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The Austin (TX) school district, which educates 83,000 students on 130 campuses, is partnering with commercial providers on solutions adapted to meet district needs.
Austin adopted Instructure’s (Salt Lake City) Canvas learning management system with plans for full adoption across the district by fall 2017. The system chosen, rebranded as Blend, has all of the features of Canvas with additional functionality for Austin schools. One of those functions is a parent portal with mobile app, allowing parents to log in and view student assignments and grades.
Superintendent Paul Cruz told EER that the first goal in implementing Blend is to give teachers one place to access curriculum resources, develop and launch lessons and share and collaborate across the district. A second goal is to help teachers better understand how to use technology in the classroom and give them more opportunities to do so.
Austin has 6,000 teachers, counselors and librarians who had web pages on many different sites. All of those pages will now be available through Blend.
At the same time Austin is personalizing Canvas as Blend, the district is working with digital literacy platform provider myOn (Mankato, MN) to provide students with a personalized interface with more customized book choices for students and assistive reading tools to go deeper into text.
Austin piloted myOn in the summer of 2016 and is implementing it district-wide in 2017 as part of an overall literacy initiative to raise student reading achievement to grade level or above. myOn will work within Blend in thecoming school year.
In the Classroom
Classroom technology implementation varies across the Austin campuses and grade levels, according to Cruz. All classrooms have a presentation system and are connected to the Internet. Many schools have iPads available, and in the 2017-2018 school year the district plans to provide laptops in a 1:1 ratio in all district high schools.
Cruz said instructional resources in the district will continue to be both print and digital. The district invests in leveled libraries wanting student to hold authentic literature in their hands, but also likes having technology that allows students to find resources any time.
Cruz wants teachers to have a deep understanding of pedagogy and content, so they can develop some of their own lessons and short-cycle assessments. The district provides yearly planning guides with standards for all content areas across all grade levels, lessons and resources.
One area where Austin finds commercial providers are falling short is providing materials in multiple languages. Austin has 23,000 English-language learners speaking more than 100 languages.
Language arts supervisor Claire Alvarado told EER not much content is available beyond Spanish, and many Spanish resources are not high quality. With a large Spanish-speaking student population, Austin would like materials written originally in Spanish, not just translations.
More Student
Options Another way Austin gives students options is through online courses. Cruz said the district partners with online course providers when it cannot find a teacher for a course or to accommodate student schedule needs. The district also partners with a virtual learning provider to offer practice ACT and SAT prep lessons that can be done any time.
The district’s Garza High School Online gives any grade 9-12 student in the district the opportunity to obtain select credits for catch-up or acceleration. The Delta program offers recovered or potential dropout students an individualized, self-paced instructional program to help them earn credit and graduate from high school. Delta students typically spend two hours per day in the Delta lab working on textbook assignments, experimental activities and competing lessons on Pearson’s (London/New York) NovaNET computer-assisted instruction program.
To enhance career-and-technical education options, Austin partners with Dell (Round Rock, TX) for a computer science path and with a community healthcare provider on a health science career track.