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Video Playlist: A Project-Based Learning Toolkit Keep watching the player below to see the rest of the playlist, or view it on YouTube.

Project-Based Learning: Explained. (03:50) First, let's get the basics out of the way. This video is a great tool for when you just need to describe PBL in four minutes. Created by the Buck Institute for Education (BIE) -- a one-stop resource for PBL tools.

Let's start with the secondary system. As this level of education becomes significantly student focused, there are many of us in the system who fear we are coddling students in the extreme and not preparing them at all for the realities of the work world or college/university. Here are samples of policies, largely instituted by the Ministry of Education, that added together, have lead to concerns re: coddling.

•Late work: Student work is not penalized for lateness. Late work is viewed as a behavioural issue, not an academic one. •Plagiarism: This is also seen as a behavioural issue, and usually does not result in any academic penalty, even in a grade 12 University level course. •Evaluation: Policies are moving away from grades being derived from an average of all student assignments in favour of a more general approach that reflects "most recent and/or most consistent" achievement. •Lower limits: Students getting failing grades are assessed by this policy which requires teachers to give a mark of 30 to students who are, on paper, achieving anywhere from 1-29 per cent. This is designed to 'give them hope' of success. •Credit rescue/recovery: A policy designed to give students who fail a course the opportunity to make up key missed work with the goal of achieving a passing grade. •Memorization: The idea of students actually memorizing material is viewed as "old fashioned" and is rejected in favour of "inquiry based learning'." The world of the university student is decidedly different, as evidenced by their policies. •Late work: Most courses do not accept late work. Period. •Plagiarism: This is viewed as academic dishonesty, and harsh academic penalties are in place. •Evaluation: Most courses feature few evaluations that are weighted heavily, and grades are based on the average of all assignments. •Evaluation: The move toward knowledge-based evaluation is epidemic. Exams, even in courses like literature studies and philosophy, are commonly multiple choice and short answer exams.

•If students are trained for the 14 years they attend school that there really are few consequences to academic problems, how will they fare in the much more rigorous world of post-secondary education? A history professor recently asked me what we (high school teachers) were doing to our kids.

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If I could go back and change my classes now, I would immediately: Offer brief, blitzkrieg-like mini-lessons with engaging, assessment-for-learning-type activities following directly on their heels (e.g. a ten-minute lecture on Whitman’s life and poetry, followed by small-group work in which teams scour new poems of his for the very themes and notions expressed in the lecture, and then share out or perform some of them to the whole group while everyone takes notes on the findings.) set an egg timer every time I get up to talk and all eyes are on me. When the timer goes off, I am done. End of story. I can go on and on. I love to hear myself talk. I often cannot shut up. This is not really conducive to my students’ learning, however much I might enjoy it. Ask every class to start with students’ Essential Questions or just general questions born of confusion from the previous night’s reading or the previous class’s discussion. I would ask them to come in to class and write them all on the board, and then, as a group, ask them to choose which one we start with and which ones need to be addressed. This is my biggest regret right now – not starting every class this way. I am imagining all the misunderstandings, the engagement, the enthusiasm, the collaborative skills, and the autonomy we missed out on because I didn’t begin every class with fifteen or twenty minutes of this.

made me realize how little autonomy students have, how little of their learning they are directing or choosing

I would structure every test or formal activity like the IB exams do – a five-minute reading period in which students can ask all their questions but no one can write until the reading period is finished. This is a simple solution I probably should have tried years ago that would head off a lot (thought, admittedly, not all) of the frustration I felt with constant, repetitive questions.

But, you might say, it’s the internet. We’ve come to associate the internet as low-engagement, a drive-by experience. We take for granted that the internet offers us things that are slightly flaky, or easy. So we’re not surprised when the drop out rate is so high. Easy in, easy out.But it doesn’t have to be this way.The course was as well-designed as a real-world lecture and the teacher was qualified and engaging, but it’s not a surprise that the dropout rate was so high: As soon as education gets difficult (and useful education always gets difficult) it’s social pressure, peer pressure and our own need to fit in and achieve that often keeps us going. The typical online course provides precious little of any of these elements.

Lectures are at the heart of the last century of higher learning. A proven scholar orates in front of a class of selected students.Tests are the way institutions enforce compliance. They’re the stick.And accreditation is the carrot. Put up with the lectures and the tests and we’ll give you the certificate, the scarce piece of paper that is (supposed to be) worth far more than the effort you went through to get certified.

We’ve seen that when knowledge jobs meet the internet, they change. And now we’re seeing that online education is having trouble acting like a job as well.

Finally, technology is embedded into the structure of all we do. It’s part of how we research, how we capture information, and how we display our learning. It’s never an accessory tacked on at the end.

My students started by creating a Flickr feed, Facebook page, a YouTube account, a Tumblr blog, and a Twitter account. They decided that visual representations of their knowledge would be the most powerful. So some of my students created photographs depicting images that they felt best represented modern trafficking. These photos were then edited in Picnik, and posted to our blog.

A few years ago I tried to teach this idea to a grade 12 class when we were studying essay writing. They didn’t get it. But in the context we were using, after comparing social media content, it made perfect sense to my grade 11 students.

explains some of the individual differences that influence problem solving

psychologist David Jonassen

Given the reality of all these differences, how can I even dream of a functional classroom in which every student is learning at their own learning edge?

when a student asked Nieto if he could bring his iPod to class, Nieto agreed, and neither teacher nor student has looked back since.

said mobile devices are particularly useful because of the many learning applications and basic language tools, such as spell check and grammar check, which increase the speed of learning. Rather than view the mobile applications as learning shortcuts tantamount to cheating, Nieto sees them as motivational tools that increase his students’ interest in reading and writing by giving them instant feedback. It’s a perspective most of his students seem to share.

as motivational tools that increase his students’ interest in reading and writing by giving them instant feedback.

This is not an isolated event—schools across the country regularly ban finger use in classrooms or communicate to students that they are babyish. This is despite a compelling and rather surprising branch of neuroscience that shows the importance of an area of our brain that “sees” fingers, well beyond the time and age that people use their fingers to count.

Remarkably, brain researchers know that we “see” a representation of our fingers in our brains, even when we do not use fingers in a calculation

Evidence from both behavioral and neuroscience studies shows that when people receive training on ways to perceive and represent their own fingers, they get better at doing so, which leads to higher mathematics achievement. The tasks we have developed for use in schools and homes (see below) are based on the training programs researchers use to improve finger-perception quality.

Education as it should be – passion-based. The Other 21st Century Skills with 19 comments Many have attempted to identify the skills important for a learner today in this era of the 21st century (I know it is an overused phrase).  I have an affinity towards the skills identified by Tony Wagner: Critical thinking and problem-solving Collaboration across networks and leading by influence Agility and adaptability Initiative and entrepreneurialism Effective oral and written communication Accessing and analyzing information Curiosity and imagination   http://www.tonywagner.com/7-survival-skills Today I viewed a slideshow created by Gallup entitled, The Economics of Human Development: The Path to Winning Again in Education. Here are some slides from this presentation. This

presentation sparked my thinking about what other skills and attributes would serve the learners (of all ages) in this era of learning.  Some other ones that I believe important based on what I hear at conferences, read via blogs and other social networks include: Grit Resilience Hope and Optimism Vision Self-Regulation Empathy and Global Stewardship

Self-regulation is a complex process involving numerous motivational, affective, cognitive, physiological and behavioral factors that individuals proactively direct and manage in order to attain self-set goals (Zeidner, Boekaerts, & Pintrich, 2000). It is a broad construct incorporating behaviors and strategies utilized by individuals across their lifespan to modulate or control their own emotional and behavioral responses. Students who self-regulate believe that they are responsible for their own learning and are more adept at dictating what, where, and how their learning occurs (Bandura, 2006). These students often persist longer through academic tasks and display higher levels of motivation and achievement (Schunk & Ertmer, 2000; Zimmerman & Schunk, 2001)

Flipped Classroom: The "In-Class" Version

An In-Class Flip works like this. Just like with a traditional flip, the teacher pre-records direct instruction, say, in a video lecture. But instead of having students view the content at home, that video becomes a station in class that small groups rotate through.

As with a traditional flip, the direct instruction runs on its own, which frees the teacher for more one-on-one time with students.

Initially in many institutions the move will be crude pedagogically, with an emphasis on video recording of lectures and flipped classes, or merely increasing the amount of online learning supporting regular classes. Over time, though, as instructors get more experience in hybrid learning, get more instructional design support, and greater pressure from the administration, full course re-design will increase, but major redesigns around hybrid learning may take as long as five years in many institutions. One reason for this slow adoption of re-design is the current lack of appropriate models for hybrid learning that have been tested and evaluated; this will change though as experience grows. Best practice for hybrid learning will emerge, as it did for fully online learning.

10. Expect the unexpected: One year: 100%; Three years: 100%; Five years: 100% These are the monsters lurking in the shadows. In online learning, the only thing you can really be certain of is the uncertainty. These are Donald Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns, so by definition they are unpredictable or non-forecastable. However, there are also some known unknowns that perhaps we should discuss. (MOOCs are good examples – they were known in 2011, but the likelihood that they would take off in 2012 in the way they did was not known, at least by most pundits.) Here are some possible bogeymen to lie awake worrying about:

the privatization of post-secondary education in the USA. Many states are in dire financial trouble. Will this result in some states privatizing their public post-secondary education systems? What price would Alabama State University fetch from a commercial buyer and how would that affect the state’s finances? If some states do decide on privatization, expect online learning to increase – indeed, online learning will likely increase in financially challenged states without privatization, because, rightly or wrongly, it will be seen as cheaper; also expect federal student financial aid to take a hit in the USA as Congress grapples with the deficit. a major Internet player (Apple, Google, Facebook or Amazon) jumps into the online learning market, perhaps in partnership with some elite universities, and takes a major share of the for-credit online market, because of lower costs, quality content, and accreditation from elite universities (but with a different category of degree from their on-campus programs) The US Congress backs publishers and shuts down all publicly funded open educational resources; copyright legislation is tightened on US-based Internet companies making it all but impossible to use educational resources over the Internet for free major power shortages/outages, due to bad weather/a surge in energy prices/political activists (pick your reason) makes online delivery increasingly unreliable during winter quantum computing arrives at a reasonable cost and completely changes the game.

how do they learn best

Student Surveys: Using Student Voice to Improve Teaching and Learning

The Brain Puzzle The Thinking Skills Club organizes fun, cognitively enriching games into a curriculum disguised as a brain puzzle. The puzzle pieces fill with colour as games are passed in all 6 areas of the site: Executive Function, Problem Solving, Memory, Processing Speed, Social Skills and Attention.

Use Wait Time Two

Try "Do Not Call On Me" Signals

Enjoy Your Students