20 Percent Project Continues -- Week 1 of the New Semester and Year

With the start of the new semester and with district benchmarks and finals, I got lost in the shuffle a bit and have not been able to blog until now.  Since I got some new students at the semester, I decided to review what the 20 Percent Project was again to all of my students.  I actually encouraged many students to change their project if they hadn't done much work on it, or they weren't that interested in their old project.

Students that are changing their project from the first semester are going to fill out a reflective form  (Change of Project Form)  to explain why they are switching projects, because even in their failure or not completing their project, I'd like them to reflect on why the project didn't take off.

One of the things that I've found about the project is that students truly need to choose something they are interested in actually doing and not something they think will be something they will want to do.

Some students thought it would be great to volunteer with different organizations and write about their experiences.  Although their altruism was to be commended, they went to a couple of things on the weekends and found that this is too time consuming and not really their passion.  The two girls that started with this project, changed their project to making a YouTube channel about how to apply makeup.

Although the project is not as philanthropic as volunteering, this new project allows them to pursue they are passionate in.  I also encouraged new students to choose a project that is already somewhat part of their lives.

I re-showed this video below that captures a second of each day of the film-maker's life for a year.  Many of the students have changed their projects to something related to photography or videos.  This video inspired a lot of students

I'm wondering if this 20 Percent Project should really be two separate semester long projects rather than one year long project.  We'll see how they turn out as we get closer to the presentation dates, which will be May 29-30.

Thanks for reading.  Would appreciate any feedback or suggestions that have worked for you.

Cheers.

Resources: Change of Project Form