To close the SXSWedu conference with a bang and open up the main music, film and interactive festivities, the organizers picked a speaker who is working to transform education as we know it: Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates.

Gates is the co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which has donated more than $6 billion to education programs in the United States since 1994.

 He discussed how advances in technology could not only change the classroom, but the entirety of education.

“I think this is a special time for technology and education,” Gates said. “The right things are happening now.”

Through his speech, Gates emphasized the potential for a golden age of technology that the 1990s did not realize despite all the optimism.

 He mentioned charter schools and some public schools as being pioneers of using educational technology successfully.

Gates claimed that our educational system is at a tipping point. 

According to Gates, 80 percent of high school students have smart phones and 75 percent of all kindergarten through 2nd grade students play educational computer games.

Gates went on to explain that education often demonizes technology rather than harnesses it as a vital tool.  

“The bar we have to achieve is that a lot of material is not interesting to the students,” Gates said.

As an entrepreneur, Gates also highlighted the importance of the private sector’s investment in education, which he claimed only made up one percent of all investments. 

“It would be rational for that to expand,” Gates said.

Gates ended with a call to action comparing the USA educational system to the global health crisis.  Gates said that there is only one way to measure the efficacy of education.

“Like in health, we either reduce the number of deaths or we don’t … We either improve our graduation rates and test scores or we stay flat, like we have for the last few decades,” he remarked.  

In the second portion of his presentation, Gates brought up and interviewed Jesse Wooley-Wilson, CEO of Dreambox Learning, Diane Handler, a board member of Summit Schools, an independent non-traditional elementary school in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Iwan Streichenberger, CEO of inBloom, a non-profit company specializing in personalized learning services.

DreamBox uses educational games to assess an individual student’s capability at a subject in real time then it either assists them if they are struggling, or move them along if they are doing well.

Summit Schools, according to Tabner, is intended to teach students empowered learning, a skill that encouraged students to teach themselves and each other.

In contrast to the other two, inBloom is intended to assist teachers in gathering day to day data. Streichenberger discussed how the company has been working with a school district in Everett, Massachusetts to test their services.

Gates seemed enthused by what the three CEO’s had to say. 

“It’s going to take a lot of innovators, but when you hear about it, you get the sense something’s happening,” Gates said.