For several years now at my school we have celebrated an annual event called “Peace Day.” The idea of this event, started by Jeremy Gilley, is to have one day of the year with no fighting, no war, just peace. This has been a powerful event at school year after year, and the idea of one day of peace, hopefully moving toward many more days of peace, made me think that this is a good model for making other changes that will better society.
I decided to apply the same idea to a “paperless” day at school. The idea was to do something that has a positive ecological impact while promoting the technology integration push at my school. I proposed to the high school student government that our school be paperless on Earth Day (April 22), and it was enthusiastically adopted by the students.
After speaking to a few people at school about going paperless I decided to try to make a greater impact with this idea. I started tweeting about it and was getting a very positive response. I made contact with Shelly Blake-Plock, the leader in paperless education, and shortly thereafter he had a post on his Teach Paperless blog about the idea. He also created a place where teachers can pledge to go paperless for Earth Day. Take a look at the list, which has over 650 teachers from all over the world pledging to go paperless.
I also started a Google Doc and wiki page for sharing ideas on alternatives to using paper.
Consider taking the pledge, and think about this first paperless day as one step toward finding alternatives for paper in your class, and improving instruction with the use of technology.
Dr. Lynch wanted the students to do a presentation on different aspects of Beowulf, comparing the story to the history and culture at that time. Each group had a different topic that required historical research and references from the epic. We discussed possibilities for a project and decided on Prezi. We came up with this rubric. Below is the list of presentations and links to them:
