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Students who have mastered the ability to create their own learning environments have an advantage over students who rely on traditional environments to structure their learning. Students who understand how to use new tools for school learning typically do not pick up these skills at school--they learn from the habits of parents and peers who work in knowledge fields (Watkins, 2013). Widespread access to many innovations in the digital world has great promise in engaging all students in 21st century learning, but without the active role of schools to remediate the class distinctions, the participation gap will continue to widen in ways that reflect social inequalities. This paper addresses the gap between the potential of new media tools for transforming learning in and out of schools and the school commitment to technologies that support testing and accountability. The authors argue that the gap between schools and digital worlds can be "intentionally bridged" if affordances of widely used new media environments and tools, such as makerspaces, video games, citizen science, fantasy sports and youth media arts organizations are matched with needs that traditional schools often struggle to meet. Matching affordances with needs means that educators do not have to invent entirely new approaches to teaching and learning. Rather, they can leverage learning practices widely used outside schools to answer questions raised by teachers and learners in schools. The authors propose the idea of "participatory culture" as a robust model for how to think about the emerging practices of learning in digital media spaces. The participatory culture framework helps to make sense of learning in and out of schools, and points toward viable paths to integrate the best of new media experience into contemporary school design.

Personalized learning places the interests and abilities of learners at the center of their education experience. Educators develop environments in which students and teachers together build plans for learners to achieve both interest-based and standards-based goals. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education worked with leaders at the Institute for Personalized Learning (IPL) to identify five K-12 schools for a 6-month research project documenting what personalized learning looks like in these schools. This research report presents the initial findings. The central questions and findings that guide this report are: How do IPL schools encourage students to be active participants in their learning? Educators in the IPL schools attempt to create a culture of agency by designing opportunities for students (and educators) to collaboratively control the time, pace, space, place, content and goals of their learning. How do IPL schools shift the role of educators to support personalization? IPL schools enable educators to engage in regular, data-driven consultation with students to construct learning pathways and set learning goals. How are learning technologies used in IPL schools? IPL schools develop socio-technical ecologies, that is, environments where technologies are selected by educators to address the interests and needs of all learners. The ecologies have three dimensions: (1) all schools provide information technologies that allow students to coordinate and document learning processes and outcomes; (2) all schools provide computer-adaptive assessment and curriculum programs that individuate skill and content development learning in math and reading; (3) some schools create digital media spaces to foster creativity in activities such as gaming, coding, performance, production and making. Across the IPL schools we found a shared vision of teaching and learning that framed the practices to provide students with agency over their learning, the interactions of teachers and students, and the selection and use of technologies. Commitment to a core pedagogy of student ability to design, track and assess a learning program pervades our observations at the IPL schools.