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:
- 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!
- 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!
- 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:
Karen Blumberg 