We are embarking on a new adventure at the ISTE 2016 conference in Denver, Colorado: the ISTE Campfires. The ISTE Campfires are going to replace the Birds of a Feather sessions, connecting educators around their interests and passions at the conference. These sessions are built on the idea of educators wanting to connect and collaborate on current topics of interest in a dynamic environment. We will launch these sessions on Monday and Tuesday evening of the conference (5:30-7:30pm and 5:15-7:15pm, respectively) and are looking for volunteers to help us shape the Campfires and help us as facilitators for the learning in the Campfire rooms.
The task is to work with ISTE's Conference Program Chair Camilla Gagliolo, and PAECT's Chris Champion to create the environment for dialogue and idea sharing at the Campfire sessions. Facilitators will start the conversation in each of four strands:
- Mobile Learning
- Professional Learning (PD, Coaching, etc)
- STEM/STEAM/Maker/Gamification
- Teaching and Learning Strategies (PBL, Online/Flipped Learning, etc)
Volunteers will be tasked with starting a Padlet, encouraging participants interested in leading sub-topic to put a "sticky" up on the Padlet. Then the facilitators will create about six sub-groups based on the topic. If there are too many disparate topics, they'll use PollEverywhere to get a popular vote.
Table signs are then labeled by a facilitator (getting help perhaps from attendees), and then the people in the room are directed to each table for the "conversation"
If everything goes well, we won't need to come back to topic selection. If the room stagnates, the facilitators may need to revisit topics or encourage people to cross-pollenate.
We hope that you would be interested in working with us on this new initiative.
If you are interested, please sign up with this form:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1YCfzdrfD56CXeWlA6Pq1xRXTrCtVCOhfVdUGgMcB57U/viewform
A brief webinar will be held on Wednesday June 15 at 8:00 PM EDT to discuss this further, and to answer any questions. Registered volunteers (link above) will be sent a link.
P.S. Please pass this along if you think another educator would be interested.
