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"John Mergendoller is Executive Director of the Buck Institute for Education, where he leads a talented team focused on building the capacity of districts, schools and teachers to do high quality Project Based learning. He has taught in both elementary and high schools, and received his Ph.D. in Education and Psychology from the University of Michigan."

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

"The U.S. Individuals with Disabilities Education Act defines the concept of the Least Restrictive Environment as the opportunity for a student with a disability to be "provided with supplementary aids and services necessary to achieve educational goals if placed in a setting with non-disabled peers." (Daniel R.r. v. State Bd. of Educ., 874 F.2d 1036, 1050, 5th Cir.1989) This concept of providing students with "supplementary aids and services necessary to achieve educational goals" could be applied to all students. By leveraging the capabilities of mobile devices, teachers can support their students in creating a personalized learning environment with the least number of barriers. "

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.

When a teacher, school, or district tells parents and community members, "We're going to do Project Based Learning!" the response may vary. You're lucky if some say, "Great news! Students need to be taught differently these days!" but a more typical response might be: What's Project Based Learning?  That's not how I was taught. Why do we need PBL, if (a) our school is already doing well, or (b) what we really need is a better literacy/math program to raise test scores?  Isn't that just a trendy new thing that doesn't really work?  How is this going to affect my child (and me)?  Basically, they're asking for the what, why, and how. Here are some successful strategies we've seen to answer these questions.

"We've clarified the difference between projects and project-based learning before. Projects are about the product, while project-based learning is about the process. Projects are generally teacher-directed, universal, and tangent to the learning, while project-based learning is student-centered, personal, and the learning pathway itself. Put simply, it is an approach to learning rather than something to complete."

"The Web provides many tools that can play a fun and helpful role in Project Based Learning Project based learning is one of many active learning methods, providing students the opportunity to get actively involved in learning, stepping away from being passive receivers of knowledge. "PBL" often involves groups of students who work on a real-life project. Thanks to today's wealth of internet and cloud-computing technology, there are many powerful free digital tools available to teachers and students for use in a Project Based Learning environment. In this article we introduce 5 such tools, with references to web sources discussing the role these apps can play in this hands-on approach to learning."

Collaboration is among the most-often promoted fluencies of 21st century learning (along with creativity and communication). However, there are very few frameworks or models that exist to support the development of better collaboration forms. As it is, in many K-12 learning environments, collaboration is limited to teacher-created grouping, or more scattered project-based learning groups that converge on a single project and thus a single goal.

"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? "

If you've ever considered having students bring their own devices (BYOD) to class, you've probably worried…won't the kids text all day long? How do I keep them from taking inappropriate photos or posting on Facebook while I'm teaching? Aren't students' phones a huge distraction? Here to help is Kristy from the 2 Peas and a Dog blog. Kristy is a Canadian middle school teacher who is in her seventh year of teaching Grades 7 and 8′s. She has allowed students to bring their own technology into the classroom for a few years now, and is excited to share how BYOD works in her classroom.

An artilcle from The Language Teacher magazine on the WL 21st Century Skills Map

"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."

A digital story combines text and images with narration in the student's own voice to form a short digital movie. Digital Storyteller is a web-based tool that offers teachers and students frictionless access to digital images and materials that enable them to construct compelling personal narratives. Digital Storyteller was developed as an initiative of Primary Access.

"Variations francophones, the 12 video-clips and their teaching cards, evoke the various realities of French speakers across Canada whose identities are modulated as much by the culture, the history, the territory as the climate. The teaching cards enable teachers to guide their pupils' discovery of the richness and the diversity of the Canadian francophonie. They will also help students develop oral competence and in particular their receptive language skills. The video-clips are appropriate for students enrolled in francophone schools within a minority context, as well as students enrolled in French second language, intensive French and French immersion courses who work at an intermediate to advanced linguistic level. Indeed, listening to the video-clips will enable students to better understand the various characteristics of French spoken in different locations of Canada as well as the various linguistic registers used."

Listening to a language while reading along with the transcript is a great way to improve your comprehension as well as your pronunciation. The following mp3s and mp4s were created by native speakers of French and they are free for teachers and students to download. All of them are spontaneous speech - nothing was scripted or rehearsed, and some were even recorded without the speaker's prior knowledge for an eavesdropping effect.

Digital Storytelling can transform your students' writing into a visual masterpiece that is filled with voice and emotion, while enhancing critical thinking skills.  The iPad takes digital storytelling to a new level by making the process easier, and even more engaging for students of all grade levels as well as for their teachers.   This site will help guide you in what you need for success in the iPad Digital Storytelling classroom.

Great ideas from Renée for French teachers.

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.

AAPPL Measures and IPAS I think tests are stupid. A test can't tell you how well I do my job or live my life--or anything you really need to know about me. Now, I'm really good at taking tests, and if you were to look at various test scores I've accumulated in my life, I daresay you'd be impressed with me. But do you know how much bearing the ACT, SAT, or GRE has had on any of my roles since college or grad school application time? Do you know how much impact that Issues in Teaching Foreign Languages or  Masterpieces of Hispanic Art and Literature exam has had on me as a teacher, mother, wife, or friend--or even as a speaker of Spanish?

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.