Why LangCamp?
If you want to know where LangCamp came from, Bethanie (@lovemysummer) has your answers! If you want to know what it’s going to be like, allow me to take you on a little flight of fancy, how I imagine it going!
A couple of us will meet up the night before at Curate in downtown Asheville. Bethanie and I will be there, nibbling on tapas, sipping beverages (my two-year-old and six-year-old will, of course, be coloring angelically at the table with Daddy). A tweep or two will walk in and spot us, and we’ll wave excitedly and try to figure out real names after addressing each other as SraSpanglish and Lovemysummer, etc. a few times (I’ll concentrate really hard not to slip into tweepspeak). We’ll dish about our trips and how awesome Asheville is (might have to send the kids back to our room for bedtime before we are thoroughly caught up), maybe a little about plans for the next day before we retire to our respective accommodations for the evening.
Then bright and early Wednesday morning, about 9:00, we’ll start gathering in the meeting room at Brookstone Lodge where we’ll put the rest of the faces with Twitter handles–and real names! (Also, I’ve discovered there’s a Krispy Kreme not 10 minutes away, so I figure we’ll have at least a dozen glazed!) When everybody’s settled and ready to go, Bethanie and I will give you a rundown of plans, including sessions we set up based on the polls we’ll have conducted among attendees a few weeks beforehand.
We’ll have a couple of breakouts going in two different hour-long sessions before lunch. I imagine a handful of us in one corner with our laptops checking out different sites for e-portfolios and looking at examples some of us have tried. There might be some raucous giggling in another corner where some authentic target language videos are tickling some funny bones in between serious discussions of how best to scaffold their interpretation and connect them to relevant themes. In another corner, all we’ll hear is ticking keyboards while some serious assessment contemplation is going into inventing and modifying rubrics for eveverything from formative interpersonal chats to community-based multimedia presentations.
And then: SANDWICHES. I’m thinking Jimmy John’s with a side of inspiration and war stories.
Then, we’ll have one more hour of semi-structured time–maybe a little practice with Kahoot or Evernote for me–before sandbox time!
That’s right, we’re going to take what we’ve been working on and go wild. Those cool ideas we got started on earlier in the day, we’ll hunker down and make some magic, maybe spread out in little clusters all over the meeting room.
Then a little show-and-tell so everyone can see the awesomeness we’ve come up with. We’ll talk over which breakouts we want to repeat the next day and then have an all-out SMACKDOWN. We’ll each share our favorite apps and resources before we wrap up and head out. I’ll see what you guys are up to, maybe some authentic Spanish food from Cúrate, and we’ll round up young ‘uns, spouses, etc. and go unwind! I think I’ll have a little dip in the Brookstone Lodge pool with my water babies before bed, too.
Then it’s up and at ’em at 9:00 the next day with some more breakouts, probably mostly repeats from the day before so we can keep the awesome coming, but we might have had some revelations that lead us to different sessions. Who knows? (Mystery! Excitement! Spontaneity!) We’ll spend an hour in one session, do a do-si-do, and switch partners once before lunch.
And then we sandbox until we drop, collaborating and creating everything we can for the next year before it’s time to part ways. Of course we’ll share out again. There WILL be hugs. For those who don’t have to zip home, we’ll probably do a little touring, maybe hit the bouncy houses just across from the lodge at Fun Depot, and MAYBE I’ll let Sr. Sexton talk me into taking the kiddos on their first tour of the Biltmore Estate.
So my question for you is this: don’t you want to come along?
2 Comments
Courtney Cochran · May 14, 2014 at 2:22 pm
As if my heart weren't broken enough that I can't go…you had to mention JIMMY JOHNS!
Courtney Cochran · May 14, 2014 at 10:22 am
As if my heart weren't broken enough that I can't go…you had to mention JIMMY JOHNS!
Comments are closed.