Food Network star Alton Brown cautions viewers that “too much spice can ruin a meal.” At a recent tech conference in Minneapolis I began to understand what Brown meant, when in presentation after presentation I was introduced to a veritable cornucopia of tech tools that all seemed equally useful in a PBL context, but all seemed to do the same thing. Which one was the right fit for me and the teachers I supported?

What I really wanted was for someone, anyone, to come over to me, look at the challenges I wanted to help my teachers with, and give me a tool that would work. Just one, not a dozen. With this in mind, I started a list of challenges associated with the Essential Project Design Elements in Gold Standard PBL. Here are three; each comes with a tech tool that has helped a teacher I’ve worked with, which I hope will help you as well.