The end of the road

Well, this is the end of the road for my Genius Hour Project and my final blog post.  I wanted to thank everyone who followed my journey.  

As I finalized my Genius Hour product, I completed the final piece of my research.  Last week, I launched a survey to Ontario based teachers within their Reddit channel.  The survey was a success, gathering 45 responses over 7 days.  The findings were quite interesting, showing that while 86.6% of respondents felt confident in their understanding of Generative AI, 60% felt that their school board did not present clear guidelines on its use. There were also some very good suggestions as to its use (create rubrics, generating make-up tests), and where teachers draw the line (no personal information, never used to grade assignment).  I was able to use this information to help prioritize the valuable pieces of AI against the items that AI should never be used for. Below are the snapshots of the responses I received:

This was a pleasant project to work on, and something that I will definitely be bringing into my classroom in a meaningful way. There is a certain joy in being able to work on projects that are of interest to ourselves, compelling us to move forward and execute with more determination than a standard assignment.  The fact that we were able to combine this with learning about key technology tools, such as Blogger, presentations, and video creation made this a very compelling project. I enjoyed leveraging these different tools, and watching them come together through this blog as a journey helped me to see the evolution over this period of time, which is difficult to account for as you are working on each part of the project.  I also enjoyed the fact that we had to put the project plan together ourselves and work through at pace.  My final product turned out better than expected, and is something that I would be happy to share more broadly to fellow teachers.

The biggest challenge that I had was in the actual creation of my driving question.  It took me many iterations, and support from the instructors, to really hone in on the meaning of my topic.  However, this time was well spent, as I could see that it helped me gain focus on how to execute my project.  It allowed me to more quickly move through the research phases by honing in on the information that was most meaningful to my driving question. As I implement this in future classes, I will be sure that we apply the right level of focus on creating robust driving questions to make the rest of the project flow more smoothly for my students.

Honestly, I thought that the process worked really well for our level of knowledge as university students and experienced professionals.  For my secondary school classes, I would imagine that a bit more guidance might be necessary around the tools involved in delivering the project.  For instance, the creation and maintenance of a blog, or how to create effective PowerPoint slides. Baking these elements into the course will help students be prepared to deliver their best work.

I look forward to implement Genius Hours within my courses once I begin teaching. I believe that this is a powerful tool for self-directed and meaningful learning that will appeal to virtually all students.  By making students more accountable to their own learning, we can expect a higher level of engagement in class, and more in depth insights being formed without requiring a load of explicit teaching.

References:

Gemini. Create an image for my final blog post... Google Gemini, 12 Feb. 2026.                         Google. https://gemini.google.com/