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.