Blogging Biology Lab Conclusions

One of the big experiments this year has been pushing most writing for my biology and anatomy classes on to student curated blogs.  It has been a really great experience and something that I think has enhanced the classroom learning experience.

I still give copies of labs, and students write on them in class, but when the lab is done they get out the chromebooks, and type up their conclusions on the their blog.  What's even better, students are excited during lab time and take pictures of their experiments and embed those into their blog.

Here's a student example from a recent DNA extraction lab.  http://ronitsbioblog.blogspot.com

When students are finished, they submit the url of their link to our learning management system, Canvas, where I can see and grade all of their submissions.  This has allowed me to utilize rubrics and peer evaluation, grade assignments quicker, and students get to keep copies of the labs as tools for studying.  The one draw back I've found is that some students are slow keyboarders, so it takes these students longer to type the conclusion than handwrite them.

Here's what I see in the speed grader view of Canvas of a student submission.

The blog is really becoming a digital portfolio of work completed.  Scrolling through nearly a semester's worth of work, you can really appreciate the hard work they've put in and they get to showcase to the world their learning journey in my class.

I'll showcase more of our blogging on future posts.

The Rookie Module

Every year of my teaching I always start too fast.  I love biology, and always can't wait to dive right into content.  Then, about 2/3 of the year I realize my shortcomings as students forget basic class routines, and I feel like they're not working as cooperatively as I'd like.  A couple years ago, I decided to implement "rookie mistakes" as part of my beginning of the year routine building.  I wrote down all those rookie things mid year that students forget, but should still remember.  Then at the start of the next year, I taught them these rookie items with the explanation that it's ok to be a rookie now, but you need to know these things the rest of the year.  When those rookie questions came up, I just told them that was rookie question, and made them ask someone who's not a rookie.  It really helped a lot with class routines and procedures because nobody wants to be a rookie.  Accountability went up.

But last year I still got that feeling like more needed to be done.  I wasn't getting as many rookie questions, but I was still not experiencing the collaborative class I was hoping for.  

This year I set out to really front load.  The year is made in the first month of school.  The classroom climate, efficiency, efficacy, and overall experience is built on the foundation of the first weeks of school as we establish those routines, expectations, and student connections.

Here's what I did in Week 1: 

"The Rookie Module"

We've moved to the learning management system Canvas. I really like it, and have moved everything onto it.  I created a unit with all the stuff I wanted my students to know before I teach them a bit of biology.  Below are several screenshots of my Rookie Module.

Everything in one place a new student needs to know.

The first page featured several screencasts showing where things are on Canvas, how to manage their settings, where things can be found, and how to turn in assignments.

The Class Overview page basically had the syllabus (which we went over in class on the first day) and a vodcast introducing them to my flipped classroom.  Here's the video they watched, which I had them do as homework.

Your Flipped Classroom

Building on what I really took away from Tom Solarz's book Learning Like a Pirate, we're creating even more of a student centered classroom.  We had students on day 3 sign up for student roles.  Class-sourcing many of things I used to do, or want to do, but don't have time or energy to do myself.

Students set up their Google Accounts and shared it with me on a spreadsheet.

We're doing a lot of things online and I feel very strongly about teaching digital citizenship, so they watched a video about digital citizenship, read some about it (we also discussed it in class as part of our rules), and then they participated in an online discussion about what it means to them and how they will practice good digital citizenship.

I used to spend a bunch of time setting up the notebook on day 3.  Now I just put a video tutorial of it on Canvas, and let students set it up at home or in class, depending on where they were in their module.  I included the documents they should paste in as well.

From here they then went on to set up their biology blog (I'll post about this in another post), which they then turned-in via Canvas (a skill they need to know).

When they were all done, they had to take a rookie quiz (also on Canvas).  This assessed them on each of different parts of the rookie module to see if they have moved beyond rookie status.  I required a 90% for them to move on Unit 1 with the ability to retake as much as they needed.  Really, I should have made it 85%, because some spent too much time re-taking the quiz.

How I implemented it

 We spent day 2 of class getting Canvas set up and starting the module, that night for homework they watched the "Your flipped classroom" vodcast, and then the next day they continued on the module.  Whatever wasn't finished, was homework.  

Reflection

I would say the Rookie Module was a great success. It really gave a nice orientation for the start of the year. It taught them how to use Canvas, front loaded everything I wanted them to know that was on the digital side of the class (and some in class things too), and created a nice foundation for what we're going to do the rest of the year.  What's more, it's a great resource that students can go back to throughout the year.  

Today, the start of week 4, I had a new student.  I simply told her what tonight's homework was and where to find it, and then showed her the rookie module.  She now has the next week to work through it at her own pace, and won't feel nearly as lost as most new students would.

Some Highlights of Week 2 and 3:

• Students completed a Rookie Scavenger Hunt to find where things are in the class and review lab safety expectations.
• Reviewed the Rookie Module.
• We dove into our first unit on the scientific method, did a lab, posted the results of the lab to their blog, and then used the peer-grading function of Canvas to grade their lab reports.
• Took their first test on the scientific method module. 

It's been a while

It's been a while since I last posted.  Let's just say the end of the year got pretty crazy and then I went on summer mode.  It was hard for me to get motivated to update this blog.  But now the school year has started, and I'm back to trying to update this blog more regularly.

Since I never did follow up with the conclusion of 20 Time in my Anatomy and Physiology class last year, I'll have to do one at some point soon. Suffice to say it was great experience.  It definitely wasn't perfect, and I have some things I will tweak, but it was meaningful experience for most students and rewarding for me to see how they grew through the experience.  I will be doing it again this year, and to some extent with my biology classes too.

This school year is going to be great year.  I'm really trying to take my biology class to the next level. For the last 6 years I've taught a flipped class, which has been a great experience.  But now I see it becoming much more than that as I try make it truly blended and student centered.  Below is a list of new things I'm doing in my class.

1. Pilot a BYOD program for the district.
2.  Use student blogging for documenting student learning, increasing communication and collaboration, and reflecting on what they've learned.
3. Student Centered Classroom: Increased student responsibility so I become more of the guide on the side rather than the sage on the stage.
4. Class Twitter Page (@OrreBiology) to showcase what we're doing in class and network with parents and others outside of our city.
5. Mindfulness and Social Emotional Learning.  This is something I've been doing since last year, but I'm really looking to increase this more.
6. Genius Hour/20 Time. For bio, we're calling this "inquiry hour."  I'm going to try and squeeze this into the year.


It's a lot of new stuff, but professionally I'm just not happy unless I'm really trying new things.  I feel like I can always make the class more interactive, fun, and a better learning experience for all.  My goal for this blog this year is to document my progress with each of these and reflect on my experience.

Here's to a great year.

What have you learned from the PROCESS?

It's so easy to just keep the train moving during the school year.  I often have a bad habit of ending a unit and moving right into the next thing.  There's so much I want to do, and so little time.  But if I really want students to become better, more independent, learners, I need to be giving them time to reflect on their learning.

We're about 1/2 way through the Genius Hour Project (wow!), so yesterday after their test, I took the time for them to reflect on what they learned in our unit and what they've learned so far from the process of 20 Time.  I used Todays Meet and Padlet to have students share their "take aways" from our unit, then we shifted to 20 time.  One class was really small, so we just had a round table discussion about updates in their process and issues they were having.  My other class, which is a little bigger, had the same discussion in smaller groups, and then I asked them to reflect on their process so far on Today's Meet.

I LOVE the comments up above from that question (despite the typos), and I wish I had done it in my other class.  For me, it validates why I'm doing this.  In my post Start With Why, I explained how I wanted students to foster a love for learning, go deeper with learning, and develop critical skills such as analysis, synthesis, time/project management, creativity, and more.  Well, based on just those comments, I feel like we're making progress towards those goals.  They're getting better at the process.

Process over Product.
I keep going back to this phrase over and over again this year.  It comes up in our staff collaboration discussions.  I see it on Twitter.  I see in the circle of those discussing genius hour.  I go back to it when I think about what I want my students to be able to do.  The reality is, they can't get to a meaningful, accurate, and appropriate product (whatever that may be), if they're not good at the process.  What's more, if they're good at the process, the product will come, and it will probably be good.

What kinds of processes are important?  Here's some just off the top of my head.  You can see many of my goals of this project are process oriented goals.

• Inquiry
• Time/task management
• Credible Information gathering
• Conflict resolution
• Problem resolutions
• Learning from failures
• Modifying goals based on changing information

What have I learned about the process?

• I've learned it's worth the process!  
• While it may feel a little uncomfortable to release control, students really benefit from having more control of their learning.
• Periodic reflection is key.  I wouldn't have realized where they were in this process if I hadn't checked in with them, and they might not have either if they weren't prompted.
• I really like the blogging process.  I think it builds in a great platform for student reflection, and collaboration.  I'm already thinking of how I'll be implementing this in my biology classes next year.

Animating and Visualizing Complex Physiological Steps

Do you know how our muscles work?  

We often take for granted how much it really takes to get our muscles to move the way they do.  I am personally amazed how we're able to respond to stimuli in a fraction of a second.  There are so many steps required to get a single muscle fiber to contract, let alone all the fibers working together.  And those fibers working together pull on tendons, which pull on bones, which then elicit the movement.  There's a lot going on.

We're wrapping up our unit on the muscular system in my Anatomy and Physiology Classes.  The last two weeks student groups were tasked with creating either a non-verbal skit, video, or animation to illustrate the complex steps of muscle contraction. For the most part, this was a homework assignment, but they were given some time in class to collaborate and plan.

I'm really impressed with how they came out.  Below are some of the videos that help illustrate those steps of muscle contraction occurring in a single muscle fiber.  They had to first illustrate the movement requiring the contraction, and then "zoom in" to the cellular/molecular level.

This one is too big to upload to the blog. Click on the link to view/download.  It's worth watching.

https://drive.google.com/a/lgsuhsd.org/file/d/0B_HzqNZ0s41LNnRab1VhRVJqMTA/view

You can see there's clearly a variety of methods.  One group drew everything, filmed with a camera, and then used Windows movie maker, or something else, to speed it up.  Some didn't speed it up, and just played in real time.  Another group used an iOS app called "iMotion" to create the stop motion steps after drawing on white boards.  Others did splicing of pictures with text.  One group made a .gif from the images.

While not all are perfect, all did demonstrate the steps required for muscle contraction.  Hopefully the act of making them, and then being able to watch them, helped students have a better understanding of the many steps of muscle contraction.

Why is this type of assignment useful?

While I love technology, I do not love technology for the sake of technology (mostly).  For me, if I'm going to assign a multi-media project, I want to it do something that couldn't be done without the technology, and I want students to be gaining skills along the way.  I think the "SAMR Model" is useful for determining what I'm getting out of the technology.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/souvenirsofcanada/16365262131/

Licensed for noncommercial reuse

The steps of muscle contraction are super complicated and difficult to visualize since it's occurring at the cellular and molecular level.  Without technology, the best I could have them do is draw it or act it out in person, but by adding the technology we're able to shift from the enhancement up into transformational categories of modification and redefinition.  The ability for a student to create a video that is posted on YouTube, where other students can watch and learn from watching, is transformational.  

Do you have any ways this kind of assignment could be made better?  Can it be more transformational?  I'd love to hear some ideas.  Also, if you want a copy of the activity we did, let me know. I'd be happy to share it.

Time-Lapse as a formative tool

GI love project based learning.  Nothing gives me more bang for my buck in terms of content and skills that students acquire through collaborating and creating something as part of group.  It's the 4 C's: Communication, Collaboration, Critical Thinking, and Creativity.  Check out the  ISTE standards for more specifics.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/c5/50/41/c550417f3e21123c7dc8404c99f5b89c.jpg Used under Fair Use/Creative Commons.

The one thing about group work is it's messy.  Kids don't necessarily know how to work in groups appropriately.  While we as teachers can assign roles for each, and scaffold all we want, ultimately it's up to to them to learn how to do it through a little bit of trial and error. What's more, it's often unfair.  Especially for the untrained or unaccustomed student of group work, I find most students shuffle into roughly three types of students during group work in the beginning.

1. The collaborative group member: He/she shares work proportionally with group mates.  They communicate effectively.  Is self directed and stays mostly on task.   They're not the "perfect" group member, they just do their work.
2. Dominant leader:  He/she likes to be in control of the group.  They often do more than their fair share, sometimes going so far as to intimidate others from working.
3. Spectator Lab Partner: This person loves to watch others work, but don't do much, if anything, themselves. Sometimes they like to look like they're working, but they're not.

Today was day 3 of a short term project.  By today everyone should know what to do, have divided up work, and be working on it.  But, I had one group that had basically one collaborative group member, and 3 spectators.  Even though I had prompted them to all get to work, the same three continued to do their observational study.

I've been experimenting with the time-lapse feature of the camera in the latest iOS 8 by filming my daughter as she colors or paints.  It's a pretty cool feature.  It essentially takes a picture every 10 seconds, and then when you're done recording, it plays all the images in sequential order.  It's pretty simple, and easy to do. Just spin the "dial"to time-lapse and push the red button.

Here's a quick picture I took of what it looks in the app itself.

Here's an example of what it can look like, courtesy of my daughter's artwork.

I had an idea today to set up my iPad on a time lapse while students did work. One class I set up the iPad targeted directly on the group and then let it go and said nothing.  Fifteen minutes later, and after stepping out of the room for a few minutes to check on students working outside, I stopped the time-lapse and went and sat down at the group.

"I love technology...." I started.

"Wait, you filmed us?" blurted one student as he saw me go the camera roll of the iPad.

"That's right. I took a time-lapse of you guys working.  Now let's think about this, if this camera takes a picture every ten seconds, and a student is working throughout, what should we see?"

"They shouldn't move."

"Exactly." I say, ready to make my point.  "Let's see what we see from this group.  I have a hypothesis that Elizabeth won't move, but everyone else will."

I start the video, and sure enough one student hardly moves, and is writing through most of the time. A second doesn't move, but does a fair amount of talking.  One is sitting on the desk, doing nothing except to get up once to twirl the meter stick for a good minute.  The third is the one everyone gathered around to watch and laugh at.  He's never in the same place for more two consecutive frames. He's constantly moving around, bobbing in and out, and clearly not working. At one point he disappears for a while as he left to go talk to another group, and then he shows up in the frame visiting with another group.

Nothing says busted, like video proof.  While we all had a good laugh about it, the students got the point.  I didn't really need to say much.  When I walked away, all four sat down and started working, and worked much better.

My take-aways from today
Formative assessment is often more important for students than teachers.  And the quicker the feedback from that assessment, the quicker one can make an adjustment.  Our own mobile devices give another tool for us to give that feedback quickly.

While a picture may speak a thousand words, a video (or even a rapid fire series of pictures), can say just as much or more. As teachers were often the sole person giving feedback in the classroom, and I think sometimes students inadvertently tune us out like they do their parents even if what they say is right or important.  It's nice to let a video speak for you. 

Formative assessment isn't just for content.  It's needed for developing skills too.  Students need feedback, in real time, on their interactions with peers in collaborative settings.  This was a big a-ha for me today, and one that I think I'll explore in the future.


I'd love to share the video I recorded, but I'd have to get parent permission for all of the kids in the clip.

The Hunger Games

This is my first non-genius hour post to the blog.  Friday I did one of my favorite labs of the year with my biology classes.  It's a lab that came to me as an epiphany during my student teaching, and has been refined each year to become a solid lab covering many types of concepts.   I now call it The Hunger Games Lab.  I've included a link to  the lab at the bottom of this post.  Here's the explanation of how it works:

The basic format starts with the class broken into three groups, or phenotypes, which we record the number of before we begin.  They are the "stumpy" (genotype AA) who pick up their cork "food" with their wrists,

 "knucklers (Aa) who pick up food with the gap between their index and middle finger knuckles,

and "pinchers" (aa) who pick up their food with their thumb and index fingers.   

We go outside, make a big circle, and I spread ~100 corks on the ground and say "go!"  

They have to run and get as much food as possible using their feeding style.  A colleague tried my lab this year a made a modification that I loved and tried with my class myself.  Each student was given a container to serve as their "nest" or "den" that they had to bring their food back to.

Once all food is exhausted, I tell them how many corks they needed to survive.  Usually I choose enough to kill off about 1/3 to 1/2 of the population.  They return the corks to me, the dead individuals leave the population, and the winners are told to find a mate to reproduce with that will give them offspring most likely to survive.  Typically this means everyone wants to mate with a pincher primarily, and a knuckle secondarily.  Stumpys don't usually get much love.

Earlier in the year we do a "coin sex" lab where we explore probabilities of offspring inheriting alleles from various different genotypes of parents.  I build on this experience with the Hunger Games Lab.  A student who is a stumpy (AA) will label a coin with tape "A" on each side.  A knuckler would have "A" on one side and "a" on the other.  And a pincher would be "a" on both sides.  Each side of the coin represents each homologous chromosome with the gene of interest.  When students pair up with their mate, they both flip their coin. This simulate meiosis and Mendel's laws of segregation and independent assortment.  The resulting allele face up is the one passed on in their gamete.  When students pair their coins together, they simulate recombination, or sex, to determine their offspring's genotype and phenotype.  For a lot of students, this lab is a big "a-ha" moment about meiosis and sex, and haploid and diploid.

Remember those dead individuals? Well now they are reincarnated as the offspring.  A kid who died as a stumpy may come back as pincher (this is why all kids need to have three coins).  Then the most important part: we count the number of each phenotype.   We then circle back up and the process repeats.  I have on my data table 10 generations worth, but we typically do 5-6.

The next lab day we calculate the allele frequency each generation to track the evolution of the population.  We also have a lot of great conversations about behaviors we saw during the lab and how it's like real life.  I love the conversations we have about this part.

Real Life Context

There are so many real life applications that can be discussed from this lab. Here's an incomplete list of things that come up and some discussion questions I usually raise.

1. Kids always cheat.  Nevertheless, the population always evolves to be more like the pinchers with "a" allele increasing in frequency.  What is cheating? Why do we cheat? Do organisms cheat in real life?
2. Sometimes Stumpys cooperate into a herd, and preserve their genotype.  This brings up topics like group selection, disruptive selection, and speciation.
3. The whole population shifts towards the pinchers.  This helps us understand directional selection and gradualism.  A common thing is see is that students always thing recessive alleles are bad.  Here they realize that recessive alleles can actually be good, and thus increase in the population.
4. Populations, not individuals, evolve.  Most kids get this rock solid by the end of the lab.  They also begin to understand how natural selection acts on the phenotype, but it's the genotype that evolves.
5. Certain kids are sometimes popular as mates.  Sometimes certain kids are monogamous.  This brings us interesting topics of discussion about mate choice and sexual selection, and how that can influence the population.
6. Bottlenecks. Sometimes I kill off a lot of the population.  There's usually a point at which I dump all the food in one pile, and everyone sprints to the center (Hence the name "Hunger Games").  Some kids give up and die off.  In this way it's less about the phenotypes and more about who was lucky enough to get to the pile.  This can help students understand genetic drift and how sudden changes in the environment can affect a population.
7. This year after I adopted the "nests" component, some students raided each other's nests at the end of the last round.  This brought up a great conversation about parasitism.  This reminded us how new behaviors, if advantageous, can be heavily rewarded in a population and can act as driving force in reproductive isolation and speciation.  We talked about Cuckoos' nest parasitism and a neat recent article about Scrub Jays on Santa Cruz Island.  There are a lot of parasites one could discuss.

Feel free to use and modify the lab to fit your needs.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.  If you make any great modifications or find cool new patterns, PLEASE share in the comments below.  I'd love to hear more, or hear how people are benefiting from my work.  If you have any questions, I'm happy to clarify too!

Hunger Games Lab

Student Blogs!

Here is the list of my Anatomy and Physiology students' projects I posted previously, but now with links to their individual blogs.

Please check them out and give them a comment!

• Designing a lighter high top basketball shoe.  
• Creating a documentary about distracted driving.
• Raising awareness of organ donation and promoting a way of increasing the number of donors.
• Comparing and contrasting different approaches to autism therapy and raising awareness and money for treatment.
• Creating a visual novel centered on emotional intelligence and brain science.
• Getting solar power established at SHS.
• Creating a visual portfolio of styles through the 20th century
• Creating a human body board game (like Clue) where players have to determine the system, and disease, afflicting a patient.
• Writing a business plan.
• Creating, preparing, and discussing the nutritional benefits of various meals and then creating a cookbook based on their blog.
• Creating a removable device that will address damage to clothes caused by autistic kids who chew on their clothing.
• Designing a method for increasing bone density.
• Creating a plan to help those who are diagnosed as pre-diabetic with changes in diet and lifestyle.
• Create an app that helps people choose where they should travel based on various criteria.
• Creating a targeted meal plan for sport specific athletes.
• Creating a light that utilizes salt water.
• Designing a genetically modified algae to help produce oxygen.
• Creating an app for cancer patients to help manage schedules, medications, and biometrics as well as create a social network for those with similar conditions.
• Studying and understanding online behavior when given anonymity compared to real identity.
• Creating video series highlighting pillars of health and how to promote a healthy lifestyle.
• Create a book on California native plants that highlight natural history, potential health benefits, and how to use them in home landscaping.
• Volunteering in a retirement home and creating an oral history of those who live there.
• Creating a fitness plan to test the benefits of low, moderate, and high intensity workouts.
• Game programming and design in interactive cognitive brain games

Using Feedly to Monitor Student Blogs

Students have created their blogs, and have begun posting.  The plan is for them to post to them every other week, and provide comments on each other's blogs during non posting weeks.    Our school uses a learning management system called Canvas as an intranet of sorts for teacher pages, homework posting, online discussion boards, and submitting assignments (among other things). I used this system for them to submit their blog urls.  Another way would have been to create a Google Form that they could go to and paste in their urls, which in turn would give me a spreadsheet with all of their urls organized neatly by name.  I actually think I might just do that next year.  

From my end as a reader though, I don't really want to go to Canvas every time I want to link to their blogs, or see if they've posted recently.  I want to go to one single place.  That's where Feedly comes in:

Feedly is basically and RSS reader that conglomerates all of the most recent posts of website you view on a regular basis.  Why waste time going to each and every one of your favorite websites to see what's new, when you can go to one place and see all of the new posts organized however you choose?  It's easy to set up. Once you create an account, you can easily access new posts by logging in via the Feedly website, or by using the Feedly mobile or desktop app.  Once in, you can see which websites have had recent posts, and link directly to them, or just read the content in Feedly and quickly move on to the next. It's really handy.

Here you can see that I connected all of my student blogs into my own Feedly.  The numbers on the right of the left hand column indicate the number of unread posts.

At first glance it looks like I need to talk to students about including some pictures in their posts.  Having pictures can be a nice way to pique view interest.

This is a great tool for me to see real quick who's posting and who's not.  It's also a great tool for students to use, and I plan on sharing it with them next week.  For them, they can use it to track their peers' blogs without having to go to Canvas.  What's more, they can use it to track information they're seeking for their actual projects.  20% time seems like a lot of time, but it's really not. I'm realizing how fast it goes, and you want your time finding information to be as efficient as possible.  Using Feedly, or other RSS readers, to bring the information to you is a huge time saver.

"Frustration"

"Frustration" is the subject line in my inbox.  The email from my student has only this screenshot:

Frustration was definitely the right sentiment.  Monday, we were in the computer lab to set up everyone's blog and all but a couple students kept getting this message.  Trying with different browsers yielded the same result.  Even students who used their phones had the same result.

Unfortunately that meant setting up the blog had to be homework, and everyone had to kind of improvise a little bit.  Thankfully we had the great handout from 20timeineducation.com, and most people just worked on this to brainstorm what they wanted their blog to look like.

After following up on the invalid message.  It appears to be something that happens a lot when multiple blogs are being set up within a short amount of time from the same IP address. Since we were all using the same one (even those on their phones via wifi), Google perceived it as multiple requests from the same computer and treated it as though we were some auto-bot and blocked us all.  It doesn't sound like there's much that can be done about it from our end.  So, next year I'll require that part for homework I guess and we'll spend class time tweaking the settings and starting the first blog post. The take home message: if you're going to set up blogs with blogger, you likely won't be able to have the whole class set it up at the same time at school.


Permission for blogging
Monday I also passed out a permission slip for parents and guardians to sign regarding creation of,  and posting on, blogs online for all to access.  I know that some educators choose to keep blogs restricted, especially for elementary aged children.  Blog services, like Kid Blog, give teachers a lot of great control over privacy settings.  But I feel since I teach juniors and seniors, they're close enough to adulthood that the training wheels can come off.  We've gone over digital citizenship earlier this year, and again with the permission slip, and they generally have a good handle on what it means to be posting online.

Here's the permission slip that I used, which was modified from one I found on Joy Kirr's plethora of resources on Genius Hour.  I'm so thankful for all the great resources out there from teachers trying this already.  It's nice to build on what's been vetted already and tailor to my needs.

Where we are now, and where we're going: 
Most all students have set up the blogs by now.  Here's the handout I gave them (again, manipulating one I found from another 20 Time teacher).  Now they're expected to make their first post, which they requested will be due the Tuesday night following our 20 Time day.  I plan to make blog posts due every other week, and have them comment on 3 of each others' post in the weeks between.  I'm excited to see their first posts next week.  I'll be sharing their links as they begin posting!

Shark Tank Update

An Update
Thursday's Shark Tank was a big success.  I was really impressed with the ideas and vision that they're creating.  Many students clearly have a passion that is feeding their ideas and many showed some real excitement when proposing their ideas.

I invited a colleague one period and my administrator (who was actually formally observing me at the same time) the other period.  Both gave great feedback to the students that, coupled with student feedback, I think really gave students some good ideas moving forward.

I had initially hoped to have a larger class discussion after the presentations, and then have students write some reflections on the process for me to read over the break, but we ran out of time.  Questions and conversations that followed each pitch ate up a lot of time, so we didn't have the time for the class discussion that I had hoped we would have.

Next Year
In the future I think I would actually split the class in half, and have them pitch to smaller groups and have someone record each pitch.  This would allow us to get through all of them faster, and have time for a class discussion after.  I would then have them post those video pitches into our LMS, Canvas, and create an online discussion on the videos.  Then that night for homework I'd have each student watch and make comments on a couple pitches that they didn't watch in class.  This would give additional feedback to each student, and make for more refined ideas.

Student Proposed Topics
Below is my rough description of the different topics proposed Thursday.  These will certainly evolve over time, and I'll maybe showcase these these periodically the next few months.  I've highlighted in blue, the ones that are science related.  

• Volunteering in a retirement home and creating an oral history of those who live there.
• Creating a fitness plan to test the benefits of low, moderate, and high intensity workouts.
• Designing a lighter high top basketball shoe.  
• Creating a documentary about distracted driving.
• Raising awareness of organ donation and promoting a way of increasing the number of donors.
• Comparing and contrasting different approaches to autism therapy and raising awareness and money for treatment.
• Creating a choice novel centered on emotional intelligence and brain science.
• Getting solar power established at SHS.
• Creating a visual portfolio of styles through the 20th century
• Creating a human body board game (like Clue) where players have to determine the system, and disease, afflicting a patient.
• Writing a business plan.
• Creating, preparing, and discussing the nutritional benefits of various meals and then creating a cookbook based on their blog.
• Creating a removable device that will address damage to clothes caused by autistic kids who chew on their clothing.
• Designing a method for increasing bone density.
• Creating a plan to help those who are diagnosed as pre-diabetic with changes in diet and lifestyle.
• Create an app that helps people choose where they should travel based on various criteria.
• Creating a targeted meal plan for sport specific athletes.
• Creating a light that utilizes salt water.
• Designing a genetically modified algae to help produce oxygen.
• Creating an app for cancer patients to help manage schedules, medications, and biometrics as well as create a social network for those with similar conditions.
• Studying and understanding online behavior when given anonymity compared to real identity.
• Creating video series highlighting pillars of health and how to promote a healthy lifestyle.
• Create a book on California native plants that highlight natural history, potential health benefits, and how to use them in home landscaping.

Reflection and Thoughts Moving Forward

As I had anticipated in my start with why post, those with an interest in science would pick related topics.  More than half are science based, or build off specific topics we discussed last semester.  Our unit on health that covered the effects of nutrition, sleep, exercise, stress, and social interactions on our bodies had a pretty large impact on the class and you can see that several are now applying what they learned in various and creative ways.

There's certainly some topics that I have some real questions about feasibility, or that they've taken on too big of an undertaking.  Some might be too technical or too time consuming to have an actual product or solution at the end, but I think it's important to let students set their own goals and discover for themselves through their research and planning if they've bitten off more than they can chew.  This is the way life is, and appropriate goal setting is a skill that needs to be developed.  

What's really important here is the process, not the product.

We're on vacation for this next week. When we return, we will begin the blogging process and students will begin their projects.  

Shark Tank

New ideas pass through three periods:
• It can't be done.
• It probably can be done, but it's not worth doing.
• I knew it was a good idea all along !

-(Arthur C. Clarke, British Science Fiction Author & Futurist)

We're making the transition this week from idea to plan.  Monday is the last class time for students to refine their ideas for the project before pitching it to the class.  I'm excited for this next step.  I know students are putting serious thought into their project ideas. I've seen students in the library outside of class time collaborating with peers and researching.  

• Describe the purpose of their project.

• What they will be doing?

• What they will need to learn along the way?

• What obstacles they anticipate experiencing?

• Questions they have for their audience.  

Since introducing the project, I’ve helped them develop their ideas, but I’ve also given them space and autonomy to explore it on their own. The next step is their “Shark Tank” (borrowed from the popular show), where they will need to pitch their idea to the class.  Here's what they need to do:

Much like the “sharks” on Shark Tank ask questions to get at the root of the businesses, and help direct the business owners in the right direction, I’m trying to create a collaborative (and hopefully less intimidating) environment where the class can help each other refine their ideas and help resolve any issues they might have.  In some cases, as in the TV show, they may find their project will be too difficult, and may need to be reworked entirely.  Hopefully this will not be the case, and they will have a solid idea already. 

The basic format will have students come up to the front of the room, give their pitch in ~5 minutes, and then the class will ask questions and give feedback for an additional few more minutes, or as much time as is needed.  I will also be scoring them according to a rubric, which is based on the Common Core State Standards (see below).  

20 Time Shark Tank Rubric

Name:

Requirement	Score (0= absent, 10= excellent)
Student comes prepared, having read and researched material under study; explicitly draws on that preparation by referring to evidence from their research on the topic.
Has set clear purpose and goals for project.
Identifies what additional information or research is required to deepen the investigation or complete the task.
Responds thoughtfully to diverse perspectives of the class during Q&A.
Total

Once all pitches have been made, we will open the activity to a broader class discussion and reflection.  I will also have them write down a brief reflection on the experience and ask them to tell me about their next steps, given what they learned today.

After this phase of the project, the plan is for them to go home over the break thinking about their project, and when they come back from the break, begin moving forward on their plan.  At that point we will also begin the blog phase of the project.

Stay tuned for updates on Thursday's Shark Tank!

Common Core Standards tied with this lesson alone:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.11-12.1

Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grades 11-12 topics, texts, and issues, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.11-12.1.A

Come to discussions prepared, having read and researched material under study; explicitly draw on that preparation by referring to evidence from texts and other research on the topic or issue to stimulate a thoughtful, well-reasoned exchange of ideas.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.11-12.1.B

Work with peers to promote civil, democratic discussions and decision-making, set clear goals and deadlines, and establish individual roles as needed.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.11-12.1.C

Propel conversations by posing and responding to questions that probe reasoning and evidence; ensure a hearing for a full range of positions on a topic or issue; clarify, verify, or challenge ideas and conclusions; and promote divergent and creative perspectives.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.11-12.1.D

Respond thoughtfully to diverse perspectives; synthesize comments, claims, and evidence made on all sides of an issue; resolve contradictions when possible; and determine what additional information or research is required to deepen the investigation or complete the task.