Choice boards are a great way to provide voice and choice to your students in their PeBL learning journey. Please see the PowerPoint presentation attached for more information.

This site has an amazing variety of tools that students can use to share their learning.
Let your students have voice and choice!
Some of the best choices on this site include

FAKEBOOK - kids can make a mock facebook page ONLINE for a historical figure, or a character in a novel. Etc.

PAC MAN & ARCADE GAMES -transform your quiz into a trivia Pac Man game. The kids have to answer questions to play and if they die they must answer more questions to continue. The kids can make their own trivia games as well. This could be a great final product and you could play it on the smartboard as a class to evaluate it.

FAKE NEWS Headlines - this would be great for an important event in a novel, or current events, or historical info!

QR CODE TREASURE HUNT – no Internet needed. Kids can create these; or you could!

BURGER ESSAY PLANNER -students can plan and organized essays with the provided structure!

Other Options include: timers, turn your text into a Star Wars theme, 3D gallery, fake Twitter, random name picker, etc!

The Hour of Code started as a one-hour introduction to computer science, designed to demystify "code", to show that anybody can learn the basics, and to broaden participation in the field of computer science. It has since become a worldwide effort to celebrate computer science, starting with 1-hour coding activities but expanding to all sorts of community efforts. Check out the tutorials and activities. This grassroots campaign is supported by over 400 partners and 200,000 educators worldwide.

Students can code for just an hour, or complete full courses.

The courses are in 45 different languages.

There are even coding activities that can be down without computers called "unplugged".

"CommonLit delivers high-quality, free instructional materials to support literacy development for students in grades 3-12. Our resources are:
Flexible;
Research-Based;
Aligned to the Common Core State Standards;
Created by teachers, for teachers.
They believe in the transformative power of a great text, and a great question. That’s why we are committed to keeping CommonLit completely free, forever." (CommonLit site)

"CommonLit delivers high-quality, free instructional materials to support literacy development for students in grades 3-12. Our resources are:
Flexible;
Research-Based;
Created by teachers, for teachers.
They believe in the transformative power of a great text, and a great question. That’s why we are committed to keeping CommonLit completely free, forever." (CommonLit site)

Teachers can search for content by grade, theme, content type, genres, literary devices, and more. Alternative options are offered for students that may require adaptations for reading an easier level.

Parent guides are also provided.

Benchmark and ongoing assessments are available.

360 Curriculum provides full integrated units E.g., Unit 1 Characters Who Change and Grow which includes a baseline assessment, vocabulary activities, reading lessons, writing lessons, quiz, grammar activities, media exploration, discussion, and a culminating task.

The Compassion Project for Character Development PeBL from Everfi

With so much emphasis placed on improvements in math and science, skills like compassion often receive less classroom time. This unintended trade-off may be short-sighted, as compassion is an important social-emotional skill that begins to develop in early childhood and is essential for lifelong health and success. Learning compassion increases students’ own sense of wellbeing and improves the learning environment for all learners. EVERFI’s new SEL program, The Compassion Project, is the first comprehensive, no-cost program designed to help educators facilitate lessons around fundamental SEL skills for students in grades 2-4, focusing on the complex but critical skill of compassion.

Grades 2-4 and about 45 minutes.

This Course Covers
Understanding Compassion
Self Compassion
Practicing Compassion

This amazing video will clearly explain the PeBL philosophy at Sun West School Division. The who, what, when, where, why and how of PeBL are addressed and articluated clearly for the parent and community audience. Topics include the continuum of learning, transfer of responsibility, personalized learning, the three pillars of PeBL. This resource will clearly explain everything you need to know to get started embracing PeBL at home!

This graphic addresses the considerations (where, when, who, how, what and why) of PeBL, as well as the learning environment and the transfer of responsibility.

This amazing video will clearly explain the PeBL philosophy at Sun West School Division. The who, what, when, where, why and how of PeBL are addressed. Topics include the continuum of learning, transfer of responsibility, personalized learning, the three pillars of PeBL. This resource will clearly explain everything you need to know to get started embracing PeBL at home or in the classroom today!

This is a resource for adminstrators or PeBL mentors to help set goals with their staff for their school. Beginning with a look into the Continuum of Learning and moving into the idea of Collective Responsibility, staff will be given a chance to decide where they see their school and where they want to go next. This workshop works best in small, safe groups. The adminstrator or PeBL mentor will compile the results of the workshops and present to the staff to demonstrate common threads and related action items to work toward their goals for their school.
Agenda, PowerPoint, personal booklet, and group booklet are attached.

Students will develop skills needed to work independently and with a group
within Problem Based Work. The skills centered around 21st Century
Competencies and work skills desired by employers. Five skills which will be
learnt, discussed, reflected upon, and executed include: leadership, problem
solving, teamwork, time management and communication.

Students choose a novel that is appropriate to their reading level (teacher-approved). They read it in ELA/during DEAR time. I set a date that they needed to be finished reading by so they could estimate where they needed to be at by the end of each week. When they finished reading, they used Bristol board to create a “puzzle” for their novel. Each piece of the puzzle contained a written description of information. On the opposite side, students draw a different cover for their novel that shows an important event or setting. You can upload the picture to a website to create it as an online puzzle for friends to complete! After, I had them cut the actual Bristol board into the 6 puzzle shapes, as you can see in the examples I included on the subsequent pages.

I wanted to give my grade 9 students the opportunity to show me how they interpret and understand the periodic table. I wanted to come up with a creative and fun way for them to display their knowledge. I attended an amazing session at FETC in Orlando called “Storytelling For The Youtube Generation” that showcased the many opportunities to use popular youtube videos as educational tools (Check out Steve Dembo for more information - he has some great prezis). So I decided to give my students the opportunity to teach me about the periodic table as if I had no prior knowledge by creating videos based off of viral videos.

Click "Take the test" in the bottom left corner to get started.

A short and quirky personality style test created by Adobe to showcase varieties of creativity.

The quiz will outline your creative strengths, untapped potential and your ideal way of contributing. For example "The Artist" has the strength of being able to bring ideas and concepts to life; but untapped is fearlessness in expression and this person make a good producer.

Types are the artist, thinker, adventurer, maker, producer, dreamer, innovator, and visionary. Each type includes a goofy animated character that represents the type, there is a description of each type, and who they work best with.

This would be a great addition to a learner profile, or to explore when examining creativity. We can all be creative - just in different ways. This is a great way to illustrate that and spark some rich discussion in your classroom!

This resource provides video about critical thinking (about 7 min). Students can then apply what they learn, visualize it and explore more links about it.
This is a great resourced for high school students to prepare for university!

In our unit on forces and simple machines we incorporated
many different uses of technology. During our unit the students were
given an opportunity to work collaboratively and think critically. After
learning all about simple machine and forces, my class had to
collaboratively design a fair test that would explore one of type of force.
Each group created a fair a test and designed and collected materials to
carry out this experiment. They also had to create a tool to record their
results. During their experiment we had 3 adults with iPads who walked
around the room videoing as the students explained their findings. This
allowed us to check their understanding at this point.
Some ways we used technology throughout this unit
- Used as an instructional tool
- Students used to share their results
- Shared results through pictures and videos
- Present Data
- Generate class discussions
- Final Assessment (students created a PowerPoint)

As a part of our school SWISI program, we work on math skills during our assigned time. For this activity students will be scanning QR codes that align with the unit they are working on in math at the time.

Flash Mob –
Collaboration was highlighted in my classroom when students undertook dancing and pop culture in the arts ed curriculum (This is a major focus at grade 5). Together with my intern, we decided to create something unique with the students that hadn’t previously been done in our school, and that the students could have ownership and pride in.