Weekly Reflection – March 16

Ed Camps

Hi All,

This week we discussed ed camps as a method of professional development. Also described as “unconferences” these sessions are participant driven teacher to teacher information sessions. They are somewhat informal compared to full education conferences. The benefits over formal conferences include a lower cost, a usually more personal/friendly atmosphere, and topics that may be more situationally applicable to local school districts.

I personally like the idea of Ed Camps compared to formal conferences. In my current career stage (student, soon to be TOC) I am unsure if any of the costs of a traditional conference would be covered. Unless a conference is very close and has a low registration fee, I will not likely attend. The local element is also very appealing. School districts, and even individual schools, often have significant differences in how they operate. Getting first hand knowledge that is directly applicable to your own workplace environment is invaluable.

Here is a very short video that gives a run down of what an ed camp is:

In Class Ed Camp

I attended a session today where we discussed the use of AI for lesson plan creation. I have used ChatGPT once last semester to make a full grade 9 math lesson from scratch. It seemed to do a reasonable job granted I was still pretty new to everything at that time. Some of my colleagues have been using Claude and Perplexity with varying levels of success. which were preferred over ChatGPT. Nobody had tried Gemini which was surprising given Google’s education involvement with Google Classroom and other suite programs. I may try and do more lesson planning with AI in the future but I do not believe it is helpful to me while I am still learning the process of how to create an engaging lesson.

If anyone is interested, I have included the grade 9 unit and math lesson plan that I created with ChatGPT last semester: Unit Plan