20 Time Update

This blog originated as my documentation of implementing 20 Time in my Anatomy and Physiology class.  It's become pretty difficult for me to maintain this blog in any kind of regular interval with everything I have going on in my life, but I wanted to give a quick update about 20 time so far this year.

The highlights:
I am doing 20 Time in all of my classes: Biology (9th and 10th graders) and Anatomy and Physiology (11th and 12th graders).  I introduced it in December to all of my classes, let them contemplate their ideas over the break and a few weeks in January.  Then they gave their elevator pitches the beginning of February where they explained the idea and rough plan, and now they're off and running with their projects, blogging every other week on what they're doing.  Like last year, while A&P can do theirs on any topic, Biology must do their project on something science related.


"Elevator Pitch" instead of "Shark Tank"
Last year I had my students pitch their ideas to the class similar to that of the show Shark Tank, and then had the class ask questions and give feedback.  It was good, but it took a while.  This year they had to do an elevator pitch. I explained the idea as if they were suddenly in an elevator with a potential investor and only had a minute to get across their idea, general plan, and what they need from that person.

We have an online discussion feature in our learning management system, Canvas, that allows students to record and upload videos.  I had them record their elevator pitch this way and then post it in the discussion. Then the class was assigned for homework the task of watching the video, and commenting with constructive feedback to help the author refine their ideas.  Then when they came to class, I actually had the students give their elevator pitches again, in small group settings.  This gave additional support and refinement for each student.  The down side for me was that it was hard for me to listen to all of them, and it's taken me a long while to watch the pitches on my own to give them my feedback.   I've had to do this more through individual conversations and comments on their first blog posts.

Using Google Forms to get all blogs in one place
This is kind of a no brainer. I should have done this last year but didn't and it made a lot of work for me to get everyone's blogs in one place.  This year with over 100 different projects, I needed a concise way to get blog urls.  I created this form to quickly capture the information I needed.

Check out the list of topics and urls from the form.  Even better check out some of the student blogs and give them some comments.  They've all just done one blog post, and will be doing their second.  Some students are utilizing their class blogs, so you can even see some of their work too.