#EdCampOnline Experience 10-26-13 #ce13

Yesterday I had the exciting opportunity to participate in the first ever EdCamp to be held online. If you are not familiar with EdCamps, they differ from traditional professional development experiences in that they are organized by the participants on the day of the event. This EdCamp video gives a brief introduction to EdCamps, and this TEDxPhiladelphia talk by Kristen Swanson gives a much more in-depth story of how the EdCamp movement came to be and what it seeks to provide to educators.

I have watched many EdCamps from afar by following their hashtags on Twitter while they are taking place, but have never had the opportunity to participate in one in person myself. I am excited that EdCamp Austin is coming to my area very soon, but I was also pumped when I heard about EdCamp Online and registered for it right away. After being a part of yesterday's event, I am even more excited about the in-person experience I will be having in just a couple of weeks!

To preserve the experience, I created a Storify using the Tweets I sent out during EdCamp Online. They include general getting organized Tweets, information from the session on engagement in online learning that I took part in, and the wrap-up. Also included is evidence of some technical issues that were bound to happen with a large endeavor like this one.  I've embedded the Storify slide show below so you can see what my experience was like. You can also click here to view the Storify in a different format. 

I hope it will help inspire you to take part in an EdCamp experience at your first opportunity!

NOTE: When Storify shut down in May, 2018, I exported my Storify collections to Wakelet. Below is the original collection of Tweets I saved during Edcamp Online in 2013, now hosted on Wakelet.



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All original work in this post by Sandy Kendell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Please see specifics on my re-use policy in the right-hand column of my blog before re-posting/re-using any of my blog content.