The 87th Texas Legislature is kicking into high gear. This might be a good time for a refresher on the use of a free tool that is designed to help citizens find information about the legislators and the legislative process. The Texas Legislature Online is a one-stop shop to find almost all the information you need to be engaged in the legislative process.
Here are just a few of the things you can find on the TLO.
- Find out who represents you both in Texas and in Washington DC
- Discover what bills have been filed at the Texas Legislature
- Track the actions of certain bills
- Find the videos (both live and recorded) of the various bill hearings
- Learn when certain committees are meeting
Create an Account
To really take advantage of the power of the TLO, I recommend that you create a free account. This will let you create a list of bills to track and also receive alerts if there are any actions that happen to a bill you are interested in.
The first step is to set up your free account. See below for the steps to do that.
Create a Bill List
The next step is to begin making bill lists. These are lists that can track a subset of bills. It makes it easy to find all the bills that you are interested in that are related to each other.
For instance, in this session, broadband is going to be a big topic. I want to track all the various bills related to broadband, so I created a list of these bills. Below are the steps to create these lists.
Find Bills of Interest
The next step is to find bills that have been filed that you are interested in. You can do this on the main TLO page. If you know the bill number, you will enter it into the search field. Make sure you have selected Bill Number. You will always need to indicate if it is a Senate bill (SB) or a House bill (HB) by placing the appropriate initials in front of the bill.
You also need to make sure you are searching in the correct legislature. It defaults to the current one, but if you happened to go back and search for a bill in a previous legislative year, it may still be set to search in that legislature.
If you don’t know the bill number, you will want to do a word or phrase search. Here are some steps showing you how to do that.
Review the Bills
You are now ready to review the bills you have placed in various lists.
Alerts on Bills
You can also receive alerts on bills you are wanting to track. I recommend you track by “any category.” This will let you know when anything happens to a bill, such as when it is going to be heard in a hearing. There are a couple of ways you can subscribe to the alerts.
Hopefully, this will help you make use of this very important tool. The more you know, the more you can influence your legislators throughout the process. In a future blog post, I’ll provide some tips on how to interact with your legislators and their staff members. The first thing to remember is that they work for you!
Additional Resources
- Blog post on TCEA’s Legislative Priorities I and II
- TCEA’s Bill Analysis for the Texas 87th Legislature
We had some huge wins in the area of computer science and computational thinking this session. Our six-year goal of providing weighted funding for the 9-12 Technology Application courses has finally been achieved. In HB 3, the school finance legislation, the weighted funding for CTE was changed from grades nine through twelve to grades seven through twelve. In addition, the 
There are two pieces of legislation that are going to impact educational broadband. The first is HB 1960 which creates a Governor’s Broadband Council that will advise the governor on issues related to broadband access to unserved areas. This is progress, but not as much as we hoped for. There are few, if any, areas of Texas that are unserved. The original bill included underserved areas, but heavy lobbying by the large telecommunication companies eliminated that language from the bill. However, we consider this progress because we finally have some entity at the state level that will look at the state’s needs for broadband from a strategic perspective. For too long, all state entities have tried to provide affordable, scalable broadband for their own purposes when it would be much more cost efficient to survey the needs across agencies and entities and design a plan to meet all the needs. HB 1960 at least establishes a council that could do this in the future, if given the authority. 
There are several opportunities in the bills mentioned above that will provide professional development in digital learning. The Blended Learning Grants are largely designed to provide professional development for educators in blended learning, not to mention the funding provided to UTeach to continue to provide this type of training to Texas teachers. Also, this is a good chance to remind districts that the TIMA may be used to provide professional development on the use of technology. In addition to these bills, the legislature passed HB 2424 that requires the SBEC to establish rules to create microcredentials in fields of study related to an educator certification class. This was one of TCEA’s legislative priorities, so we are excited to see this bill pass. 
For many, this is t
having a group of staff members from legislator’s offices discuss what to expect and how to navigate this type of meeting. I promise that, by the end of the two-hour training, everyone will be prepared to advocate for the things they are passionate about! Most people who attend the Ed Tech Day at the Capitol have so mu
In order to accomplish the goals established in our priorities, it is imperative that teachers have a supportive environment in which to adapt their teaching strategies to take advantage of empowering technologies. Teachers recognize the benefits of the use of technology, but don’t always know how and when to use the different technologies that are available. This is why TCEA believes strongly that teachers need ongoing, job-embedded professional learning opportunities that empower them to use appropriate
Every student has distinct learning needs, interests, and aspirations. Up until recently, it was extremely difficult to tailor the instructional strategies to meet each student’s needs. Technology can be an enabler of this type of educational model. It allows students to guide their inquiry as they decide how they will interact with the content, including the time and location. This type of learning requires a major shift in the delivery of instruction and involves teacher professional learning, a robust technical infrastructure, the selection of appropriate content, and strong leaders who know how to manage this type of change. Many of the strategies listed above support the goal of personalized learning; however, there are a few that have not yet been addressed.
House of Representatives. Students from Richardson, San Antonio, Austin, Pflugerville, Spring Branch, Leander, Hays County, and Lufkin came to the Capitol to demonstrate the different ways students gain coding experience in their elementary, middle, and high schools. They also came to teach state legislators and their staff members how to write their first line of code. 
The 
students and listened to some San Antonio elementary students read a story they wrote, as their pre-programmed robots acted out the plot line. In fact, there were a variety of different robots roaming about the floor of the chamber, including: Lego, Sphero, Dot and Dash, Makeblock, Mircobits, and Ozobots. One of the participant’s favorite activities was test driving the code written for a virtual reality experience by the Richardson ISD high school students. 
The students also got to hear what it takes to work at Facebook, Google, and Uber. Representatives from these companies spoke to the students over pizza and soft drinks. They highlighted the benefits of working in the tech industry and what it takes to land a job at one of these three companies. It won’t be long before these students will be polishing their resumes and knocking on their doors. The likelihood of these students getting jobs is strong since there are currently over 40,000 unfilled high-tech jobs in Texas. And yet, only 3 percent of high school students took a computer science course last school year.
This is why this day was so important. Educating policy makers on the benefits of computer science is critical to enacting policies that can effectively change the dismal statistics. Some of the strategies to increase the opportunities for students to gain computer science skills are:
If this sounds like the goal of your district and you haven’t taken the 
This blog post is not meant to be exhaustive. The Future Ready initiative is not a one and done type of effort. They have proven over time that they are committed to their mission and are willing to adapt and grow. This is why TCEA is proud to be considered one of their partners. Hopefully I have whet your appetite to know more. Start by checking 
In addition, the state budget for the next two years includes $20 million for the state to arrange for an outside entity to produce open educational resources for the state’s use. It is expected that TEA will begin with instructional materials that meet the specifications for the English Language Arts adoption that will be implemented in the 2019-2020 school year. This would give districts the ability to use high-quality OER materials for this adoption, which has the potential to save them money. 
outside of school time to be successful in school. The survey also revealed that 75 percent of Texas 6th through 12th graders use the internet at home for school work. Those who do not have internet access at home are at a distinct disadvantage. Not only do they have fewer options in terms of access to content; they are unable to develop the technical skills necessary in an economy driven by technology. 
