But first, a photo. Here are the amazing educators who spent a morning working on professional development that fits their needs. Aren’t they an awesome group?!

There are many reasons I love EdCamps and here is one reason to organize one in your area…the new batch of teachers. Our EdCamp is located at Creighton University and they have a unique program called the Magis Catholic Teacher Corps. You can read more about this program here and here. What better way to pass on your learning but through an unconference. And is there anything more satisfying, as a seasoned teacher, to see a group of young people excited and ready to teach in our Catholic schools? I am so grateful for the many seasoned teachers that came today too to lead the way!

Another big plus, in an EdCamp, are the sponsors. Companies reached out to us and donated some great items. I was overwhelmed at the generosity of these companies. They know how to build good will and get their products into the hands of teachers who will use them and share their product on Social Media. I personally know that this strategy works, I have bought several items myself from our sponsors. 

Click here to see the Sponsor page from this year’s EdCamp. Look at all these freebies!

Our EdCamp has a few unique touches. This Magis teacher won a handmade twine Rosary because he traveled the farthest. He’s from the great state of Rhode Island!
Another unique touch added to #NECathEdCamp are fresh flowers picked from my garden! 

And what’s an EdCamp without great people! I want to personally thank this year’s team. Mike, Jim, Terri, Sara, and Deb We did it! Another EdCamp in the books…ready for next year?!

If you need any help putting together an EdCamp in your area, the EdCamp Foundation offers all you need to get started. Click here for more information and to see when an EdCamp will be near you.

#8 Working with a great group of people. I’d like to thank Jim Homan, Sara Hood, Mike Mansour, Terri Preston, and Linda Sweeting You are all true professionals and always have what is best for our students at heart!

#7 Having the support of the EdCamp Foundation. Our edcamp qualified for the “Edcamp-in-a-Box” and we were grateful for the contents of the box and I was personally thankful for a phone call from Kristen Swanson who helped answer my questions and calmed my nerves. Plus a ‘high five’ to the new EdCamp Foundation Executive Director, Hadley Ferguson, for her support!

#6 The Support of the CatholicEdChat-ish and EdCampShare Voxer groups. You may know I love Twitter, but having a friendly voice of a Catholic school teacher  and an Edcamp veteran, over Voxer, has been priceless. Being able to ask a quick question and get several answers makes Voxer tops in my book.

#5 Sponsors! What can I say? They are awesome! When you are planning an edcamp, which is free for teachers and organized by teachers who don’t do this for a living, having someone contact you, to give you free SWAG, a product to raffle off, or donuts is amazing! You can see our sponsors here. http://edcamparchomaha.weebly.com/sponsors.html Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

#4 Google! Yes, I am a Google Fan Girl and I don’t believe our Edcamp would not have been as successful as it was without it. From making a survey with Google Forms, to hosting all the notes from the sessions, it really made our day run smoothly.

#3 People travel from far away to learn at #edcampArchOmaha. Who would have thought that 2 teachers from the Salt Lake City diocese would travel to learn with us?! They wanted to see an edcamp in action to bring it back to their teachers. This made me so happy!

#2 Prayer! Our Edcamp had an added feature. We began with a prayer and ended with prayer.

#1 You! The people who came today! I am so grateful for the great conversations that took place today. A special shout out to Josh Allen, one of the founders of EdCampOmaha, for coming today. It was so nice to see his friendly face!

After reading some of the answers from our survey, I believe the day was a huge success! I look forward to seeing you at a future edcamp, online, or in person. Thank you again for taking part of this new type of Professional Development.

Using MapAList I was able to plot the locations of all those who voted. They will have a Rosary color picked by friends from around the globe!

Here is a close up of the voters from the US.

Now it’s my turn. I need to make the Rosary!

This year our school purchased a cart filled with 32 iPads. I’m always on the look out for new ways to add tech to our classroom. This year I wanted to add tech to our hallways. Last year, during a #CatholicEdChat where we were sharing ideas for Lent, Kay Basailon, shared her principal’s idea. Here is her principal, Patricia’s blog.  So here is how I made our version of the QR Code Stations of the Cross.

Our 4th graders, every year, use Craft Foil to make these beautiful Stations of the Cross. One classroom uses the copper side and the other the silver side. They take their piece of foil and tape one simple scene, from the stations of the cross, to their work. They take a ball point pen and trace the outline. The tracing is embedded into the foil. Once they are done, they use a brown marker for the cross and a yellow highlighter for the halo. 

Our 3rd graders used the Stations of the Cross reflection from Loyola Press. I used my iPhone to record their voice using the app AudioBoo. Once I had a URL from AudioBoo, I used the Chrome extension goo.gl to make the QR code. Voila!

I think this activity made the Stations of the Cross more personal to my students. I know I have become more involved in this Catholic Lenten practice this year with listening to my students record the reflections and viewing the images made by the 4th graders.

I also know that this idea has spread onto at least 2 friends in my Twitter PLN. Tracy Edmisten did something similar with her 4th graders. Click HERE to see her student’s work.

This idea also went to a Michigan classroom where Mrs. Sack teaches 6th, 7th and 8th graders. They took it to whole other level! Besides QR Codes they used Augmented Reality. Click HERE and HERE to see the beginnings of their work.

Luckily, I don’t have to write an acceptance speech! But if I did, it would go something like this…

I’d like to thank my parents for passing on the Catholic faith to me. My love of the beauty of this faith makes it so easy to share with my students.

I’d like to thank my family for allowing me to work long hours correcting papers, working in my classroom, and driving me to edcamps to learn more about teaching.

I’d like to thank my co-workers, both past and present, who continually inspired me to bring my A game each day, as they are also doing in their classroom. They also don’t mind when I share the many new ideas I find, email after email!

I’d like to thank my principal who gives me the freedom to try new ideas in my classroom and the encouragement to continue sharing my ideas.

I’d like to thank my students for learning right along with me. I love how they keep the questions coming and have fun finding the answers with me.

I’d like to thank the parents of my students who have entrusted me with their most precious gift to help them grow from 8am to 3pm.

I’d like to thank my PLN on Twitter. This award truly stems from Twitter! Only Twitter would allow a 3rd grade teacher, in Omaha, Nebraska to start a world wide Catholic education chat with her Twitter friends, Nick Senger and Nancy Caramanico. Reaching across the world, making connections, and sharing ideas to make my teaching better for my precious charges.

So what’s next? More learning and sharing! This teacher will not be resting on her laurels!

There were 7 rooms set aside for our sessions. Here is the schedule that we ended up with.   It originally started on a sheet of paper. Looking at the first hour of sessions, I was torn. So many great topics and Josh, Brent, and Toby all were presenting at the same time. I decided to attend the Twitter 101 session even though I’m not a Twitter newbie. I’m a Twitter early adaptor. I started on May 1, 2007. I joined Toby and about 10 other teachers to share the wonderful professional tool of Twitter. Here is where my blog post title comes in.

Before the session started, I asked around to those who were already on Twitter. “Are you my friend?” was the question I asked Ben. Toby and Ben laughed. They thought I sounded like the new Delilah. When I record my next #CatholicEdChat AudioBoo, I’ll be sure I sound like her.

This was a great session, or as EdCampers like to say, a conversation. Toby adjusted the session to what his students needed. We had a good laugh when we looked at the #duckface and #fishlip pictures. I also shared how I use Twitter in my classroom with my class Twitter account.

My next session was on Tech Integration with a sub title, “They Gave the kids iPads…now what.” This was the perfect session for me. We will be rolling out a brand new iPad cart at my school. Here are the notes that the session members took on a Google Doc. I shared these notes with my co-workers on Monday.

Next up was lunch and we were given a generous amount of time for a nice lunch break. I knew I’d want to catch up with Barbara. She’s a 4th grade teacher in West Des Moines and we just hit it off at our first EdCamp in 2010. She also participated in a Thanksgiving collaborative online project I hosted for several years. The PD continued over lunch. I grilled Barbara on her latest classroom ideas and learned about her newsbreak for non-fiction reading she started and her procedures for the student’s Response Journals. We were having so much fun, we got back to the edcamp late! I thought it started back up at 1:15. Oh well!

When we returned we checked out the ever popular edcamp session, “Things that Rock and Sucks in Education” This session was hosted by one of the organizers of EdCampDSM Jaime. But we decided to move on to another session. That’s another trademark of an edcamp, vote with your feet. If a session is not what you wanted or needed, just move on and check out another session. We both ended up in the “Less Us, More Them” session. It was a very interesting session with a real live student! Yes, students can come to edcamps. This young man shared how he feels more engaged in his classroom when he has technology. Several participants also shared some ideas using technology. One math teacher has his students use educreations to work out a math problem and send it to the teacher. He also had his students show a ray in Minecraft. He said that homework was emailed in quickly that night. His students couldn’t wait to complete it! A brief discussion of Augmented Reality came up and I tweeted out this website. Drew and Brad are new to Twitter but they are making up for lost time. Their website is fantastic and they just launched a podcast.

Finally, it was time for the last session. Boy this day went fast! Of course I had to attend a session to discuss my new favorite educational book, Teach Like a Pirate.

#tlap #argh

I read this book in June but only had an online Twitter discussion on my thoughts. I really enjoyed connecting with other educators and learning what they took away from this book. I’m going to ‘pirate’ an idea that a teacher shared. He had his students write their goals for the year outside their classroom with sidewalk chalk. What a great idea! I had my student write paper tweets, but I like this more public way of sharing goals.

The last part of a great edcamp is the prizes. The organizers were able to score many wonderful prizes, but guess what? I didn’t win any of them! But I do have another edcamp coming up. I’m going to EdCampCentralNE on October 12. Maybe you can join me in Grand Island, Nebraska! Maybe I’ll win a prize this time!

My biggest worry about having a classroom Twitter account is the tweets I really didn’t want my students to see. Twitter now has promoted tweets and you never really know what they will post. Matt shared that he favorites the tweets he wanted his students to see. Problem solved! So I set up our account, @Room113SMM

Hello, World!

— Mrs. Gilman’s Class (@Room113SMM) March 25, 2013

Maybe I should back up a bit. Why did I want a classroom Twitter account? One of the reasons is to communicate what is happening in the classroom. If we had a celebration, I wanted to tell the world, not just jump up on a chair in my room. If we had a new vocabulary game, I wanted a quick way to share it out. If we had a question or a thought to share, I wanted to acknowledge the importance of that idea by sharing it out.

So far, the account has been a big hit! My favorite tweeting activity has been summarizing the weekly Mass homily. So far, they have done a great job on sharing, in 140 characters what the homily was about.

At Mass today, Fr. reminded us to put on Christ and help someone in need. We sang “Go Make a Difference!”

— Mrs. Gilman’s Class (@Room113SMM) September 11, 2013

We are also tweeting using our own hashtag. I read On a Beam of Light: A Story of Albert Einstein during the first week of school. I want to encourage my students to always ask questions and to continue to wonder about our world. So we wrote ‘paper tweets’ using the hashtag #iWonderSMM I decided to add the initials of our school to our new hashtags. I discovered the importance of doing this after having them write ‘paper tweets’ during the first day on what they want to learn this year in 3rd grade. If I had used the hashtag, #iLearn instead of #iLearnSMM, students or parents doing a hashtag search would get an eye full.

Another point in my classroom Twitter account is that I am doing the typing. But we are composing the tweets together. 3rd graders aren’t the best at typing and I want this activity to be quick. I do want to honor the TOS from Twitter. I share, with my class,  that students younger than 13 shouldn’t be on Social Media.

I think the classroom we have tweeted  the most is our friends in Canada, Mr. Chidiac’s Grade 2 Golden Stars. We had an opportunity for a real life global difference in spelling. It took my students a few minutes to notice how Canadians spell a common word differently.

This past Friday, we had a very real example of the importance of editing. We read a Tweet from Mr. Chidiac’s class about their new classroom pet. We wanted to tweet back our excitement and also that we knew what their new pet was. Here is the tweet.

Can you find the mistake?

There are so many classrooms on Twitter! It seems to be the ‘in’ thing. I decided to limit who we follow to Catholic classrooms. I also made a Twitter list with Catholic classrooms on Twitter. So far we have 9 members. If you know of any Catholic classrooms on Twitter. Please let me know.

Privacy is very important to our school and parents. I only tweet using student numbers, if we want to share a student quote. I also take pictures of objects, not students. Here is a picture of our flyswatters used for our Flyswatter Vocabulary game we play for vocabulary review. Don’t worry, they have never been used on real flies.

I hope you will consider opening a Twitter account for your classroom. It’s been a great experience so far.

I really love adding widgets to wikis. My favorite type of widget is anything related to Geography. I just added a country and state flag counter and I’m hoping we can collect a lot of flags.

You can help us gather flags by ‘hitting the wiki‘!

Do you have a favorite widget to share?