Blogs on Project-Based Learning

More than 450 educators from around the globe, including 27 U.S. states, are converging on Napa, California, this week for the first-ever PBL World conference. Focusing on best practices in project-based learning and featuring a stellar line-up of daily keynote speakers, PBL World is co-sponsored by the Buck Institute for Education and the Napa Valley Unified School District. Can't make it? No worries. Thanks to social media, there will be plenty of virtual opportunities to expand your PBL toolkit right alongside attendees. Today is the first in a weeklong series of Edutopia blogs coming to you from the conference site, New Technology High School in Napa.

As we glide through the month of May, I know that many teachers and students are steadily dreaming of how to spend their summer vacations. Some will be off to sleep-away camp, some will travel to faraway places, and many others are still trying to figure it out. But for many families, the summer will also bring a level of anxiety. In the age of budget cuts, the opportunities for quality programs and government subsidized summer jobs will be few and far between. According to the National Summer Learning Association, many low-income and underserved students will face two to three months' summer learning loss in reading and math, while affluent and better resourced students may show slight gains in reading over the summer because of their access to summer enrichment.

What does this mean?

On April 22, a billion people around the world are expected to take part in Earth Day 2012 celebrations. Among the anticipated "billion acts of green" will be scores of events for students and schools, from gardening lessons to eco-fairs to solar cooking demonstrations. It could be an ideal set-up for young people to dive deeply into problem solving and creative thinking -- but only if we trust students to figure out which problems they want to tackle.

Did you check out Open Education Week this month? The international event highlighted free lesson plans and materials, searchable by subject, grade and quality. I spent a couple days throwing keywords into OER (open education resources are digital materials freely available through open licenses) search engines to assess the quality of secondary and higher education writing curricula.