How we are meeting the requirements

Our middle school building is going to "bring your own device" this year and will be providing either tablets or phones to those students without a personal device.  This will open up lots of opportunities for teachers to incorporate online learning experiences into their curriculum.  There are some barriers to this, however.  Time to allow for teachers to learn how to effectively use the technology is  a huge one. This summer, I am also enrolled in a class offered by our district (ALONG WITH A FEW OF OUR GREENVILLE TLA COHORT!) to learn some of the basics that the district provided tablets can do. We will have some time to play with apps and google docs and the like.  There is a small percentage of our staff attending this training though, so unless the rest of our staff is really good at learning tech things on their own, I would bet that the true usefulness of the BYOD program will be slow to realize building wide.  Our district has participated in offering E2020 courses for both middle and high school students who struggle academically or behaviorally in the traditional classroom.  To my knowledge, these are not required by all students to take.  I do not know what the high school requires of the students to meet the online learning requirement.

Student Information System

The student information system we use at our school to manage student records is PowerSchool.  Teachers have access to one side of the portal, administrators and parents have access through their respective screens.  I use PowerSchool to learn basic information about my students such as any special needs or restrictions, school photo of the student, parent contacts and their grades in their other courses.  I record student attendance and assessments in a grade book through this program.  I really like this program because it allows me to bulk or individually email parents information about their students progress.  In our old system, we used to have better access to a students building wide discipline report, I miss that information as it sometimes helped me work with a student to find solutions (knowing what had already been tried).

Website Evaluations

I bet most students, like me, do internet searches at a surface level.  I admit it.  I look for the fast answer, that's what the internet is for right? :)  So, knowing this about myself, and knowing that this is probably true for most of my students, how can educators help improve this key component of 21st century literacy?  Well, first, we need to teach students how to be more critical and using the PDF of questions you've provided us is a great place to start.  Students can also learn these skills in their art classroom through good visual literacy instruction.  Now that our school is going to a building wide "bring your own device" initiative, website evaluations will likely become part of my curriculum when I am sending kids out to gather research for their ideas.  We no longer have a media specialist screening everything in the physical library for us.  We need the kids to be able to screen for themselves.