General PBL Resource: Intel Education

When you are starting out in the PBL world, nothing is more daunting than thinking about trying to design your own project. Sure, you are probably psyched to be doing PBL, because you have awesome ideas that are sure to engage the students. So you start planning out your project and realize it is missing pieces. Frustrated, you search the internet for similar projects to see if you can beef yours up, or adjust an already designed project. Enter an organization-lovers PBL Project Resource: Intel Education.

Intel Education has a lot to offer the educational world and is worth exploring as a resource in and of itself. However, I'm going to focus on the Project-Based aspects it addresses in their Designing Effective Projects section. In addition to giving an overview of Project Based Learning, Intel Education Project Design and Thinking Skills--those skills that are critical to success in PBL.

Reasons I Love Intel Education:

• Intel Education takes project planning to an entire different level with their focus on questioning and it's importance. For PBL in particular, you can focus on the curriculum framing questions, originally brought up by Wiggins-McTighe. 
• Units/Projects broken up into smaller increments (9-10, 11-12, instead of 9-12 and using your best judgement). You can also select by subject, as with most PBL project warehouses. 
• The organization and freebies associated with their projects!
• As an incredibly organized person, I can't stress how nice it is to have such a clean template to be looking at for the project overview!
• As an incredibly frugal person, I am in love with having free resources like rubrics, assessment ideas and examples at my disposal!
• The Differentiation suggestions
• Many projects lack explicit differentiation, however at the bottom of each unit's main page, I've been able to find prerequisite skills, and differentiation for resource, gifted and ELL students. Quite the find!