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Great article for resources on PBL, links to other articles, project ideas, integration of edtech ideas...

Creative ideas for PBL-aligned units from Suzie Boss

Suzie Boss on PBL ideas - good read!

Teachers are used to hearing about new ideas in education -- changes in instruction, technology and curriculum that are going to fix what's broken. The trouble is, these changes are so difficult to trust. Many changes are based on ideas that have gained traction through very limited and poorly researched beginnings. One district might see success with a "program," and soon superintendents and principals are sent scrambling to duplicate that approach in their own district, without a full understanding of both data and circumstance. On the flipside, other changes are based entirely on "data," products of number-crunching from funded studies that keep telling us what we already know -- technology makes new things possible, socioeconomic status matters, and literacy skills are everything. Changes here produce clinical, lifeless curricula that mean well but lack the ambition to reach for students' imagination.

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.

When I first heard about the exit ticket, I thought it was a great idea.  It seemed like a way to keep myself accountable to assess every student, and it seemed like a way to keep students accountable to do something to show me they'd learned what I'd taught.  It also seemed like a decent classroom management tool - if you didn't pay attention and do the exit ticket task, you couldn't leave.

When I first heard about the exit ticket, I thought it was a great idea.  It seemed like a way to keep myself accountable to assess every student, and it seemed like a way to keep students accountable to do something to show me they'd learned what I'd taught.  It also seemed like a decent classroom management tool - if you didn't pay attention and do the exit ticket task, you couldn't leave.

Another great article by Suzie Boss

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.

Literacy expert Tim Rasinski gave me an idea for a bellringer that I think will improve students' vocabulary, fluency, listening, reading, and speaking skills and get them hooked. Rasinski proposes an acronym for those wishing to improve students' literacy skills, and although Rasinski's research and strategies revolve around L1 literacy, I think his theories align perfectly with L2 acquisition. AMAPPS stands for Accuracy as in being able to sound out words correctly Modeling fluent reading Assisted reading e.g. choral or partnered Practice with a variety of texts as well as repeated exposure to the same texts Phrasing or chunking words in common combinations Synergy of all of these elements

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

"Restorative justice empowers students to resolve conflicts on their own, and it's growing in practice at schools around the country. Essentially, the idea is to bring students together in peer-mediated small groups to talk, ask questions and air their grievances. (This overview from Fix School Discipline is a wonderful primer.)"

Some good ideas for student engagement

Great ideas for questioning strategies.

"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? "

Digital storytelling refers to a short form of digital media production that allows everyday people to share aspects of their life story. "Media" may include the digital equivalent of film techniques (full-motion video with sound), animation, stills, audio only, or any of the other forms of non-physical media (material that exists only as electronic files as opposed to actual paintings or photographs on paper, sounds stored on tape or disc, movies stored on film) which individuals can use to tell a story or present an idea.

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.

Great ideas from Renée for French teachers.

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.