First, I want to think my colleagues in Arkansas for a great session last Thursday! I presented “From Jaded to Joyful: Galvanizing Students with Genius Hour,” and the participants could not have been more welcoming and gracious. (Here is my new link to some of the PD sessions I’m offering. More sessions are being added!)

As I mentioned last week, I am doing some updating on my Genius Hour Resources. I’ve taken some of the free downloads down from the website that had broken links and other issues. But I also added something new, which is the Teacher Planner. I want to thank Joy Kirr, who is the amazing person behind the Genius Hour Livebinder for sharing that resource on social media and commenting on the post with an excellent suggestion to read a post that she wrote — the perfect companion to the Teacher Planner.

Over the weekend, I began to redo some of the Google Slides files that I had originally created to help guide my own students through Genius Hour. The first set is now ready to go. Feel free to make a copy and use it with your own students. I developed “Genius Hour Research Notes” because I wanted to help my students keep a digital record of their process from the beginning, and to give them a way that they could work on Genius Hour independently. Also, they were having a hard time separating their learning from their presentation of their learning. My plan is to have the next slide set, which students use to plan their presentations, updated and ready next week.

One more note: I was listening to the Smartless podcast with this week’s guest, Jose Andres, and he made a comment about the way they plan their World Kitchen pop-ups at disasters and other locations that need them that I thought was a good way for teachers to look at things, especially during projects like Genius Hour. In fact, I think it’s a skill we should teach our students, too.