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Digital portfolios of student work are powerful to help students see how they have grown over time. In turn, they support confidence in students to tackle things they may have once thought too difficult to learn. I have used wikis for this purpose, and they work well, but Evernote, with its apps for smartphones in addition to web access and desktop apps, is more versatile. In addition, students can take photos and make voice recordings to add to their notes, and share folders with their teachers and group members. Great tips here in this article.

"I came across Terry Heick's blog - 10 Assessments You Can Perform In 90 Seconds - at TeachThought from earlier this year and really enjoyed the formative assessment strategies that he outlined. Using formative assessment techniques in class - or "simple assessments" as Terry calls them - are easy to administer and provide the instant feedback teachers need to identify which students need more help, and then adjust their instruction and lesson plans to help them."

Great ideas here!

Good article highlighting some of the misconceptions we can have about PBL.

le blog de l'Institut français de Florence - plain d'idées pour le #FLE

The website which accompanies Tom Vander Ark's book and explores further areas of inquiry.

Regardless of what social and emotional learning (SEL), character development, or any other related program you might use in your school, two things are true: They have a problem-solving component, and generalization is greatly enhanced when what is being taught as SEL/character is also integrated into the rest of the school day. Because of the importance of language arts skills, reading activities provide an ideal way to build students' problem-solving skills by applying them to deepen their insights into the written materials.

Standards based grading for World Languages

In my Learning Through Projects series, I wrote about crafting questions that drive projects. Developing interesting, relevant, and meaningful driving questions is challenging. To help teachers with project based learning, Global Digital Citizenship Foundation has free publications with ideas and resource links. The publications are PDFs and are licensed under Creative Commons, so you may distribute or print them as long as you do not modify them in any way.

Telling our story is an essential part of our humanness. It allows us to feel part of the community that knows our story, and it fosters empathy for those that surround us. Story is a powerful force in shaping mental models, motivating and persuading others, and teaching the lessons of life. Telling story extends back to a time when oral history dominated the tools of communication. And now the flood of technology tools that allow for instant communication has spun us back into a golden age where story again dominates the media landscape.

t's no secret that curiosity makes learning more effective and enjoyable. Curious students not only ask questions, but also actively seek out the answers. Without curiosity, Sir Isaac Newton would have never formulated the laws of physics, Alexander Fleming probably wouldn't have discovered penicillin, and Marie Curie's pioneering research on radioactivity may not exist.

In 1968, two researchers conducted a fascinating study that proved the extent to which teacher expectations influence student performance. Positive expectations influence performance positively, and negative expectations influence performance negatively. In educational circles, this has been termed the Pygmalion Effect, or more colloquially, a self-fulfilling prophecy. What has always intrigued me about this study is specifically what the teachers did to communicate that they believed a certain set of students had "unusual potential for academic growth." The research isn't overly explicit about this, but it indicates that the teachers "may have paid closer attention to the students, and treated them differently in times of difficulty." This begs the following questions: Why can't teachers treat all of their students like this? How do we communicate to students whether we believe in them or not?

Todas las lenguas tienen un vocabulario base, es decir, es como el soporte para comunicar. Es aquel léxico que está siempre presente en la vida cotidiana, que impregna cada intento de comunicar algo, sencillamente, aquel que nos impide expresar hasta la idea más simple si lo ignoramos. Es por ello que debes aprenderlo urgentemente para poder hablar francés satisfactoriamente. El "diccionario de frecuencias de la lengua francesa del CNRS"  o "Dictionnaire des fréquences de la langue française du CNRS (Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique)" en francés, ha listado los 100 verbos más utilizados en francés.

HOW would you rank "important" languages? If asked to rattle them off, many people start with English, but after that are reluctant to go further. Important how, they ask. One approach would be to look at people and money: surely a language is important if it is spoken by lots of people, in countries with great wealth (and presumably, therefore, power).

Adding structure to student-led inquiry

Good reflection by Andrew Miller

You know the hardest thing about teaching with project-based learning? Explaining it to someone. It seems to me that whenever I asked someone the definition of PBL, the description was always so complicated that my eyes would begin to glaze over immediately. So to help you in your own musings, I've devised an elevator speech to help you clearly see what's it all about.