Hard to believe I woke up in the beautiful Smoky Mountains this morning. Joanne, Nate, and I drove to Burlington, where Nate and I promptly got in his car and drove to Raleigh-Durham airport, because I am about to fly to Ohio to go to the wedding of a great friend of mine with whom I teach and coach. I’m sitting near Gate D17 at RDU, waiting for my flight. Looong day.

While I was super excited about the raft trip and it was (along with the edcamp) my favorite activity of the week, the highlight of my experience at NCCAT would be the relationships formed. Our cohort is AWESOME.

 

Project: The 1NFuns

Project: Wearable Devices

Project: Students Discover

The teachers here have been selected (from a pool of around 300 applications) to do this project and I feel honored to be among them.

We were presented with some fantastic resources in addition to having the time to network and form relationships. The project management tool Trello is going to revolutionize the way I do group work.  I do some formal debates in my class that require a lot of purposeful collaboration and teamwork.  Trello is going to be a perfect tool for that (and my teammates and I are going to use it to plan our year AND my E-Mammal projectmates and I are going to use it to plan our Kenan product). Trello was introduced to me by @mcscienceteach, who put on a great workshop about project management. @mshicksenglish shared some great resources for the discussion based classroom as well. Hoo-boy, I am ready to start cracking on next year.

Even with something as high quality as Kenan PD, there is always room for improvement.  I attended a session with a teacher that (because I follow her on Twitter) I know is awesome. But, I was expecting some very practical advice on implementing successful project-based learning in my classroom and I didn’t get it.  I think edcamp’s philosophy of “The Law of Two Feet” needs to be implemented at ALL PD for teachers, and this problem would be solved.

Regardless of this session, my week at NCCAT has been better than any other PD I’ve attended save my two day visit to Ron Clark Academy. The programming that was put together was helpful and useful and practical and didn’t waste our time.  Additionally, they take good care of teachers at NCCAT and I’m currently brainstorming a way that a few teachers at Broadview can go.  Believe it or not, this resource is not widely mentioned where I teach in ABSS.

I have a feeling that will change soon.