projectpals.com ■ Retail Prices: Class: Free (up to 20 projects and 50 students); Team: $500 per teacher per year (unlimited projects and students); School: $10 per student per year (unlimited projects and teachers).
Product Description: Project Pals is a Web-based management system for project based learning (PBL). It allows students to work collaboratively or individually to organize projects and content.
Teachers can use Project Pals to organize work, monitor student progress, and assess projects in an interactive environment. Project Pals also provides a resource bank of Common Core-aligned lesson plans so teachers can drag and drop content to differentiate instruction. Using the publishing and sharing features, finished work can be shared with a school or district library.
Quality and Effectiveness: Project-based learning (PBL) has proven to be effective, and Project Pals helps teachers and students organize information and share and track their work. Students can visualize their work and collaborate to share tasks. This tool is also very effective for individual student projects, because it’s flexible and allows students to upload or post a variety of content.
Teacher tools help instructors monitor progress, communicate with students, and evaluate work. Project Pals also gives teachers insights into group projects so they can see who has contributed. This keeps students accountable and enables teachers to identify potential issues with understanding or shared workload.
Ease of Use: Project Pals is a fast-loading, comprehensive, and easy-to-use program. It gives teachers and students tools and resources to successfully implement PBL in an organized manner. The collaborative features are simple to use and teachers can create classes in order to assign work as needed.
Project worksheets give teachers a template to plan out and create an entire project. The worksheets have sections for project descriptions, standards, essential questions, resources, etc. If they wish, teachers can plan out an entire unit of study before they move the content to Project Pals.
Creative Use of Technology: Project Pals is an innovative product for PBL classrooms with an intuitive and visually pleasing user environment. When users log in, they see all of the project workspaces graphically displayed as “cards” on the home page. Teachers can see all of their classes, publish and share projects, or search the catalogue. While it’s great for students to be able to collaborate, the ability for teachers to share content and projects is very innovative.
Suitability for Use in a School Environment: Project Pals is a great solution for PBL lessons. Teachers and students can have anytime, anywhere access to work alone or collaboratively. Because teachers can track and analyze student work as a project progresses, they can gain insight and make data-driven decisions in real time. In addition, teachers can build a catalogue of projects and students can build a portfolio of work.
OVERALL RATING:
Project Pals is a complete project management platform. It provides a comprehensive and easy-to-navigate environment for both teachers and students to complete individual or team tasks. Using this platform, students can develop the skills they need to succeed in today’s collaborative work environments.
TOP FEATURES
1. Common Core-aligned projects can be reused and shared.
2. Users can upload and share a variety of media files in a collaborative work environment.
3. Provides useful project and student data and analytics for teachers.
