It’s like your alarm clock blowing off every morning: gamification, pbl, blended learning, 21st century skills… buzzing over and over. But the truth is that you don’t really know what’s going down with all of them.

What makes a word a buzzword? Politicians beating around the bush, educational fashion, bloggers repeating things ad infinitum, Social Media, new opportunities created by technology, new jobs demanding new education...

I can’t forget our Education Department’s letter sent years ago when Multiple Intelligences started to rocket: we’ll apply this new strategy as it is the one widely rising in Europe (i.e, do as your neighbour does… insane). Was that new buzzword successful or buzzy enough? It seems it wasn’t looking at this:

As we are becoming more and more technologically evolved teacher thanks to this blog (LOL) our newest tool for buzzword tracking is going to be Google Trends. Just type what you want to track and observe the result, you may be surprised. The tool’s interface looks like this:

As you’ve already realized the previous search has been done with two terms: PBL and Project based learning.

Shown results are different for each term, so take in count:

Some people use the abbreviated form, as PBL.
PBL also stands for Points Badges Leaderboards (from gamification).
And, the concept may be so settled down that nobody needs to look it up on the Internet, making its buzzing nature go silent.

Let’s be curious about some other terms, but this time I’ll embed searches’ HTML code so it is updated live:

Interesting, huh?