged and expected throughout the day!

Learn more about EdCamps by watching the videos linked and embedded on our ABOUT page.

Organizer Team Forming for EdCampOKC 2014

Are you interested in helping organize and plan EdCampOKC 2014? If so, please take a minute and fill out this Doodle Poll, and also add a COMMENT to this post so we’ll have your email and can send you a message about our next online meeting.

We’re going to have our initial planning meeting the week of September 23rd in the evening, via a Google Hangout. Our date and location isn’t finalized yet for our next event, but we’re looking at having EdCampOKC in OKCPS next year on a Saturday in February.

We’ll post more updates here as they are available!

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