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Jeff Robin, art teacher at High Tech High, outlines a common misunderstanding of project based learning.

"The EdUmatics project aims to provide teachers of secondary mathematics with support to learn to use and integrate technology within their classrooms. The resources for professional development, whilst aimed at teachers, include a range of tasks for students to enable them to use technology within modelling and problem-solving activities. These are available in the different project languages. The resources include links to free and trial software, applications and animations in addition to tasksheets and helpsheets that can be adapted for different scenarios. If you are a teacher trainer, there is additional guidance to support you to use the professional development modules with teachers and trainee teachers."

Voyager Academy Charter School in Durham, NC is a project-based learning school that currently has about 1,250 students across grades K-11. We started with 320 students in grades 4-7 in 2007 and have grown exponentially. This upcoming school year we will add 12th grade and complete our growth.

"The instructor can then pull together material from various sources into one e-book-two chapters from a published textbook, three videos from MIT's OpenCourseWare, and a research study from Harvard University, for example. The instructor can also upload his or her own material, like a syllabus for the course. The system then calculates a price for the Pearson and third-party content."

"Empirically, it's not just for other people that you need to start small. You need to for your own sake. Neither Bill Gates nor Mark Zuckerberg knew at first how big their companies were going to get. All they knew was that they were onto something. Maybe it's a bad idea to have really big ambitions initially, because the bigger your ambition, the longer it's going to take, and the further you project into the future, the more likely you'll get it wrong. I think the way to use these big ideas is not to try to identify a precise point in the future and then ask yourself how to get from here to there, like the popular image of a visionary. You'll be better off if you operate like Columbus and just head in a general westerly direction. Don't try to construct the future like a building, because your current blueprint is almost certainly mistaken. Start with something you know works, and when you expand, expand westward. The popular image of the visionary is someone with a clear view of the future, but empirically it may be better to have a blurry one. "

"The akashic records are described as containing all knowledge of human experience and the history of the cosmos. They are metaphorically described as a library; other analogies commonly found in discourse on the subject include a "universal supercomputer" and the "Mind of God". People who describe the records assert that they are constantly updated automatically and that they can be accessed through astral projection[1] or when someone is placed under deep hypnosis. The concept was popularized in the theosophical movements of the 19th century and is derived from Hindu philosophy of Samkhya. It is promulgated in the Samkhya philosophy that the Akashic records are automatically recorded in the elements of akasha one of the five types of elements visualized as existing in the elemental theory of Ancient India, called Mahabhuta. In the Mahabharata mention is made of Chitragupta (lit. "hidden picture"). "

Education Applications (EA) Proposal Due Date: Decemeber 03, 2012 Please all inquiries about this topic to Glenn Larsen (glarsen@nsf.gov) Administrative Information The required 400-word project summary should discuss the intellectual merit and broader impact in two separate ~200 word paragraphs that specifically answer the following questions: Paragraph 1) Intellectual merit: What is the problem to be solved? How will the problem be solved? What is the specific innovation in the proposed approach? Paragraph 2) Broader impacts: Why is your solution better than competitive technologies? Who is going to buy your solution? Who are the other key players? Tools that build real-time information from data-mining on complexity, diversity, and similar types of information to generate knowledge that can be used to revise curricula, teaching, and assessment such as in learning analytics. Gesture-based computing applications that enable collaborative work with multiple students interacting on content simultaneously. Education tools that benefit from objects having their own IP address or location based services for new types of communications, assistive technologies, and new applications of benefit primarily to education.

"The Predictive Analytics Reporting (PAR) Framework is a multi-institutional data mining project that brings together 2 year, 4 year, public, proprietary, traditional, and progressive institutions to collaborate on identifying points of student loss and to find effective practices that improve student retention in U.S. higher education. Current efforts focus on removing barriers to student success in online and blended programs. With sixteen WCET member institutions, over 1,700,000 anonymized student records and 8,100,000 institutionally de-identified course level records, the PAR Framework offers educational stakeholders a unique multi-instituional lens for examining dimensions of student success from both unified and contextual perspectives. More benefits of PAR Framework participation."

"A recent blog by Grant Wiggins affirmed what I have long believed about creativity: it is a 21st-century skill we can teach and assess. Creativity fosters deeper learning, builds confidence and creates a student ready for college and career. However, many teachers don't know how to implement the teaching and assessment of creativity in their classrooms. While we may have the tools to teach and assess content, creativity is another matter, especially if we want to be intentional about teaching it as a 21st-century skill. In a PBL project, some teachers focus on just one skill, while others focus on many. Here are some strategies educators can use tomorrow to get started teaching and assessing creativity -- just one more highly necessary skill in that 21st-century toolkit. "

"All Our Ideas is a research project that seeks to develop a new form of social data collection by combining the best features of quantitative and qualitative methods. Using the power of the web, we are creating a data collection tool that has the scale, speed, and quantification of a survey while still allowing for new information to "bubble up" from respondents as happens in interviews, participant observation, and focus groups. "

The Worst Consequence of Your Best Ideas You have to wonder why desks in rows and textbooks on the desks have survived as long as they have as the dominant instructional model when so few people think that it's actually a good way to teach and learn. And then you realize that while it never goes all that right, it rarely goes all that wrong either. Teachers don't usually get in trouble when administrators walk into their classroom and see kids with books open, doing work, even if the work isn't worth doing. And all those other ideas that we love so much - inquiry, project-based learning, technology, real world application of student work - they get so… messy. And something always seems to go wrong. And we have to face that education is a somewhat reactionary field to work in. The death of so many good ideas is when something goes wrong and someone decides that we should never do that again.