Looking for ways to plan project based learning activities? Suzie Boss suggests borrowing ideas from your colleagues and adapt or remix to fit your context.

Suzie borrowed ideas from professional development and learning conferences for teachers who may need a boost to get their project-based learning off the ground.

In this activity, students will use 5 pictures and 15 words of their choice to respond to a prompt of the teacher's choosing.  

Students will create a podcast exploring a topic of interest to them following the NYT framework. Students will enter the NYT competition (typically held in April/May).

In this activity, students will work in collaborative groups to create 9M x 9M models of plant and animal cells. Class population can be split into 2 or 4 groups, with half the students constructing animal cells and the other half constructing plant cells. Students must organize and assign duties, provide materials for this activity, and write a written report. They will also give "Cell Tours" to other students and/or classroom guests.

How are magnetism and electricity related? In this lesson, students will explore the relationship between magnetism and electricity, learn how to construct an electromagnet, and discover everyday uses of electromagnets. Students will create a multimedia presentation in which they will demonstrate their knowledge of electromagnetism.

Students match the character traits of a character in a book they are reading with specific actions the character takes. Students then work in pairs to "become" one of the major characters in a book and describe themselves and other characters, using Internet reference tools to compile lists of accurate, powerful adjectives supported with details from the reading. The lesson uses The Scarlet Letter as an example, but this activity is effective with any work of literature in which characterization is important.

A teaching resource for actiities, research assignments, writing prompts and cooperative activities for Ben Franklin including Poor Richard's Almanac.

In this lesson, students work in cooperative groups to prepare presentations on business organization and Big Business during the second part of the Industrial Revolution (1860-1910) in the United States.

After reading books, students share book talks through digital storytelling. First, students plan scripts and then find images to illustrate their scripts. They also add text, narration, music as well as pan and zoom effects. Finally, the joy of reading is prompted through the sharing of the students' digital stories.

By mimicking popular websites that relate the plot of movies, television shows, and real life events in reverse, students have the opportunity to review the plot in a more creative and challenging fashion. Using a snowclone (a verbal formula that is changed for reuse), students complete the phrase "If you read ____ backwards, it's about ____" to comment on the plots of novels.

The selection "Everyday Use" by Alice Walker explores the role heritage and culture played in an individual's understanding of his or her life and identity. In this lesson, students will understand the contributions of past and present and interpret and analyze the ideas of family and hertiage through the use of theme and metaphors.

In this lesson, students will research a variety of chromosomal abnormalities and resulting syndromes to determine risk factors and contributors of the abnormality, and characteristics of the syndromes.

In this activity, students create their own personal inferno journeys that reflects a real-life situation they may have faced or might face, that highlights a time where guidance might be needed to reach a better understanding.

In this lesson, teachers scaffold student reading of websites that highlight science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers. Before choosing a text for close reading, the teacher models how to "read" the variety of texts and features of different websites, including images and interactives. Then the teacher models a close reading with students, setting a purpose and asking text-dependent questions to help students find evidence, use inferencing skills, and peer edit.

This lesson asks students to explore the motivation behind characters' actions in To Kill a Mockingbird. Students first engage in a freewrite activity. They then do research and creative thinking to design a poster and plan a presentation representing a psychological profile for a selected character, while determining what specific factors (such as family, career, environment, and so forth) have the greatest influence on the characters' decision making throughout the novel. The groups present their findings to the class by assuming the persona of their character and explaining the psychological factors influencing their behavior in the novel

This lesson and resource engages students in a metacognition exercise about critical thinking and also practice research and informational writing skills using a collection of critical thinking quotes.

The past is often neatly partitioned in time periods and eras with generalized names meant to characterize what life was like during that time. In this multi-day lesson, students question the validity of using ?Dark Ages? to describe Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance. In the process, students examine a variety of primary and secondary sources highlighting different social, political, economic, cultural, and environmental facets of life in Europe during this period.

This assignment was made for an English II class. It uses various PodCasts epsidoes to explore culture. 

In this lab, students will investigate the law of conservation of energy. Student teams must develop and carry out a lab procedure to achieve the stated goal of finding the maximum conversion of potential energy to kinetic energy. Using a ruler and a toy car, students will work collaboratively to design a lab that will demonstrate the change from one form of energy to another based upon the law of conservation of energy. Teams will then develop a hypothesis for maximizing the amount of energy transfer and create a procedure for proving the hypothesis. Once they run their lab, students will work independently to create formal lab reports that summarize the activity.

Students will explore the world of Medieval Europe. They will learn the way the people lived and how Phragmites was part of this world. Students will then be assigned a social class role in the system of feudalism and research information about their character's privileges and disadvantages. Students will experience the feudal system through activities and presentations to relay what they learned to their class. Students may choose a variety of creative outlets to express their character's life in their own creative way with a group or separately.