Engage Me with IT - Project-Based Learning: Introduction

This is the first in a series of posts related to Engage Me with IT.

For the 2011-2012 school year, our county Technology department is offering some professional development under the umbrella of Engage Me - a district-wide framework that is intended to help teachers develop learning experiences and products that have high expectations and result in student engagement.

Technology is offering three Engage Me with IT series of courses - BYOT (Bring Your Own Technology), CLOT (Collaborative Learning Online Tools), and PBL (Project-Based Learning). As we are heavily engaged in piloting BYOT concepts here at my school, and I feel pretty comfortable with finding and using online tools for collaboration, I chose to engage in the Project-Based Learning course.

As a former science teacher, PBL has always been something that I've been interested in, both as a teacher and an instructional coach. The power of students learning by asking and answering their own questions is often lost in most classrooms - even science classrooms. My interest in simulation games is a close fit to PBL, so I'm hoping I'll be able to add some insight into each (PBL and gaming) from the other.

Part of the class is to post reflections on the content discussed during each face-to-face session; I'll be posting mine here, along with any useful PBL items we uncover.

Posted in: Engage Me with IT, professional development, project-based learning