Whew, a lot is going on, and I'm struggling to catch up! This is going to be a brief one, so I can just get some ideas out in the aether! So games were one thing I wanted to pursue this year under this whole inquiry-based learning kick that I've been on. The other one was 20% Time, which has been burning a hole in the back of my mind for a while now. I heard an episode of a podcast called Cult of Pedagogy about it that got me thinking, read a book by the guy interviewed on the podcast, A.J. Juliani, which got me fired up about the idea.
Quick pitch for those who haven't heard of it: 20% Time (or Genius Hour, which is pretty much the same) comes from something companies like Google have done with giving 20% of the work week for employees to pursue passion projects, as a way of fostering innovation in the workplace. 1 day of the week (or for me, once every five days), people work on producing something that they are passionate about and that have real purpose for them. In the classroom, this means reaching to create something really awesome that a student really wants to do, and to document this process along the way, by pitching their project to their class, blogging along the way and commenting on each others' projects, and presenting in a sort of TED-style at the end to show what they did.
So far, I've been really excited by the results. I won't give away projects, since they're still in development, but I've gotten a lot of student enthusiasm. I told one of the principals about it, and she came to observe one of the intro days, and she was similarly excited, and has been encouraging about spreading it further, either as a senior project or something interdisciplinary. We'll see how it goes, but I'll post more resources that I've been reading up on .
Quick pitch for those who haven't heard of it: 20% Time (or Genius Hour, which is pretty much the same) comes from something companies like Google have done with giving 20% of the work week for employees to pursue passion projects, as a way of fostering innovation in the workplace. 1 day of the week (or for me, once every five days), people work on producing something that they are passionate about and that have real purpose for them. In the classroom, this means reaching to create something really awesome that a student really wants to do, and to document this process along the way, by pitching their project to their class, blogging along the way and commenting on each others' projects, and presenting in a sort of TED-style at the end to show what they did.
So far, I've been really excited by the results. I won't give away projects, since they're still in development, but I've gotten a lot of student enthusiasm. I told one of the principals about it, and she came to observe one of the intro days, and she was similarly excited, and has been encouraging about spreading it further, either as a senior project or something interdisciplinary. We'll see how it goes, but I'll post more resources that I've been reading up on .
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