Eclectic Technology

The Buck Institute for Education (BIE) is a go to site for learning about Problem-Based Learning, and they are offering four free one-week courses during February and March. The courses are:

* How to Create a Driving Question

* How to Manage Student Presentations

* How to Assess Critical Thinking

* How to Include Content and Competencies

You may register for the first two courses now. Registration for the other two will open on Feb. 4, 2015.

Additional information is available on the courses at the website (click through to the course).

There is a maximum enrollment of 300 so if you are interested in checking these out it would be good to go to the website sooner rather than later.

How can we get our students more engaged in the classroom? Teaching them to investigate authentic problems provides them with opportunities to ask questions that will lead to solutions (and failures) but that will also engage them. In this post Tony Vincent shares steps in how to have your students engage in investigating authentic questions.

Vincent starts with a section called Driven to Investigate. In this section he discusses driving questions and references a previous article, Crafting Questions that Drive Projects.

Additional sections (and there are a total of thirteen) include:

* Thinking is Critical

* Stick Together or Divide and Conquer

* Provide Focus

* Provide Staring Points

* Can You  Believe It?

* Experiments, Trial and Error, Data Collection

* You Know Better Than Anyone

Each section is chock full of resources. This is a great resource to help you launch students into investigating authentic problems. He also notes that he will publish Part 3, Creating Products to Show and Share in the future. I will be looking forward to reading (and in all likelihood sharing) that post once it is published.