Genius Hour Research Project

The Master Plan

The Master Plan is a way for you to document your Genius Hour Research Process.  You've been given this in Google Classroom and need to link your documentation to it.  Check out this awesome Thinglink Mrs. Arthur did to explain what needs to be uploaded. 

How do I complete my Mastery Based Learning Plan?​

Use the ThingLink above for more information on how to complete your personalized learning document. As you set up and complete assignments, link them to your master plan. You don't have to wait to be done to link them. In fact, the sooner you link them, the sooner you can get feedback from me or your peers.

Once something is reviewed for feedback, I will fill the box in with one of the four feedback colors (see above image). If you don't meet the standard on your first try, you can resubmit your work in that area as many times as you need to up until the final due date of the research project.

Your personal copy of the document is in Google Classroom. Many of your assignments are already completed and in your Interactive Student Notebook. Take photos of them, upload them to Google Drive, then link them to your personal copy of the Master Plan to get started.

Source and Notecards

As you find sources that will work for your research project writing, you will need to set up a way to organize notes from those sources and to create a Works Cited page reflecting those sources. We will go over how to set these up in class, but you can review any aspect of MLA formatting on the OWL Purdue MLA Citation Page.


For your research project, you are expected to find at least 5-7 reliable sources, and to pull approximately 4-6 notes that help answer one of your research questions from each of those sources. The more reliable sources and notes that you have, the easier it will be to write your explanatory/informational texts. 

Researching

Notecards. Tried and true, and done completely by hand. Your parents will remember this method, we promise. We've jazzed it up a bit to help you keep track of them in a folder, but staying organized is imperative with this method. If you lose the notecards, you will need to start over.

However, notecards do give you a lot of freedom to organize your notes by research question instead of source right from the beginning. This is a huge time saver when it comes time to outline and start writing.


Here's a short video on how to set these up.

This tool usually works best if you set up a separate document for each source and keep all of the documents in the same folder. However, I've seen students do a nice job by dividing the sources by page breaks, tables, or color. You can put the source at the top of the document, then record your citations under that.

If you set the citations up in a table, you could further organize the notes by topic or driving questions.


Here's an excellent video on how to utilize Google Docs for research note taking. I highly recommend following this tutorial if you're considering Docs.