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"The end of the school year presents us with an opportunity for reflection at Envision Schools. We take a final measure of students' progress throughout the school year, celebrate the many Envision graduates that will be heading off to college in the fall, and consider how we can incorporate those lessons into improving our own work to best enable, encourage, and ensure student learning."

"BIE has created free materials - "FreeBIEs" - such as planning forms, student handouts, rubrics, and articles for educators to download and use to design, assess, and manage projects."

"Sara Shaw, an elementary school teacher in Avon, Mass., realized she needed to teach online research skills several years ago when her students kept turning in projects riddled with misinformation. The flawed material often came from websites the students used. They took the information as fact, when it often was just someone's personal opinion."

" Indiana Department of Education is now making NBC LEARN K-12 a part of its digital offerings! Now all middle and high schools will be able to access thousands of high-quality archival, original, and currents events videos from NBC LEARN K-12 for use in classroom instruction, student projects, and homework."

"This is how evaluation and reporting works in the student-centered classroom that I like to call a Results Only Learning Environment (ROLE). There is no room for numbers, percentages or letter grades in a ROLE. Instead, students collaborate with each other and with their teacher, in order to demonstrate mastery of various objectives contained in yearlong projects. Learning is a conversation built on a system of summary, explanation, redirection and resubmission - something all stakeholders in the classroom come to know simply as SE2R. If a report card is required, the student and teacher agree on what that final grade should be, based on how all feedback was handled throughout a grading period."

"All great teachers do great work. And not only that, but they also do different work. Great teachers are always looking to improve practice, steal ideas and try new things -- all in order to meet the needs of their students. PBL teachers are no exception. Any teacher who is truly doing PBL would also agree that it's different. There is something about being a PBL teacher that requires different work, and work that is especially capitalized when implementing a PBL project. Because I work with so many PBL teachers, I feel there are some things that PBL teachers should specifically be proud of. I present them in these six affirmations. "

"Much as tablet computers went mainstream in the iPad's wake, Apple's latest educational project heralds an age of tablet-based schoolbooks. That, at least, is the hope and hype surrounding iBooks textbooks, launched Jan. 19 at a promotional gala held in the Guggenheim Museum and advertised in terms as glowing as an iPad's screen. "

"Editor's Note: Matt Weyers and co-author Jen Dole, teachers at Byron Middle School in Byron, Minnesota, present the seventh installment in a year-long series documenting their experience of launching a PBL pilot program. Project-based learning is a complex teaching method that, in our experience, requires a clear and established workflow to seamlessly accommodate the needs of teachers, parents, and students. Throughout this school year, we have found several apps, add-ons, and programs that have helped us best manage our workflow. Before we provide brief descriptions and links to each of them, it is important to state the current situation in our classroom: Students in our classes have individual iPads to use during the school day (they stay at school). Every student has a school-generated Gmail account. The majority of students have access to the internet outside of the school setting."

"One of the key components of global competence is the ability to weigh perspectives. Today, MaryBeth Jackson, founder and director of The Viewfinder Project, shares the power of photography in helping students see different points of view. Don't miss the list of resources at the end."

"Most educators I know who teach propaganda stick with examples related to America's involvement in WWI and WWII. These teachers present propaganda as something that occurred in the past. They might even teach with the many propaganda posters that were present at that time and introduce the common "techniques of persuasion." (New Mexico Media Literacy Project, 2007)"

"At the Buck Institute for Education (BIE), we've been keeping a list of the many types of "_____- based learning" we've run across over the years: Case-based learning Challenge-based learning Community-based learning Design-based learning Game-based learning Inquiry-based learning Land-based learning Passion-based learning Place-based learning Problem-based learning Proficiency-based learning Service-based learning Studio-based learning Team-based learning Work-based learning . . . and our new fave . . . Zombie-based learning (look it up!)"

"NRICH is part of the family of activities in the Millennium Mathematics Project, which also includes the Plus and Motivate sites."

"How to Use the "4 C's" Rubrics - This excerpt appears in the Buck Institute for Education's book, "PBL for 21st Century Success: Teaching Critical Thinking, Collaboration, Communication, Creativity." Rubrics for each of the "4 C's" are in the book, and we offer guidance below on how to use them in a PBL context."

"At the time of this writing, we are in the second year of a sixth-grade project-based learning program in a public school setting. In our two years of working to implement PBL, we have fielded a multitude of questions ranging from positive support to queries about the efficacy of policies that we feel best support PBL (grading for mastery, group work, etc.). Our experiences have taught us that district administration can fill three distinct roles to help streamline the PBL implementation process, which we'll discuss in this post."

"Complete state results will become publicly available this fall for California and New York, and the entire library will be online in 2017, said Daniel Lewis, chief executive and co-founder of Ravel Law, a commercial start-up in California that has teamed up with Harvard Law for the project. The cases will be available at www.ravellaw.com. Ravel is paying millions of dollars to support the scanning. The cases will be accessible in a searchable format and, along with the texts, they will be presented with visual maps developed by the company, which graphically show the evolution through cases of a judicial concept and how each key decision is cited in others."

Children in the Mehlville district may have the chance in two years to attend an elementary school with an alternative curriculum - one that uses real-world problems to help students learn and without the restraints grade levels sometimes place on learning. It would be a school that parents would choose, and there would be no admission requirements. If more children apply than there are seats available, the district would hold a lottery. That kind of competition for classroom seats has largely been limited regionally to the city of St. Louis. There, district magnet and choice schools, along with independent charter schools, offer language immersion education and schooling that focuses on science, engineering, technology and math. Mehlville Superintendent Chris Gaines received preliminary approval from the district's School Board last week to move ahead with a "Choice School of Innovation" that would be the only of its kind in St. Louis County.

"These days I'm a STEM curriculum writer and advocate, but I'll confess that each year when Middle Level Education Month rolls around, I feel an extra longing to be back in a science classroom with young adolescents elbowing their way through the door, eager to learn "stuff." It's a place where I spent 16 wonderful years of my professional life."

"On the morning of December 19, 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright achieved one of mankind's greatest feats: the first controlled flight. This revolutionized the way the world operated. Countries reacted, hiring engineers to replicate what the Wright brothers had accomplished while also trying to buy rights to the flying machine. Changes were made for the better of civilization reforming not only warfare but also the transportation of people, money, mail, and goods."

"Education has to focus on learning how to learn - metacognition. School will still be important, but not to impart what happened during the Revolutionary War or to teach the quadratic formula. School, he said, should focus on teaching young people the intangibles, the things that make humans unique: relationships, flexibility, humanity, how to make discriminating decisions, resilience, innovation, adaptability, wisdom, ethics, curiosity, how to ask good questions, synthesizing and integrating information, and of course, creating. "