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Like paintings, personal narrative stories that mix images, graphics, sound, and music with the author's own  storytelling voice will exist over time and be enjoyed long past their creation. The ideas and content for this Digital  storytelling guide have been compiled and written by Bernajean Porter, whose book, DigiTales: The Art of Telling  Digital Stories, includes detailed step-by-step processes for bringing this emerging oral storytelling style into today's  classrooms.  Learn how software like Adobe Photoshop Elements and Adobe Premiere Elements can become effective digital  storytelling tools in your classroom. Unleash your students' imagination as they create unique, personal 3-to 5- minute movies.

At any given moment, the disciplines represent the most well-honed efforts of human beings to approach questions and concerns of importance in a systematic and reliable way. (Howard Gardner, The Disciplined Mind, p. 144)

What they never tell you is that when you're eleven, you're also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four and three, and two, and one. (Sandra Cisneros, "Eleven," from The House on Mango Street)

Just getting started with project-based learning (PBL)? Our curated list of resources for educators new to PBL should help you. Before you get started, be sure to check out Edutopia's PBL page, including information about the research behind effective PBL practices. You can also connect with Edutopia's community to learn and share PBL tips.

Emotion researcher Richard Davidson says that cognition and emotion work together in a seamless, integrated way to help us persevere in a task. Thus, to teach grit effectively, educators need to help students cultivate both cognitive and emotional skills. Here are some research-based ideas for doing both.

Shake things up! Make language learning more engaging! My name is Megan Smith (just got married in July… Yeah!!) and this is my sixth year teaching Spanish in Louisville, Kentucky. I studied International Business and Spanish at Grand Valley State University in Michigan and am now finishing my master's in Education at Northern Kentucky University. I really love my job and what I get to do in the classroom. I'm lucky to have a school who gives me freedom to try new things, a friend and mentor (Kara) who challenges me as a teacher, and other hardworking teachers who are willing to collaborate with me! I am honored to have been the 2011 Kentucky New Teacher of the Year from the Kentucky World Language Association. In November 2013, Kara, Rachel, and I presented at ACTFL's national conference in Orlando. How awesome! And a big hello from me, Kara Parker! I'm the other collaborator on this blog. I'd say that I've been "around the block" when it comes to teaching. I've taught for 12 years total (6 at a private Catholic girls school, 2 at a large public school (with Megan), and now 4 years at an awesome alternative school). I have my National Board Certification in World Languages. I'm excited to share on this site. :) Hopefully you can take something from the ideas posted here to make your classroom better for your students and your workload a little lighter. Here's to sharing! If you'd like to reach us, send us an e-card, or invite us to your school… Here's an email both of us use! :) creativelanguageclass@gmail.com

Un bon article à développer pour le cours AP - la beauté et l'esthétique

Innovation is a key ingredient to authentic PBL. We must take risks, be prepared to experience failures, learn from them, persevere, endure criticism from skeptics and other curmudgeons, if we are going to make a difference. Never give up!

I really like Diving Questions. In fact, I like them so much more then Essential Questions. You might ask why? I think it just might be my affection for the revised Bloom's Taxonomy. You may remember that in the revision the different levels were changed into action. In fact, I strongly believe that learning is a verb and is based on action. Take away the word "Question" and Driving is a verb loaded with action. The word "Essential" standing alone is only a word devoted to describing… a colorful but inactive adjective.

"Editor's note: John Larmer, Editor in Chief at the Buck Institute for Education (BIE), contributed to this post. The Common Core has embedded within it some Big Ideas that shift the role of teachers to curriculum designers and managers of an inquiry process. How can project-based learning (PBL) help with this shift? "

This blog is an excerpt from the book Bringing Innovation to School: Empowering Students to Thrive in a Changing World, published June 2012 by Solution Tree.

Good new post by Andrew Miller on PBL vs. projects, and other myths

Integrating digital storytelling with instruction becomes a creative opportunity for both novice and technologically experienced educators when using Jason Ohler's Digital Storytelling in the Classroom. Ohler links digital storytelling to improving traditional, digital, and media literacy, and guides teachers on how to empower students to tell stories in their own native language: new media and multimedia. Aligned with NCTE standards and covering important copyright and fair use information, this text provides information on integrating storytelling into curriculum design and using the principles of storytelling as a measurement of learning and literacies. Implementation tips and visual aids abound, giving teachers an exciting new resource.

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?

The Language Acquisition Resource Center, LARC, is a national Language Resource Center located on the San Diego State University campus. LARC, a San Diego State University-housed program sponsored by the San Diego State University Research Foundation (SDSURF), is one of fifteen Department of Education Title VI funded Language Resource Centers (LRCs). The LRCs were established by Congress in 1989. Their purpose is to improve the teaching and learning of foreign and second languages in the United States. Our mission is to develop and support the teaching and learning of foreign languages in the United States through research, technology, and publications. Particular attention is paid to less commonly taught languages, cross-cultural issues, language skills assessment, and teacher training.

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Good review from #PBLWorld about driving questions, and links to more resources, including from BIE and Edutopia

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.

Entre l'invention de la machine à calculer (1645) et celle du Minitel (1982), 350 années se sont écoulées au cours desquelles la France a fait avancer les lignes grâce à de multiples inventions : dans les transports (automobile, aérostat, avion, TGV, Concorde), en médecine (Braille, pasteurisation et vaccination, BCG, radiologie et radiothérapie), en physique (machine à vapeur, électromagnétisme, radioactivité, mécanique ondulatoire, détecteurs de particules), dans les arts visuels (photographie, cinématographe), dans les arts de la table (Champagne, conservation des aliments), dans les hautes technologies (carte à puce, Minitel)… Au fil du temps, ces inventions ont contribué à changer le monde.