Great tool!

Nice app to find things to get kids talking.

-12 categories of questions including Friends, Family, School, Fun and Feelings.

-Challenges kids to dream about the future, think through “what would you do..” scenarios and make decisions about interesting topics. 

Projects are a range of different tasks that can be completed either at home or in the classroom by partners or groups of students usually over a period of time. Project based learning includes projects but is more focused on the the process of learning and working with peers than the content of the project. The article presents a table that describes all the differences and how project based learning can be beneficial. 

I think that learning through doing is an important thing for students. But projects are not always the answer. Many time group projects end up being one person doing the work and everyone's name being attached to it. It's important to create projects that create a projec-based learning envrionment. I think that having project-based learning in a classroom is great. I also hope that most teachers understand the difference and try to assign more projectbased learning activities. 

This article describes the difference between projects and project-based learning.  Though some aspects of the two types of classroom learning are similar, project based learning generally takes projects to the next level.  PBL is a student centered approach to instruction and as such, asking students important questions and making changes to products and ideas created the philosophy behind PBL.  This resource includes an extensive chart that compares projects with PBL.  Here are three I'd like to highlight:

1. Projects can be done at home with out teacher guidance or team collaboration, where as PBL requires teacher guidance and team collaboration.

2. Projects do not give students many opportunities to make choices at any point in the project, while PBL requires the students to make most of the choices during the project with pre-approved guidelines.

3. Projects are generally turned and are all the same while PBL opportunities are presented to a public audience encompassing people from outside the classroom and they are different.

My reaction to this article surprised even me.  I was interested to learn about the differences between PBL and Projects.  Before curating the various articles for PBL and reading about it, I assumed that PBL basically meant the kids do projects to learn in the classroom.  After reading this article, I see that by thinking this way I was overlooking some significant aspects and benefits of PBL.  PBL takes doing projects to the next level because the projects are relevant to the kids' lives and they are child-centered.  Because PBL allows children to choose their topic and where their project is going with teacher approval, they experience ownership and they can get passionate about their work rather than doing projects.  I did a project in high school that was the same assignment for everyone and I had to work with what the teacher gave us for the problem.  I feel like I would have been so much more enthusiastic and engaged in the assignment if I was allowed to choose a topic that interested me and I could take it in a new direction.  I hope by using PBL principles in my classroom and allowing an open-ended aspect in each project the children work on, they will feel a sense of accomplishment and pride when they are finished.

great flowchart visual on creative commmons.will post in classroom