Playdate Ottawa #1
by Amy Bowker
June 8, 2014
This weekend was the first Playdate Ottawa (June 7th, 2014) and I was so happy to help plan it. The idea of Playdate originated in Chicago with the incredible Jennie Magiera and Sue Gorman. PLAYDATE is an acronym and stands for People Learning and Asking Why: Digital Age Teacher Exploration. A playdate is an opportunity to play with the tools and apps that usually learn about in conferences but don’t have time to play with. The organizers have already created the resource guides for you, you check them out and them begin to learn and play with the tool you are interested in.
The day starts with attendees coming in to register and taking pictures with our awesome photobooth. I had WAY too much fun with the photo booth.
Photo Credit: @Mr_Lafrance
Then we had a quick welcome to go over how the day as going to work and luckily the creators Jennie Magiera and Sue Gorman did a Google Hangout with us. They welcomed everyone and explained how Playdate got started.
I had signed up for Session 1 to check out e-portfolios. I found this topic was too huge to tackle. There are so many different tools you can use for e-portfolios such as: weebly, kidblogs, blogger, wordpress, three ring, google sites, desire to learn e-portfolios and probably more. We started discussing what people had tried. I don’t like using google sites but others had really positive things to say about them. I heard good things about Desire to learn e-portfolios which is integrated with google and promoted by OCDSB. I might look into that one later. I began to share David Theriault’s Eduslam about If This Than That since it blowed my mind about blogging. I also shared some recipes that I use. For example: if I take a iphone picture in the area of my school, it automatically saves the picture to a folder in google docs.
For Session 2 I went to the Google Drive session. The sessions facilitator began sharing what he does with google drive but I was frustrated since I only had my iPad and couldn’t play with anything he was talking about. I decided to leave (which is totally ok to do in a Playdate) and wandered around for a while.
Next was lunch time. The awesome Big D’s DogHouse came to help us provide lunch. I had a pogo and a small fry and it was delicious.
Session 3 for me was Genius hour or 20% time. It was great to discuss what I had started in my classroom. I began watching a couple wonders every day with my class on Wonderopolis. Then we started our wall of wonders. The wonderful Shauna Pollock and Tiiu Tsao have been trying Genius Hour and we talked about what was working for them and what wasn’t working. We talked about Paul Solarz’s step by step guide to Genius Hour and talked about how he really took his time introducing Genius Hour to his student. We also discussed the Genius Hour edchat on twitter that happens on the 1st Thursday of each month.
At the end of the day was the PLAYOFF. A Playoff is when you have 2 minutes to share something awesome you learned that day. I shared David Theriault’s Eduslam about If This Than That and other recipes I use.
All in all it was an awesome day and I’m excited to plan more in the future. Follow us on twitter here and watch our website for more information soon.
