Monday of this week I attended another Creating Pathways to Success committee meeting at one of our high schools. I look forward to these meetings as it gives us a chance to talk. Elementary folks, secondary folks, teachers, guidance, people, consultants, etc. all talking about the destinations and how to motivate students to achieve. This […]
My good friend and colleague Jon Orr (@MrOrr_geek) challenged me to reflect on the good things that happened last year. You can read where this originated here and also see one follow up from @MathManAnusic here Without further ado (spelled: adieu?), my #10goodthings from 2014. 1) I (we) successfully built and developed a Learning Space […]
I quietly (or not so quietly) launched Edmettle.com just in time for back to school this week. If you follow me on twitter you know how I can get with my projects – its all I tweet about for a while. I’m just trying to spread the word so bare with me. In a nut […]
Last night I was lucky enough to attend the Wings vs. Avalanche game at “The Joe” with my brother @adamaspinall (thx @alicespinall for the tickets!). My dad jinxed the game the night before by reminding me of the Wings current record of consistently losing in OT or a shootout and last night was no different. […]
There have been quite a few discussions around assessment the last few weeks. I have enjoyed being active in many of them as I continue to question the system and my own practice. There are a few differing perspectives about marks and their relevancy but on the whole nobody seems to really care about them […]
Sometimes our best moments come from “winging” it. This is another example. We follow the Covey Model at our school. It makes sense for our demographic. What I mean is we focus on student leadership and making good choices. We feel there are no bad kids, just good kids making bad choices because of external […]
I had some great conversation this week around assessment and what the heck that looks like anymore. There is much confusion but seems to be some agreement that the days of large quantities of marks are passed and that testing should not be the be all and end all. As a matter of fact – between #TTOG (Teachers […]
We had our first snowfall here last week in southern Ontario. It was nothing like Buffalo, but enough to make driving problematic. Fortunately, our infamous snowplow folks had the school’s parking lot shovelled by the time staff were arriving so parking wasn’t an issue – kudos to you! However, something looked funny out back. Like really […]
I always argue that we are 14 years into the 21st century so why do we still use that term when describing teachers, students, technology and tools. A great argument as far as I am concerned. Then someone brought to my attention that every grade 8 in our building was born in 2000 or 2001. […]
Today we are learning to: identify and extend patterns use algebra to describe pattern rules represent relationships using a table of values Let me introduce our Minecraft project. I cannot take credit for this. Thanks to my grade 8 student Isaac, we have developed a pretty cool “game”. Using Minecraft students are creating and extending […]
