[Super] Earth Day

I finally have a bit of time to reflect on my Earth Day project that I completed with my students. I pledged to go paperless on Earth Day through Shelly Blake-Plock's edublog TeacherPaperless. It was an amazing idea and caught absolute fire with educators around the globe. Kudos to Shelly.

My 130 + students decided that we were not going to go paperless for just Earth Day, but rather the remainder of the year. We discussed a plan and then put that plan into action. My students and I were able to take a laptop cart that had been abandoned by most at the school due to the operating issue of the machines, which are about six years old. We spent the next few weeks leading up to Earth Day repairing and cleaning the machines up after school.

On April 22, we launched our own computer lab in my classroom. It was a project that all of us had a hand in. Now we are able to be 1:1 for the remainder of the school year, contributing our share through quite a few weeks of "paperless" education. I am proud of this endeavour and look forward to working in a 1:1 environment with my students.

More importantly I thank TeachPaperless and the movement that will hopefully become a long standing tradition. It was a super Earth Day for us. My students learned a great lesson and I am glad to have been a part of it.

More to come...

Mike Meechin, M. Ed.
mike.meechin@gmail.com
twitter.com/innovateed

50, the New Zero!

Usually I am not sure of opinion on educational reform movements. Well, I need some help on this one.

I am working on some research on the 50 point minimum grading scale. I am reluctant to tackle this because I am not really sure how I feel about this form of assessment. If you want to read more about it, you can do so here. Long story short, you use 50 points as the minimum (to replace the zero) as the lowest grade a student can earn.

I proposed this concept to my faculty and I now have a test group of about 25 teachers. This is representative of about 25% of the faculty at my school. We will be rolling this assessment out in the 2010-11 school year and will hit the ground running with the research.

So, wanted to ask this. There are so many "outside-the-box" thinkers in the edublogosphere and I really want to know your thoughts. Do you uses this system? What are your thoughts on this system? What are you doing for assessment in the form of grading?

Help me.

More to come...

Mike Meechin, M. Ed.
mike.meechin@gmail.com
twitter.com/innovateed.com

Shame, Shame!

It's been over a month since my last post to this blog. Shame on me. I will tell you I have been busy over the past weeks honeymooning, writing some professional development, graduate school (again), and working on the day job... educating.

I will tell you that although I have not been doing a lot of writing, I have been doing quite a bit of reading. You have got to get on board with Google Reader if you have not already done so - it makes tearing through all my favorite edublogs so much easier. Lots of great material out there. Check out my blogroll for some suggestions on where to begin.

As for me, I will begin to write again. Every time I sit down at the keyboard I realize how much I have to say. Thanks for listening.

More to come...

Mike Meechin, M. Ed.
mike.meechin@gmail.com
twitter.com/innovateed