Final Thoughts on Genius Hour

 Initially when I started my genius hour I was very engaged and excited. An opportunity to explore anything I want in the world? That's fantastic. However, I did not for see the challenges I would have with how much time my genius hour would take me. My original plan was to create two YouTube videos a week and reflect on them. As videos take me hours to edit, I didn't think about I wouldn't have time to do this. As I had not made anymore YouTube videos, I began to avoid Genius Hour. I had no enjoyment in making blog posts because I felt like I had failed by not keeping up with my intended creative plan. Though, I think that the genius hour is a fantastic project to assign students, I think for some students it can become quite overwhelming to keep up with their passion project amongst other classes and outside of school work.

 To summarize my findings from the genius hour project, I would like to highlight my thoughts on how my genius hour went well and what didn't go well. 

Challenges:

1)Time Management: I really struggled to manage my time with genius hour and my other classes. Additionally, at the beginning I spent way too much time making YouTube videos and not enough on the actual classwork. 

2) Time Consuming: This project takes a lot of time out of your week in order to do well which is difficult when you work, do extracurriculars, and have a heavy course load! 

3) I hate Blogger: Though hate is a strong word, I am certainly not a fan of blogger. I find that with sites like WIX, there more user friendly and you're able to expand your creativity more. 

Things I loved:

1)Getting to explore my passions- I love getting the opportunity to explore anything I wanted to! It made me very excited initially to make my project.

2)Learning a new software online- Didn't I just say I hate blogger? I didn't love blogger, though I enjoyed the opportunity to get to explore a new software I had never heard of. 

3)Writing!- I didn't realize how much I enjoy writing, its fun to reflect on my work and explore my ideas in a written format. 

Things I learned: 

1)Don't bite off more than you can chew! 

2) I need to be more organized! 

Though my genius hour project wasn't a great success for me as I failed to keep up with my assigned work and creative plan, I feel as though I have learned a lot about I can move forward with a project like this in the future. I learned that next time I take on a project like this I need to develop a solid schedule, create times in my week for "work time", and create a project that isn't too challenging for the amount of time I have each week. If I could do this project again, I think I would definitely be able to do a lot better, however I'm happy that I had the chance to participate in genius hour, even if it wasn't perfect!