By Shelley Chamberlain

I will be honest. I did not participate in the 3-day CUE Rock Star Camp this past week (Aug. 4-6) in Bedford, MA, but I did get a chance to be a voyeur and observe. What I saw was amazing! What is Rock Star Camp you ask? Jon Corippo from CUE (the ISTE state affiliate for California, just as MassCUE is the Massachusetts affiliate) conceived the idea of Rock Star Camp in order to provide a low-cost, fun way for intensive teacher learning. The MassCUE PD Committee brought the Camp to Boston to support Massachusetts educators, but it turns out teachers came from all over the country, including two teachers from the Bahamas!

From my vantage point, Rock Star Camp was a blast. Each day educators got to pick two different two-hour hands-on sessions with titles like “Lit Circles, Rebooted for the 4 C’s and Common Core” or “Drive Them to Think….Not Yo Mamma’s Current Events from enthusiastic and knowledgeable faculty. (See complete listing) The sessions were interesting and relevant…and educators immediately could use what they learned to create lessons for their classrooms.

To introduce these sessions, each of the 5 faculty did a “shred session”…kind of an infomercial about what their session was about. The shreds got very competitive to entice attendees to their sessions…one speaker even offered chocolate during her session. More fun was had at lunch as well. Teachers spent a leisurely 2- hour lunch learning from each other and from the faculty. It was a chance to ask questions and get mini-lessons on any topic imaginable but the best part was the entire Camp was a community of learners with lots of sharing. Throughout the day I observed educators focused, engaged and forming friendships with other teachers at the Camp.

So next summer if you want to do some intensive learning and have lots of fun along the way, I would suggest thinking about attending CUE Rock Star Camp in Boston. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me!

About the Author

Shelley Chamberlain is a former special needs educator, staff developer, and technology director. She is currently the Executive Director of MassCUE. You can follow her @schamberlain29