the Creative Sight

It's day 4 of Genius Hour and things are really starting to roll. We're beginning to see early prototypes of projects, and the documentation has taken a pretty dramatic step in the right direction. Some of the songs are even starting to sound like music. Our big, unfortunate surprise this week came from flu season. We had a larger than expected number of students miss school today because they were sick. Using that as inspiration , I came up with the weekly "viral challenge". Editing his video for the group's YouTube channel. Going Viral In an effort to get the students to journal more effectively and share their learning with the world, I'm creating a weekly viral challenge. If students can get more page views on their YouTube channel, blog or website than I do on my weekly posts, then I will reward them with experience points and gold pieces in Classcraft. I use Classcraft in all my classes to help with classroom management, student engagement....and...

O nce upon a time in a magical land , students were given the freedom to learn anything they wanted to learn. These students expanded their knowledge of music, art, psychology, language and dozens of other interests while creating legendary artifacts of learning. They all grew to become brave knights, nobles, philosophers, scholars, kings, queens, and chefs and lived happily ever after. The end. At least, that's the plan. But as we wrap up the third week of Genius Hour, I'd say we still have a little ways to go before we reach our "happily ever after." One thing is for sure, each student has their own unique story. The trick right now, is getting them to share it. Student Engagement is Going Strong I'm happy to report the vast majority of students are still very much engaged in Genius Hour. In fact, if anything, I believe they may be more focused on what they are doing than in the beginning weeks. They stay on task during class and seem to be using a wide...

Learning to speak Korean, illustrating how car engines work, learning desktop publishing software, and demonstrating how to pilot a plane; these are just a few examples of what students will be learning in my first period class for the next nine Friday's. And that's just the first of seven classes that are exploding with dozens of wildly different projects and ideas. Friday's Are About to Get Brilliant Today we kicked off "Genius Hour" in each of my classes, which includes Graphic Design and Advanced Graphic Design for grades 9-11. Genius Hour is based off Google's 20% time. Google had the theory that if they granted their employees 20% of their time to work on projects they were passionate about that productivity would go up, stress would go down, and Google might just get some cool products out of the deal. Apparently, Google was right. As a result of Google-time, products like Gmail, Google News, Google AdSense, and Google Translate were all brough...