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BIE Institite For PBL - The main Buck Institute of On-line Resource Site is a must visit for anyone serious about PBL. There is some good information on the professional development .

PBL: Exemplary Projects - A wonderful site for those wanting practical ideas to infuse PBL into the curriculum. This is the creation of a group of experienced teachers, educators, and researchers whom you may contact as resources.

4Teachers.org PBL - This site has a contains some useful information on supplying sound reasoning for PBL in school. Especially interesting are articles on Building Motivation and Using Multiple Intellegences. One very useful resource in this site is the PBL Project Check List Section.

Houghton Mifflin Project Based Learning Space - This site from publisher Houghton Mifflin Contains contains some good resources for investigating PBL and was developed by the Wisconson Center For Education Research. Included is a page on Background Knowledge an Theory.

Intel® Teach Elements: Project-Based Approaches - If you are looking for free, just-in-time professional development that you can experience now, anytime, or anywhere, this may be your answer. Intel promises that this new series will provide high interest, visually compelling short courses that facilitate deep exploration of 21st century learning concepts using and PBL.

New Tech Network - I have personally visited the New Tech Schools in both Napa and Sacramento California. I was impresssed with more then the technology.

High Tech High School - These high schools also operate using a project based learning model centered around 21st century skills.

GlobalSchoolhouse.net - Great site to begin PBL using the web while cooperating with other schools.   Harness the ability to use the web as a tool for interaction, collaboration, distance education, cultural understanding and cooperative research -- with peers around the globe.

the lack of creativity development in our schools, there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children.

n her writing about The Neuroscience of Joyful Education, Judy Willis highlights the importance of novelty in our teaching, stress-free classrooms, and pleasurable associations linked with learning as essential pre-cursors to joyful learning and the development of creativity. She goes on to suggest that when planning for the ideal emotional atmosphere we should be mindful of the following;

Make it relevant – when stress in the classroom is getting high, it is often because a lesson is overly abstract or seems irrelevant to students.

Give them a break – students can reduce stress by enjoying hobbies, time with friends, exercise, or music.

Create positive associations – by avoiding stressful practices like calling on students who have not raised their hands, teachers can dampen the stress association.

Prioritize information – helping students learn how to prioritize and therefore reduce the amount of information they need to deal with is a valuable stress-buster.

Allow independent discovery learning – students are more likely to remember and understand what they learn if they find it compelling or have a part in figuring it out for themselves.

Others, including Richard Millwood who has written about ‘delight’ in learning, emphasise similar conditions for learning – minimising stress and allowing for more risk-taking, learning from mistakes, discovery and so forth.

Teach students how to hyperlink.

Invite students to share their strategies for bringing others into their conversations.

Begin an on-going conversation on digital citizenship.

Five findings led to our decision:

Our research suggests that the potential of the LMS to transform teaching and learning is diminishing quickly. While the LMS is vitally important, in the same sense that commodity services such as e-mail, bandwidth, and disk storage are, the LMS by itself can no longer be considered strategic. Rather, it is the mash-up of different types of collaborative technologies, such as blogs, tweets, wikis, social networking sites, online media, and document sharing systems, together with the LMS, that appears to have the greater potential to transform our technology and learning practices.

The LMS is important, but is no longer transformative

Students prefer Sakai

As a part of our planning process, beginning in the summer of 2009, Pepperdine began running Sakai in parallel with our existing LMS.

Greater numbers of student respondents preferred Sakai over our current LMS when comparing the following features: announcements, assignments, gradebooks, resources (course materials), forums, calendars, quizzes and tests, dropboxes, and blogs.

So do our faculty

Faculty respondents preferred Sakai to our current LMS when comparing the following features: assignments, gradebooks, resources (course materials), forums, calendars, and dropboxes.

Our IT staff members find Sakai much easier to support

Overall, our IT staff finds that supporting Sakai is a remarkable improvement over our current LMS.

The financial savings is equivalent to the salaries of two faculty members

Our planning process involved the participation of hundreds of faculty and students, required presentations at dozens of meetings, and necessitated buy-in from our faculty and approval by the provost and deans. Serving as a change advocate regarding the effective delivery and use of technology, particularly in the technology and learning space, is an increasingly important role for our IT organization.

My words of advice for other IT leaders contemplating similar initiatives include the following:

Don't shy away from this type of challenge: Lead

Let faculty be your advocates

Use data to break the ice with difficult change initiatives

resistance to LMS change efforts is often based on closely held myths that sometimes fall apart under scrutiny. Properly used benchmarks and other measures are effective tools in any change initiative.