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"With the help of a three-year grant from the US Department of Education and the National Endowment for the Humanities, an eleven-member task force, representing a variety of languages, levels of instruction, program models, and geographic regions, undertook the task of defining content standards - what students should know and be able to do - in foreign language education. The final document, Standards for Foreign Language Learning: Preparing for the 21st Century, first published in 1996, represents an unprecedented consensus among educators, business leaders, government, and the community on the definition and role of foreign language instruction in American education. This visionary document has been used by teachers, administrators, and curriculum developers at both state and local levels to begin to improve foreign language education in our nation's schools. The 3rd Edition Standards for Foreign Language Learning in the 21st Century, revised including Arabic standards, is now available."

It's a practical guide to building 21st century-student competency in the "4 C's" - critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and creativity/innovation. The book is designed for middle school and high school teachers, instructional coaches, and school leaders. It also shows how the 4 C's in a PBL context align with the Common Core State Standards. Sample projects, CCSS-aligned 4 C's rubrics, tips for technology in projects, notes for school leaders on building support for 21st century learning with PBL. Authors: Suzie Boss, author and BIE National Faculty, and John Larmer, Editor-in-Chief, BIE

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.

This project-based learning resource, created as part of a partnership between the Pearson Foundation and the National Academy Foundation, focuses on digital storytelling as a tool and instructional best practice for Academies. The information included in this primer is designed to supplement thr ee exciting, project-based digital arts opportunities available to schools in the NAF network.

According to Indiana University Bloomington, Inquiry-based learning is an "instructional model that centers learning on a solving a particular problem or answering a central question. There are several different inquiry-based learning models, but most have several general elements in common: Learning focuses around a meaningful, ill-structured problem that demands consideration of diverse perspectives Academic content-learning occurs as a natural part of the process as students work towards finding solutions Learners, working collaboratively, assume an active role in the learning process Teachers provide learners with learning supports and rich multiple media sources of information to assist students in successfully finding solutions Learners share and defend solutions publicly in some manner"

Activating Communication:Focusing Lenses How can we use focusing lenses to guide thinking when creating instruction? How can an old unit "going to a café" be changed to a thematic unit on food and hunger that focuses on performance tasks integrated to create a meaningful cultural context? How can images, videos and other technology encourage learners to critically think of solutions to real-world global issues on environment in innovative ways? We will explore these questions through the lenses of an UbD designed thematic units and the concepts of the ACTFL 21st Century Skills Map.

The Goals of this Website The primary goal of the Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling website is to serve as a useful resource for educators and students who are interested in how digital storytelling can be integrated into a variety of educational activities. The site was originally created in 2004 and faculty members and graduate students in the Instructional Technology Program at the University of Houston College of Education continue to maintain the site and add new content. 

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.

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