There’s an old adage that says, “Tell me, and I will forget. Show me, and I may remember. Involve me, and I will understand.” Of course, that statement is the basis for “authentic instruction,” which is any teaching that promotes the use of real-world issues and authentic problems to facilitate and inspire student learning and creativity.
The more authentic the problem is in a project-based learning application, the more likely it will be to engage students in a meaningful way and create a lasting learning experience. (For more on authentic projects, here’s a great blog post by John Larmer at the Buck Institute for Education.)
The point of the driving question at the heart of PBL is to enable students to ask important questions, design and conduct investigations, collect, analyze, and interpret data, and to apply what they have learned to the problem. While these steps can be performed without technology, the websites, databases, research reports, and documentation available through global internet access make the performance of these key steps much more effective and, ultimately, allow for an undeniably more comprehensive breadth and depth of data on which to draw conclusions.
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