Students today live in a digitally-rich environment, with technology and information woven into every aspect of 21st Century life. When it comes to the classroom, simply replacing textbooks with online content isn’t enough to create a transformed environment of learning and critical thinking.  The same goes with tablets and laptops – there is much more to the equation than just than shiny gadgets.

The students and faculty at Hall County Public Schools in Georgia – serving more than 25,000 students in 33 K-12 schools – is tackling the problem head-on and creating an exciting new learning environment, a classroom of  the future.

“Our students are not competing against students from our neighborhood, our state, or our nation. The competition for future jobs and our economic superiority is with students from around the world.” says Dr. Aaron Turpin, executive director of technology at Hall County. “So, the question was not whether we could afford to create a 21st-century learning environment. The question was how we were going to afford it.”

Through a process of discovery, educators teamed with administrators and technology experts to define a vision of blended learning that would guide the development and implementation of their HALLConnect Learning Platform, an online learning platform that allows students and teachers to work collaboratively. Course content is indexed by both state requirement and learning style, so individual students can interact with educational materials in the ways that are most engaging and effective for them.

The teams then went to work preparing the district’s IT infrastructure for the new digital learning environment – increasing network bandwidth, installing a data-center with a 10-year lifespan, and installing wireless on every campus. Overall, meeting Hall County School’s primary goal – to create an environment where learning could occur anytime and be personalized to each student’s needs.

With a highly collaborative environment, students not only learn from teachers, but from each other. The platform supports both synchronous and asynchronous learning. Students can master content and complete assignments at their own pace.

As Hall County looks to the future, students will soon be able to individualize their profile to help them determine how he or she learns best – visual, game-based, video-based or traditional face-to-face instruction. Their ultimate goal is to help students understand their own learning preferences and use them to engage with content they find compelling – skills that will stay with them for years to come. 

Hall County Schools is taking 21st Century learning to the next level and showing us all the benefits of being open to forward-thinking in practice.