20% Time, Genius Hour or Student Choice. I call it "My Interests." Part II of III

Part II of III

Wednesday and Thursday
These two days are essentially the same as Monday and Tuesday with the exception that our chapter quizzes take place on Thursdays.

Friday: My Interest Day
As we cover the chapter I encourage students to watch for something that they are really interested in learning more about and making it their "My Interest" project for the chapter. They may begin the project at any time but it is due by Friday.

Here is a brief example of  how this works. When we cover a chapter on the 1920's there are a lot of great topics to cover and the students can choose anything related to the topics in the chapter. I really give them a lot of freedom to choose here and the results have been great. The chapter on the 1920's has two paragraphs on Al Capone, three paragraphs on Prohibition, two total pages on the Women's Rights Movement. Students could go on and learn more about anything in any direction and that is what both my students and I love. Student could learn more about social standards for women in the time period related to dating. I teach 15-16 year olds so this is a topic of great interest. With regard to prohibition, some students went on to learn about modern states and their drinking age and drunk driving laws. The topic of Al Capone led students to want to learn more about other nefarious persons from the time period.

Students used technology (tech from here on) to present their ideas and I encourage them to work with partners every other project. I encouraged them to try new tech with their projects or, to at least try out tech they are familiar with (PowerPoint) and try new ideas in that medium-add a link, a video, embed a link, have a live Twitter feed, etc. Students amazed me with what they produced. Students used: Animoto, Doceri, Educreations, CloudOn, VuVox, YouTube with their own verbal narrations, Prezi, Tumblr, Pintrest, Facebook, Google Docs, Google Presentation, custom timelines, and many more. One student even recorded herself singing her favorite song from the 1940's!