Genius Hour Wrap Up

Genius Hour Wrap Up

This was an interesting project for me. I have a need to retool my diet, and I have been, but this has helped me accelerate the process, and get past not jsut learning what I should be eating more or less of, but also why. 
Sure I can say "I have to eat more oats and less trans fats" but it'll be easy to slide on that if I don't take the trouble to learn why, and also how to quickly recognize packaged foods to avoid. 
For example, I now know that soft tub margarine is somewhat better for heart issues than butter (less saturated fat), but firm stick butter is much, much worse: it holds its shape because it's been hydrogenized, which turns good fats into trans fats. And trans fats are the Big Bad for anyone's diet, especially heart patients, but everyone. 

The project itself covered a pretty decent range of basic computer-based presentation skills that I will find useful as a teacher. Most of them I'm either very comfortable with or competent with because of my career path, but some of them I needed to actually sit down and do, even if it was easy, like google slides. I've always been confident in my ability to make a slideshow with little difficulty if asked, but fact is I'm never asked. I haven't made a slideshow since probably the late 90s on powerpoint. So it was good to sit with it. 

I think some students struggled with some of the trickier aspects like making a video, so I wonder if more time could be spent in instruction on certain things. I don't need to learn how to make a video, but it was a stress point for some. 

I also had big plans to make a PDF book using Adobe Software, but I toojk the easy way out and exported it from google slides. I found week five a little crammed for this project, and I wasn't expecting to deliver the book until week six. 

Going forward I have a better overview of some presentation tools at my disposal, and I have a nice mini menu book of heart healthy recipes that I enjoyed testing. I'll probably expand on it at some point. 

But I've also promised my 11-yr-old that I'll make him a recipe book of his favourite recipes that I make for him before he's an adult and moves away. I have at least 7 years to finish that, but maybe I'll use this template and start setting it up. 

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