Photos & notes from today’s amazing inaugural @edcampBKK at @NISTschool! #edchat #whyiedcamp

I owe endless thanks to NIST International School and Bangkok Hospital for sponsoring the inaugural edcampBKK, the first edcamp in Thailand! It was a dream come true to be in Bangkok at NIST’s beautiful campus and collaborate with the talented team of educators and administrators who facilitated the event. Chissa Duangnet, Kim Beeman, Ben Sheridan, Jared Kuruzovich, Heida Prorate Doria, James Dykman, Michelle Marquez, and Boe Uarsakchai were all a joy to work with and made sure everything ran efficiently and seamlessly. It was such a pleasure to be able to rely on and trust everyone at the table! Bangkok Hospital sponsored awesome t-shirts and tote bags for participants sporting the gorgeous logo developed by the NIST team with a mango in lieu of the usual edcamp apple.

I’ve been a passionate champion and organizer of edcamps since I attended the first edcamp, edcampPhilly, in May of 2010. I was immediately inspired to launch edcampNYC just a few short months later in October of 2010. Since then, I’ve proudly inspired, coached, and peer-pressured more than a dozen additional edcamps around the world. What’s more powerful than teachers coming together to learn, network, and share with each other?! It brings me such joy to facilitate the creation of the session board — I love standing near it, inviting people to populate it with conversational topics that are pertinent to them, and suggesting that friends or strangers co-lead discussions with like goals rather than over-dilute the offerings with similar sounding sessions.

A couple stellar moments that I hope to remember:

1. I got to organize this day with Chissa, one of my closest and oldest friends who I’ve know since she was 12 back when I was her sister’s first-year roommate at Bryn Mawr College. I also collaborated with Kim, a colleague from my Sacred Heart days, who has been Head Librarian at Shrewsbury International School in Bangkok for four years but is heading to Singapore next year to be at Tanglin Trust. We’re already planning edcampSingapore!
2. Two of my favorite friends, educators, and ex-colleagues from The School at Columbia University were in attendance: Tabitha Johnson and Akio Iida! They were frequent participants at edcampNYC, launched edcampSeoul, and were such awesome champions at edcampBKK!
3. At the end of the day, four ladies told me they were inspired to launch another edcamp in Thailand, and we immediately secured @edcampBangna for them! Here’s hoping it’s another success!

Here’s the awesome schedule crafted by attendees at @edcampBKK – each session title links to a Google Doc of notes (also viewable at http://tinyurl.com/edcampbkk2017):

Here is a tagboard of tweets from the day tagged with #edcampBKK:
http://tgb.io/edcampbkk/352766

One of my favorite tweets from a participant is pasted below:

Using @pinterest & #QRcodes to digitize @iampemberton’s class library & share reading prompts. #kinderchat #ptchat

I just had such a great and productive conversation with Kindergarten teacher, Lauren Pemberton (@iampemberton)! Lauren came into the tech office asking about whether she should affix QR codes to class library books or use some other technology like augmented reality. I asked what she’d like to have happen, and she said she wants parents to be able to scan a code and see questions pop-up during read-alouds with their children that would be good prompts and conversation starters about the story.

I agreed that QR codes would work really well, since the QR code acts as a link to additional information by using any device. Each QR code is paired to a unique webpage that can be bookmarked or emailed or just left in the form of an open page on the device’s web browser. In contrast, augmented reality apps like Layar and Aurasma allow the book cover (or any image) to be used as a dynamic trigger that launches an overlay of information on the device’s screen. This is awesome, but that overlay would disappear as soon as the device is no longer hovering over the trigger (in this case, scanning the book via the app could launch an image containing a list of questions but only when the device is “seeing” the book cover).

I backtracked and suggested that Lauren and her co-teacher, @Jenn_Dare,  first build a Pinterest board full of books available in their classroom’s library. I totally got this idea from my friend, @KimBeeman, who is the amazing Head of the Library at The Shrewsbury International School in Bangkok, Thailand. Kim curates a wonderfully useful Shrewbury Library Blog and many Pinterest boards of the library’s collection organized by genre, grade, project, date aquired, and more.

So, Lauren and Jenn are going to curate a Pinterest board that is a digital representation of their Kindergarten library. Each book pinned to the board will have a unique URL (web address) and space in the description for Lauren and Jenn to post questions and conversation starters about that book. These pins also allow for comments from other users, so parents and teachers can add their own questions and prompts and share/network with each other. Yay for social networking about literacy!

Many sites allow you to make a QR code (like QR Stuff or QR Code Generator), so each book pinned on Lauren and Jenn’s Pinterest board will have a distinct QR code that gets printed and taped to the physical book in their class’s library. This enables students/parents/teachers to borrow a book, scan the QR code taped to it by using a QR reader (like QR Reader for iPhone or QR Code Reader) and launch a webpage for that book’s pin on the Pinterest board to access questions specific to the story.

Finally, I suggested that Lauren keep a GoogleDoc that consists of an ever-expanding table that includes the following information:

1. Book title
2. URL to that book’s pin on the class library Pinterest board
3. QR code that links to that pin’s URL

This will be tedious but worthwhile. After all of their classroom’s current  books are inventoried, pinned to the Pinterest board, and linked to a QR code, it’s just a matter of adding new rows to the table as any additional books are brought in to supplement their growing and evolving library.

 

Proud to represent @BrynMawrCollege at #EducationUSA Women’s Colleges panel in Bangkok today. #anassakata





Chawadee Nualkhair (aka @BangkokGlutton) was my freshman roommate at Bryn Mawr College, and I’ve stuck like glue to her for the last 24 years. I’m currently on a personal leave and based in Bangkok as a guest of Chow and her family. Chow and I were proud to represent @BrynMawrCollege as panelists for an event encouraging young women to consider the unique benefits of a women’s college.

Many thanks to Chris Schultz for introducing us to the amazing and dynamic Liz Jacobs! Liz graduated from Bryn Mawr in 2012 and is currently based in Chiang Mai, Thailand working with EducationUSA to help to provide “international students with accurate, comprehensive, and current information about how to apply to U.S. colleges and universities.” http://www.educationusa.info

Liz totally wowed us at last night’s dinner and this afternoon’s panel with her smarts, travels, passions, choices, wits, and social intelligence. She organized and moderated the event today, and it was great to be amongst interesting ladies from Wellesley and Smith too. Yay for the Seven Sisters representing in Bangkok, Thailand!

Slides for my #LKSW2015 presentations on New Media Literacies and DIY PD at @ShrewsburyBKK today.

Many thanks to @KimBeeman for including me in the lineup of speakers at the Librarians Knowledge Sharing Workshop 2015 event she organized for February 6-7, 2015 at Shrewsbury International School in Bangkok, Thailand where she is Head of Library. Here’s a link to the awesome schedule for LKSW 2015 Kim put together.

Kim and I worked together at Convent of the Sacred Heart in New York City from 2004-2006. I’m now back in the Land of Smiles on a personal leave to collaborate with @BangkokGlutton. Now that I’m 10,000 miles closer to Kim, she and I met and talked about the planning of LKSW. She had a great collection of speakers and topics lined up and she grouped them really well into 4 two-hour blocks of sessions. As a huge believer in Edcamps and the Edcamp model, I suggested ending the conference with an unconference for Session 5. I can’t wait to see how it plays out! I was honored that Kim asked me to present as well, and I readily offered a few suggestions before we narrowed it down to the two below.

Slides for my New Media Literacies presentation:

Slides for my DIY PD presentation: