What began as an idea has transformed into a movement. Since the original Edcamp in 2010 there have been over 700 conferences around the world in 25 countries. In the first few months following that first session in Philadelphia, the Edcamp movement grew and flourished in a grassroots manner. Each Edcamp is independently organized and hosted, is free to participants, bringing together passionate educators for a day of learning and growth. The conferences are participant-driven with the sessions developed and facilitated by the teachers who are attending and leverage social media to involve remote attendees. By adopting the un-conference protocol inspired by the Barcamp model, Edcamps provide access to high quality, personalized professional learning for all educators. Embracing the belief that fellow educators can be some of the most valuable professional development resources for their colleagues, the Edcamp movement has been recognized by countless organizations, including the United States Department of Education, the Bammy Awards for Education, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), the TEDx program and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Read more at http://www.edcamp.org/learn-more:
What is Design Thinking?
“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” —Tim Brown, IDEO president and CEO Design thinking is a deeply human process that taps into abilities we all have but get overlooked by more conventional problem-solving practices. It relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, to construct ideas that are emotionally meaningful as well as functional, and to express ourselves through means beyond words or symbols. Nobody wants to run an organization on feeling, intuition, and inspiration, but an over-reliance on the rational and the analytical can be just as risky. Design thinking provides an integrated third way. The design thinking process is best thought of as a system of overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps. There are three spaces to keep in mind: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. Inspiration is the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions. Ideation is the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas. Implementation is the path that leads from the project stage into people’s lives. Read more at https://www.ideo.com/about/#FolzDbkqiKlOSIp7.99