Well, went to my first CUE Rock Star Camp…and it rocked.  It was a three day event, a Wednesday-Friday at Mammoth Lakes, CA. There were seven California locations to choose from and I chose Mammoth because it is a beautiful mountain location and my commute took me through Yosemite.

It was also a major perk that Jon Corippo, Director of Academic Innovation for CUE, was there running daily sessions as well.

The camp was rad. Totally worth the price of admission, hotel, and commute. If you haven’t heard about or been to one before: go find one nearby and go, but be quick because they cap attendance at 100 people and it sells out.

Day 1

Pulled into Mammoth around 8:00 AM, check-in wasn’t until 9:00 so I killed some time at the local McDonalds then headed over to Mammoth Middle School. Awesome school! Wouldn’t take much to convince me to work there.

CUE Rock Star starts out with a shred session– basically one minute commercials by the Rock Star staff to sell you on their session for the day. The theme for this camp was SNL: Nick Foles- Company Computer Guy, MacGrader, Stefon, Hans and Franz, Phillip, and many other characters all made an appearance. I chose CFU (Check for Understanding) to the Max by Jon Corippo and a Hyperdocs session by Kristen Beck.

CFU to the Max was all about Socrative, Quizizz, Kahoot!, and Zaption. I detest grading, it has taken me five years of fifth grade to get there, but it is my least favorite thing about teaching. I do love knowing where my students are, and then giving them quick, valuable feedback. These programs help do that. Socrative and Quizizz also grade the assessment for you and put the answers in a spreadsheet- hello cutting back on wasted time grading.

Hyperdocs session was pretty good. I’ve already messed around with one over the summer- Wonder Character Traits Hypderdoc. Here are my notes on that session if you are interested.

Afterwards we met up for dinner at Mammoth Brewery to continue the conversation on education and learning.

Day 2

This day was dedicated to the Iron Chef Lesson design. I did a beginner’s session in the morning with David Platt, who is awesome and did a killer Stefon impersonation, and followed it up with an afternoon session with Jon Corippo for the advanced iron chef.

We’ve all been there: you assign a group presentation, give them a week (or 2! or 3!) to work on it, then comes the presentation and the presentation is terrible, slides are awful, and everyone just wants it to end.

Well Iron Chef does it like this: Groups of 3 or 4 have twenty minutes to make a presentation, they then have two minutes to present at the end of that twenty minutes. Sound impossible? Well I did that exact scenario once in the beginners edition, and then had only ten minutes with my advanced group in the afternoon and they turned out fine. The building of presentations is quick, the actual presentation even quicker, and the learning is high. I learned more about Mammoth Ski Resort in 35 minutes then I ever thought possible.

Take a look at our examples: Beginner Presentation, Advanced Presentation

You can start a new unit doing the Iron Chef lesson design. The Slides themselves start out very much like a Hyperdoc. You already have links in the slides for the students to go to. The students each give themselves a role for the presentation: researcher, media specialist, secret ingredient. When it comes time to present each student presents one slide (so three students would = a three slide presentation).

Here is one I’m going to use with my class this upcoming year on the Pueblo Indians- I plan on doing this Day 1 Minute 1 of my Pueblo instruction. From start to finish it will probably take an hour and we will have made and presented ten Pueblo presentations: chance of learning and retaining is HIGH- I can check immediately with a Socrative assessment and see where the holes are to drive my instruction for the next day.

A handful of us met at the Monkey Bar for dinner and drinks to keep the conversation going again.

Day 3

I started off in the morning with Will Kimbley, who did a mean Ron White impersonation for his shred, with his May the Forms be With You presentation. You can find my notes here. I learned some great tips on Data Validation and how to setup question or fields to make sure I get what I am looking for from students: for example, select 2 choices, I can make the Form not go forward until the student does exactly that. I can even create a Form password using Data Validation.

I also started playing with g(Math) for Forms in his session. If I can get my math unit assessments over to Forms and connect it with Flubaroo, that will save me massive amounts of grading time- and give my students much faster feedback.

The afternoon session was all about giving your quiet students a voice in class using Voicethread, Vocaroo, and Thinglink. 90% of classroom conversation is dominated by 10% of the students, so any tips on improving that ratio was appreciated. Here are my notes.

I think I actually like the combination of thinglink + youtube to really give my quiet students a chance to show their learning. It would look something like this: here is a diagram of a cell, upload this pic to thinglink and create various hotspots on the parts of the cell. The hotspots need to be a video of you telling me the name of the part and what it does. Simple idea, but I get to hear an actual student’s voice who may never raise their hand or even feel comfortable speaking with me one on one.

The session ended a bit early, so I wandered into Jon Corippo’s Tech Cornucopia session and saw all kinds of crazy madness happening: sphero balls, mini projectors all over the place, different iMovie ideas- it was all very cool and a fun way to end the camp.

Connections were made, ideas were shared (hooking-up with Denise Douglas for a possible Fresno-Kings-Tulare edcamp/ meeting-up with Mark Kuniya at a TOSA camp in the future/ and maybe throw my hat in the ring for a Rock Star Faculty position next year), and lots of learning took place. AWESOME TIME!

I will definitely be back. I will definitely be involved with my local CUE group. And I will definitely keep the conversation going on Twitter.