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Some examples of rich and rewarding learning opportunities offered in our national parks.  Milton Chen is senior fellow and executive director emeritus at Edutopia and sits on the National Advisory Board at National Park Service. He is also the author of Education Nation: The Six Leading Edges of Innovation.

Born to Learn is the first animation in a fascinating series aimed to provide easy-access to the exciting new discoveries constantly being made about how humans learn! Narrated by Damian Lewis

Students learn how to conduct science investigations in the same manner as scientists, as they learn to analyze sets of online real time data to solve problems.

Suzie Boss from Edutopia will be hosting a session called "Ripped from the Headlines" at ISTE 2011.  She will be discussing her approach to using real world news events in the classroom.

Projects in science are provided which take full advantage of Internet resources to help students develop a better understanding of the world in which they live.

Apps for Project-Based Learning http://zite.to/lUw4CC via @tonyvincent #mlearning #iste11

Blogger Kenneth Olden shares the thinking and feeling behind a project-based learning unit that brings Homer's Iliad to life and increases student engagement. 

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.

Telling our story is an essential part of our humanness. It allows us to feel part of the community that knows our story, and it fosters empathy for those that surround us. Story is a powerful force in shaping mental models, motivating and persuading others, and teaching the lessons of life. Telling story extends back to a time when oral history dominated the tools of communication. And now the flood of technology tools that allow for instant communication has spun us back into a golden age where story again dominates the media landscape.

t's no secret that curiosity makes learning more effective and enjoyable. Curious students not only ask questions, but also actively seek out the answers. Without curiosity, Sir Isaac Newton would have never formulated the laws of physics, Alexander Fleming probably wouldn't have discovered penicillin, and Marie Curie's pioneering research on radioactivity may not exist.

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?

Students engage more passionately when trying to answer a question that interests them. Here are ten opening questions that have inspired this kind of learning