Several Yale faculty and CLS staff have enrolled in the special Spring 2015 Fundamentals of Project-Based Language Learning (PBLL) Online Institute from the National Foreign Language Resource Center at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Over five sessions on consecutive Wednesday evenings, the institute guides participants through principles and issues that arise in conceiving, planning, and carrying out a PBLL approach.
This post will serve as a running list of some of the resources mentioned in the institute, and others that address similar issues. Perhaps more than many other topics in second language learning, there’s a plethora of sites, tools, and support out there on the web!
- The Buck Institute for Education – A nonprofit dedicated to Project Based Learning (PBL), primarily in K-12 education in the U.S. Resources start from their definition of PBL (“a teaching method in which students gain knowledge and skills by working for an extended period of time to investigate and respond to a complex question, problem, or challenge”) to their “8 Essentials for PBL” downloadable document, to all kinds of multimedia documents, forums, lesson planning tools and more.
- Project Based Learning overview, discussions, and resources on Edutopia
- ACTFL World Readiness Standards for Learning Languages – Useful in designing goals, stages, and activities of PBLL
- MERLOT World Languages Portal – A open (OER) collection of world language teaching and learning resources, of potential use in PBLL
- Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL) – A U.S. Department of Education-funded National Foreign Language Resource Center dedicated to producing and disseminating OER for second and foreign language education
- Creative Commons – A site for understanding the different terms and conditions under which free and open creative and intellectual work can be released, shared, and appropriated
To suggest additions to this list, please just leave a comment below, or contact Dave Malinowski.