Francis_u04a1

It's pretty difficult to get permission in my school to allow students to use brand new technology, especially when it comes to my principal, but one of my coworkers got it approved.

A fellow English teacher this year started a Genius Hour project with his eighth-grade students a couple years ago. When this began, he took one of our four computer labs all day every Friday. To put it mildly, not many people were happy with him, especially some "old-school" teachers who weren't happy he wasn't using that time for curriculum. Many were unhappy that he was taking lab time that could have been spread throughout the school. He described to me at first that people weren't so bad about it until about halfway through the year when the "every Friday Humenik has this computer lab" started to get old. He also said that one of the top things you don't want to do as a teacher is to make all the other teachers mad.

So, he decided to do his Genius Hour project differently this year. He first went to our principal, who, as he described it, was hesitant toward the idea of allowing students to bring in their own devices to use on our network. I believe she also didn't quite understand what that meant, so she brought in our Instructional Tech Resource Teacher, who explained to her what this would entail. She gave the okay, and over the course of a week, Mr. Humenik had his students bring in whatever mobile device they wanted to use for their Google project--either a tablet, laptop, or smartphone--and had them added to our network so they would be able to use them for their Genius Hour projects.

Now, to get to what Mr. Humenik expected of his students: the Genius Hour project (or 20% project) is, from what he described to me, a project that has gained some notoriety because of Google's own 20% initiative for its employees. The teacher allows students to spend 20% of their class time, whether that's a little time every day or one day out of the week, on a project of their choosing. Mr. Humenik's project allowed students to focus on research, a creation, or a service project of some sort. They had to be okayed by him before they could continue. As we work on a semester schedule, students only had about 14 Fridays to work on their project, and then they presented their completed research, creation, or an overview of their service project to the class.

As Mr. Humenik described, most of the students decided to do research because that seemed easier for them. A few students who were more involved in the community decided to do service projects--and one student actually created an outdoor seating/garden area for our local library (which I think is pretty awesome!). Mr. Humenik also stated that students who brought in iPads or laptops seemed to have a better time than those who brought in smartphones, although some documented their progress outside of class through video and pictures using their cell phones.

Overall, I think this is a great way to have students use technology they are comfortable in order to access those higher-level thinking skills on something that is interesting to them. I'm interested to see how Mr. Humenik continues to tweak this project in the coming years.