Though most of my posts and thoughts have to do with my Spanish 1 classes that I'll be teaching full time during the 2013-14 school year, I still have to plan for my Latino Culture elective class I'm teaching this summer! I already had a basic syllabus and outline that I was planning on fine-tuning once school gets out, but now that I've learned about 20 Time, I've been wrestling with whether I could work it into my summer class. I believe it should be a part of this program in some way given he particular nature and goals of the Upward Bound program, but I can only control my class and have such limited time...
And then, I had an epiphany. Another hurdle I was pondering in my head was how to get students jump-started in exploring the culture of the Spanish-speaking world and how they might connect their passions to culture in some way. I thought that some sort of website with interesting links would be great, but how could I possibly manage to think of enough of a variety of resources that might spark an interest in my students? Then I realized - I have the opportunity to let my students this summer put together a resource for me. What could be better than a resource for students by students? And I'd be killing two birds with one stone!
Here's my idea:
Monday through Friday, I'll teach my students about the culture I think is important, particularly in a class about "Latino Culture". Friday, however, I'll give my students the resources (such as working in a lab or in the library) to do their own research. Each one will keep a learning blog where they can post the interesting resources they find (such as links or book titles) along with a brief summary about the resource including what information it contains, why they chose to highlight this resources, what they learned, and a reflection about what they learned. As the class is 90 minutes, I think I will require students to have at least 3 resources per day. (I'm thinking I could require at least two of them to be about Latino Culture, while the third can be about anything they want, but I haven't decided whether I want to do that or have all 3 resources be about Latino culture). I think I might tell students there will be awards for things that made their blogs stand out, so be creative and make this the best you can! (I'll only have 15 students, so it'll be easy to find something about each blog to give an award for, like most posts, coolest design, most interesting resource, best descriptions, etc.) At the end of the semester, they can present what they thought was the most interesting thing they learned about (maybe one about Latino culture and one topic of their choice). Maybe they can create a Glog or another presentation, or they can just pick one or two to present directly from their blog. For simplicity's sake, I might just have they present from their blog.
Those are my ideas for now. I'll have to run them by my superviser to make sure it's okayed and that we'll have the resources to make this possible :) I love the direction this is going!
UPDATE: Great news! My supervisor is completely on board with this idea and is working to find technology solutions to make it possible. He doesn't think it will be an issue. I can't wait to do Genius Hour! 3 1/2 weeks until class begins!
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