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Project-Based Learning Frameworks
This Toolkit includes resources to support teachers and schools in implementing project-based learning. Some resources include frameworks for approaching project-based learning and specific project plans that address standards, twenty-first-century skills, and have options for various technologies and lengths of implementation.
Buck Institute for Education: Problem-Based Learning Resources, Videos, and Planning Tools
The Buck Institute for Education (BIE) is dedicated to improving twenty-first-century teaching and learning throughout the world by creating and disseminating products, practices, and knowledge for effective project-based learning (PBL). The online resource for PBL contains tutorials on the “nuts and bolts” of PBL, designing and managing a high-quality project, and a collection of already created project plans. In PBL, students go through an extended process of inquiry in response to a complex question, problem, or challenge. Rigorous projects help students learn key academic content and practice twenty-first-century skills, such as collaboration, communication, and critical thinking.
Challenge-based learning applies what is known about the emerging learning styles of high school students and leverages the powerful new technologies that provide new learning opportunities to offer an authentic learning process that challenges students to make a difference. Challenge-based learning is an engaging multidisciplinary approach to teaching and learning that encourages students to leverage the technology they use in their daily lives to solve real-world problems. This website provides the rationale for challenge-based learning and offers examples of challenges and plans for implementation.
On this site you can look at different areas, including project design, thinking skills, unit planning, and instructional strategies.
Exploring Computational Thinking
These lesson plans and resources introduce problem-solving skills and techniques that software engineers use to write programs that underlie the computer applications you use such as search, email, and maps.
These projects are examples of work that being done at all of High Tech High Schools, serve as a record of what High Tech High Schools have done, and are used by teachers to show off their students' work, and get ideas from others teachers. Students can show their parents and friends the work that they have done, and the community can see how project-based learning enables students to do and learn.
“Inanimate Alice” is a multimedia, interactive narrative following the life of Alice, a developing video game designer. Through text, sound, images, music, and games, the story of Alice unfolds. Each of the episodes becomes increasingly interactive and game-like, reflecting Alice's own developing skills as a game designer and animator. The story is available in five languages and is fully supported by lessons in a teacher education pack that can be downloaded for free.
Content-Specific Project-Based Learning Ideas
Created at New Milford High School in New Jersey, students travel abroad each year and critically reflect on their learning while students, teachers, parents, and other stakeholders comment from New Jersey and all over the world.
Interdisciplinary STEM Education
This website provides links to a number of modules related to STEM (scienc, technology, engineering, and math) education for elementary, middle, and high school students. Many of these modules are interdisciplinary between the STEM fields and have hands-on approaches to applying techniques from different content areas. Examples of modules include designing batteries, learning about vehicle design, measuring wind speed, and investigating the importance of water.
Mechanical Energy Physics Project
Created by Peter Bohacek, this project allows students to use a high speed video to determine whether a roller coaster is an example of a system in which mechanical energy is conserved. Students use frame counting to measure the speed of a roller coaster as it heads up a hill, and then they measure the speed as the roller coaster comes back down the hill. The outcome of the measurements depends on which part of the roller coaster they measure because a motor continues to propel the roller coaster until it begins to climb the hill.
High school biology students at Eminence High School (Eminence, KY) create a mitosis video project using animation. The students use digital cameras, iPods, or cell phones to take still pictures of the stages of mitosis. They put the pictures together in Windows Movie Maker. They record their voices explaining the process. Some students created songs to go with the video as seen in the YouTube link below. Following the lesson, students will reflect on their work and comment on each other's work as a gallery walk through the school website. This video shows this project in action. Directions and samples are found at the link above or at this alternative location.
Our Changing Chesapeake, Baltimore County Public Schools
Created by the Baltimore County Public Schools, this online education campaign about the Chesapeake Bay has myriad student resources for learning more about the Bay as an ecosystem. The campaign presents a scenario for students to work through as members of a “Bay-Watchers” team, which gives each student a different role. Students work through the scientific method and use various tools and approaches to learn more about human impacts on the Bay.
Project-Based Learning Ideas for Math
This resource offers a good overview of project based learning for math instruction. Then look at a few specific lesson ideas such as UBUYACAR.
Created by Peter Bohacek, this project emphasizes the importance of teaching students to communicate complex ideas by creating video. In this assignment, students need to determine whether a flying object fits the physics textbook definition of a projectile. Students perform video analysis of a flying object to make graphs they can use to determine whether air friction is noticeably affecting the object's motion. Then, they report their results as a video lab report. This link provides a complete set of instructions and sample projects.
Interactive activity involving simple interest and compound interest. Uses a case study and asks students to make calculations.
Video, Motion, Physics Project
Created by Peter Bohacek, this project goes beyond the traditional word problem in which the information is given and helps students learn to extract data about the motion of objects using videos. Several examples of videos are provided, as well as instructions for using some of these videos to measure velocity. Once this technique is mastered, students can begin to use the velocities of objects in the videos to explore other aspects of mechanics, such as collisions, conservation of energy, or projectile motion. If the video is taken carefully, students do not need video analysis software, just a simple video playback software, such as Quicktime player, that allows students to advance the video one frame at a time.
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