Model changes for 20 Time

After a few months with this project, we moved into Holiday Break which allowed some time to dig deeper into my students’ blogs and evaluate the effectiveness of our approach to 20 Time. I made some big changes that alleviated some of the issues that kept cropping up across the teams.

From January 2015:

Over the past two weeks I have had some time to rethink how my classes are approaching their 20 Time Projects. I have been allowing a lot of looseness in how the students used their 20% class time and not being as hands-on with their progress. I have been feeling that this might be a disservice to some of my students who need more structure. I wonder too, how much work students can actually get done with just a short 20% of their class time each day rather than a larger chunk. I also think the weekly blogs have not been effective reflection tools. So I have decided it is time for a slight overhaul. Below is what I sent to my students and I will go over it with them in class tomorrow. Hopefully this change will facilitate better progress for the teams that seem to be lagging and allow for others to have a more stable work period they can count on.

20 Time Updated Model:

Up until this point all students have had blogs due each Monday by 3:30 to document their progress on their 20 Time Projects. Each time has also been provided some loose class time to work on their 20 Time Projects. In looking at various group’s progress and evaluating the effectiveness of the weekly blogs, I have decided to make some changes. They are outlined below. Projects are still due to present in April, after Spring Break.

Read the full blog post “New take on Google’s 20 Time in the Classroom” at Strawbabies and Chocolate Beer

 

Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.