2010MEDU607

Excellent site from Buck Institute of Education on PBL. Our model assumes that teachers and students will be most successful in carrying out Project Based Learning if careful attention is given to developing an engaging, student-focused culture on the classroom.

Why new schools are choosing an old model to bring students into the 21st century.

Welcome to PBL-Online, a one stop solution for Project Based Learning! You'll find all the resources you need to design and manage high quality projects for middle and high school students.

Edutopia's "Big List" on Assessment. Contains plenty of links for further exploration of the topic.

"Testing represents a commitment to high academic standards and school accountability. When the financial and emotional stakes associated with standardized tests are disproportionately high, this laudable goal becomes distorted."

"If enough educators -- and noneducators -- realize there are serious flaws in how we evaluate our schools, maybe we can stop this absurdity."

A list of standardized test FAQs from FairTest - the National Center for Fair and Open Testing.

Assessment of reading using the ever ubiquitous iPod Touch.

Future assessment for 21st century skills.

When assessment drives instruction, students learn more and become more confident, self-directed learners. Assessing Projects helps teachers create assessments that address 21st century skills and provides strategies to make assessment an integral part of their teaching and help students understand content more deeply, think at higher levels, and become self-directed learners.

"If you've been following public discourse in education over the last couple of years, you have likely witnessed the emergence of a new, ubiquitous catch phrase: "21st century skills." After some time and considerable debate within and among organizations like ISTE/NETS, enGauge, and The Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a general consensus has emerged on definitions of the term. Many for-profit and not-for-profit organizations advertise their curricula to potential school and district clients, touting the alignment with 21st century skills with whatever they are pitching. The vast majority of these, from the traditional "drill and kill" to the more reformed, constructivist and project-based approaches, have adopted the rhetoric (if not the practice) of the new millennium. What is still lacking in the landscape of 21st century education, however, are examples of 21st century student work. While there is no shortage of discourse around the term or end to the lists qualifying the kind of work that students need to be engaged in as part of their 21st century education, there are precious few examples of actual 21st century work."

"The Concord Consortium undertakes innovative projects that bridge the gap between research and practice. Some projects are at the level of nuts-and-bolts technology, while others focus on learners. In all cases our projects strive to create new structures for learning and are strategically placed to achieve important long-term goals."

"Schools and universities can set up free Google Apps accounts with their own domain name, where they can give all student and faculty acces to a variety of tools, including a GMail account, iGoogle portal, Google Groups for collaboration, and Pages, for creating websites. Each user can also use their GMail account to activate other Google services, such as GoogleDocs."

An example of challenged -based learning in the elementary classroom.

Blog post by Will Richardson regarding the challenges of new assessments for new models of learning.