Texas Virtual Schools Environmental Scan

Virtual schools are becoming more and more popular as families are looking for alternative ways to school their children without them being in the classroom all day. Texas Virtual Schools (TXVS) currently services kindergarten through 12th grade public school students and offers various outlets for them throughout the day. The following is an environmental scan that I have completed based on the information I have gathered from the school, but more specifically from eSchool Prep Academy (the K-8 campus).

Since eSchool Prep is a virtual school, we do rely heavily on technology. All teachers, staff, and students conduct their learning at home, which means that they are all relying on personal internet access. At this moment, TXVS does not offer wifi or internet services to students or employees. All employees have access to their own personal internet and sometimes will utilize public internet services at libraries, cafes, or hotels when traveling. Students can rely on personal internet services, or libraries and cafes, depending on their home internet reliability. As a teacher, I have personally witnessed a few students relying on their local library for internet access to complete assignments and live lessons. 

TXVS does provide laptops to all employees and to students who apply and qualify for a device. In order for a student to qualify, they must be experiencing a financial need. If a student does not qualify, they are responsible for providing their own device like a Chromebook, desktop computer, or a tablet. All students and employees are expected to have access to a device in order to complete their work.

While teachers and students use technology 100% of the time in the classrooms, or during their live lessons, it's important to note the range of which technology is being used. All teachers utilize some type of presentation model, mostly Google Slides, and Google Meets to conduct their live lessons. Some teachers emphasize the use of other technology during their live lessons like virtual labs, virtual manipulatives, Nearpods, and other tools and resources. TXVS is very big on integrating new programs that will help students further their learning throughout the day. One of the more recent integrations is the user of Amira, an app that allows students to read to an AI model and provides personalized intervention based on the student's reading ability. Our teachers also use other websites like Epic!, Boddle, Prodigy, and SORA, in their classrooms to help keep students engaged and promote access to books.

At this moment, we do not have a large bank of technology-related professional development. Our curriculum and instruction team will often times send our teams links to PD opportunities related to the applications we tend to use in live lessons like Nearpod and Amira. Most of our technology-related PD tends to be sought-after by teachers who are looking for specific PD.

Since eSchool Prep services all students across the state of Texas, our demographics are very far and wide. All of these students have chosen to attend our school for one reason or another, but they do not attend their local school. Their parents' careers tend to differ as well, some parents work from home doing administrative jobs, while others tend to not work to be home with their children. There are parents who travel for work and take their children with them on the road. The physical environment is very important for us to keep up with too, based on the day some parts of Texas tend to lose power if there is a bad storm so we tend to keep an eye out for those days and be prepared for some of our students to be absent since they do not have access to internet or power on those days. Majority of our students do speak English, but there are some families that speak a different language. The primary other language tends to be Spanish, but we do have some families that speak Arabic and Mandarin at home.

While TXVS is ahead of the curve as far as technology usage goes, I do personally feel like there are opportunities for growth. TXVS is still a very new school, only going on year 4 of having a K-5 program, so there is still so much time for great innovations and improvements.