Whether you are teaching your students to write a thesis, create content for the school website, write proposals, or to take part in an international essay competition, there are certain skill sets that need to be imparted. Originality, proper paragraph arrangement, and catchy content are just the basics. Content creators are expected to write quality content in any given field. To do this, several skills have to be taught.

Where last time we drew attention to schools that had made innovative leaps in assessment protocols, today we look at schools that are taking the design of personalized learning pathways seriously. Fully transforming a large and established high school such as Vista Unified is no mean feat, and reading the story of Vista Unified is both illuminating and encouraging.

“Next generation” learning is a concept promoted by a program called Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC), run by the non-profit Educause. Check out a great case study that demonstrates how far we can go in reinventing traditional educational tropes such as grades, to develop better, more flexible and personalized assessments that serve to truly empower a student’s onward journey into college or the workplace.

We are fond of a quite in-depth approach on this blog, and try and drill down to the bare bones of a debate or subject, but today I will put aside the complexities of migrating to a flipped or tech-enabled classroom, and instead offer you a quick listicle of a bunch of fun, useful, trendy and simple ways to bring tech to a classroom near you. In no order of preference, check out some of these easy ways to power up your edtech journey.

While overbearing parenting comes from a place of good intentions, it can be damaging to a child’s process and psychology. It can also affect your process as a teacher, and the relationship you have developed with the student. So let’s look at some basic, practical ways you can limit the anxiety for everyone involved: open the door to communication, set boundaries from the beginning, and nurture responsibility constantly.

Fostering a sense of social responsibility among students has wide ranging positive impacts, and some schools choose to incorporate the practice into a school-wide doctrine of peace and fellowship that can have dramatic impacts on graduation rates, parent participation and conflict resolution. That’s why I have gathered a collection of fun and effective apps and websites that teachers can use to start simple social responsibility programs in class.

Advances in technology have made it possible to make classroom learning fun, engaging and interactive. Today’s students are a lot more tech-savvy than ever before. They have grown up with technology and have somewhat adapted to using it and can learn a lot more easily with it. All students tend to learn at their own individual pace. A mix of traditional and digital education can assist in personalizing lessons to teach in a more meaningful way. So check out these tech tools that will keep your students engaged in the classroom.

Change is happening at a far slower rate across “ordinary” schools. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation fund a series of research reports called Teachers Know Best. In 2015 they released a interesting report that sought out 3100 educators to establish the state of technology integration across K12. To my untrained statistician’s eye these figures seem moderate, and indicate that the digitization of the classroom is not happening as rapidly as the tech media would have us think. So let’s look at the process of bridging the digital divide, using a step-by-step model.

From Kindergarten to high school after that in college, our students are mostly treated as if they’re travelling with a railroad train of the past, bringing all of them in the same direction at the same time. When their specific learning needs are met, the percentage of underachievers and dropouts shrinks, engagement rates and the likeability of going to school go up, as well as student performance. Meeting the specific learning needs of students has a name among educators: student-centered learning.

Active learning dovetails neatly into Project Based Learning, the teaching method that requires students to engage in sustained, long-term projects, where they explore and examine targeted sets of questions, challenges and problems throughout the project. Since project based learning is awesome, this post will present three awesome case studies of PBL in action: The Hunger Games, The Ice Castle and Mission to Mars.