Online Learning for DPSCD Students

All District schools will offer students the opportunity to participate in online learning. Students remain connected to their brick and mortar school and participate in daily live instruction from a certified teacher. Students schedules will have a mix of live online instruction and independent work time. Students will recieve instructional materials and devices from their school to support learning from home. 

Interested in participating in online learning at a school-based site? Click here to learn about our Learning Centers!

Your Child's Online School Day

Students, parents, and families in the District have a number of online learning tools available to help them succeed in and out of the classroom. We know that parent engagement is essential to student achievement, and, to this end, the district is offering Virtual Parent Academy Sessions to provide families with an overview of all the online learning tools students will use this year—Clever, Teams, and Schoology.

Clever

Microsoft Teams is the district's platform for real-time communication and is accessible via Clever. Whether students and parents are engaged in class, having a meeting, or working with others on a project, they'll communicate on Teams. Our students use Teams in two ways:

1. Class Teams - students participate in live class instruction
2. School Teams - students participate as a member of their school community

Class Teams is where all live daily instruction takes place for online learning. Teachers customize these spaces with channels, recurring meetings, and other resources in order to deliver high-quality whole group and small group instruction. As if they were in person, students should expect to be assigned to channels within their Class Team for team projects and breakout discussions within their class. As the school year gets underway, teachers will schedule recurring meetings with your student using your child's school bell schedule so that they know which class to join and when and can do so easily from their calendar.

School Teams help build community and are used by principals to create connections for students and staff as if everyone were gathering in person. These spaces are used for daily announcements, assemblies, school spirit initiatives and to help families by connecting them to community resources to support their families' needs. In the coming year, schools will use these Teams to bring students together for extracurricular programs, clubs and activities like sports, robotics, mentoring, and academic support. Students and parents should also expect our support staff to use channels within the Team to engage students around our Code of Conduct's monthly character traits. They may ask students what words like "determination," "generosity," and "kindness," mean to them, then check their replies and encourage students to give a "👍" to responses they like.

Schoology

The District adopted Schoology as its new learning platform for the 2020-2021 school year. Schoology is accessible vai Clever and works in tandem with the rest of the District’s digital tools and online resources to help us provide excellent instruction to our students. This means that educators and families will still use the video conferencing and chatting features they got to know last school year while benefiting from the organization and sharing that Schoology provides. Teachers use Schoology to assign work, distribute reading and media to students, assess student progress, communicate with families, and to bolster the online classroom environment. 

Given that teachers have their choice of four tools for class assignments, they will grade work in the space that makes the most sense for them in their context, and then add the grades they wish to PowerSchool. All teachers, whether in face-to-face or fully online instructional settings, will be using Schoology to support their teaching. Not only are Schoology’s tools useful to teachers and students in both contexts, but using it in face-to-face instruction will help ease the transition to online teaching in the event of a school closure.

Ready to get started? Let's go!