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Saturday, March 22, 2014

MACUL 2014 reflection (day 1)

Once again, I had the pleasure of attending the MACUL conference in Grand Rapids last week, and it didn't disappoint.  There was a record number of attendees from all over Michigan (and even some from out of state).  The conference was two days long, each jam packed with interesting sessions, and I am now going to attempt to make sense of them all!

On Thursday I started at Adam Bellows keynote, and it was AMAZING!  So inspiring with humor thrown in.  One of the points that really hit home to me was about owning your failure.  He admitted when he'd made a huge mistake & realized that it was accepted when he was honest and transparent.  That message resonated with me because I was going to be presenting on Friday about a grant I'd received that was an epic fail :(  His message gave me the confidence to own my failure to my group.

Then I tried to get into Todd Nesloney's session on flipped classroom PBL, unfortunately it was CRAZY full & I couldn't get in...boo.  I was really looking forward to meeting Todd and hearing about his classroom straight from him.  Instead of that session, I jumped into the middle of a session on finding joy in teaching.  It was reaffirming that sometimes it's ok to just take a break from all the curriculum and just do something fun with your students.  I certainly need that reminder from time to time.  


I had to bail on that session a little early because I was meeting 4 of my students who were a part of the student showcase.  They were showing off their Weebly Websites & did an amazing job.  For the most part, the students were a little shy at the beginning, but it didn't take long for them to relax and start talking to teachers.  They even got to talk to Adam Bellow (not that they had a clue who he is). 



After the student showcase I was able to make it to one more session.  I chose a session on #20time with Nick Provezano.  Again, inspiring, funny and motivational!  I have genius hour with my students, so it was really interesting to see how it works at the secondary level as well.  After that I was going to stay for a session on Google Apps, but it was crazy full and I had to leave to go to a district PD.

As this post is getting pretty long, I'll talk about my Friday learnings in another post.  Stay tuned :)

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