Implementing Xello: Everything You Need to Know About Florida’s Senate Bill 240
As Florida’s newly selected online college and career readiness platform, Xello offers intuitive tools designed to engage students in exploration and planning for life after high school.
As of this fall, all Florida school districts can gain access, at no cost, to Xello’s full suite of K-12 tools for career planning and work-based learning coordination.
Xello is ready to deliver a high-quality career, college, and life readiness experience for students, counselors, teachers, and administrators while helping districts within Florida to meet the requirements of Florida’s new Senate Bill 240.
What is Bill 240?
This bill, passed in the spring of 2023 provides legislation intended to shine a spotlight on career and technical education (CTE) in Florida. Senate Bill 240 outlines new work-based learning requirements for students in grades 6-12. You can view detailed information related to the bill from the Florida Senate webpage here.
Keep reading to learn more about how Xello fits into the bill as Florida’s new online college and career readiness platform!
The right tools.
It’s important to have the right tools to ensure you’re meeting the requirements of Bill 240 while guiding your students to success. Implementing Xello is the key to accessing these tools!
Let’s look at 3 ways Xello plays a role in the requirements of Bill 240:
1. Incorporating Xello’s seamless approach to work-based learning into your career fair requirement
The bill requires every high school within a district to host an annual career fair during the school year and notes that Xello may be used as part of the activities. You can view the specific details of this requirement from the Florida Senate webpage starting at line 983.
Of course, a career fair that invites people from a range of industries and occupations to share what it’s like to do their job can be a meaningful way for students to learn more about careers. It’s also an activity that will take planning and coordination to deliver successfully.
Preparing students ahead of time will be important. If this is a student’s first time attending a career fair, they’ll need to know what to expect and what’s actually in it for them.
Student engagement equals student success
Xello’s career planning tools and work-based learning platform can support you in making a career fair experience more meaningful and engaging to students. The more engaged students are, the more they will gain from the experience including making a bigger impact on employers and businesses that attend.
Thinking critically about what matters to them, what they like and dislike, along with their skills, past experiences and more will provide students with the language needed to interact effectively with employers. Armed with this self awareness and a list of their top career matches, students can also conduct career research ahead of time.
By exploring career profiles in Xello, students learn more about which ones are in demand, what they typically pay, what the job duties and working conditions are, and can consider different education pathways. Interviews with real people in these careers provide even more food for thought.
This can be just the spark a student needs to prompt curiosity and interest in identifying the types of employers they might like to meet. It can even help them to come up with specific questions to ask employers on career fair day. This is a great opportunity for students to sharpen their communication skills while gathering practical information that can help inform future career decisions.
Career fair planning
Having an idea about the types of employers your students would like to engage with at your career fair can help you to customize the experience for them. Inviting a broad range of businesses, including some already on your students’ radar can certainly help with engagement. Surveying students ahead of time as to the types of businesses they’re interested in can become part of your planning for the event. You may even decide to showcase businesses in a way that helps students align them to their Personality Styles or saved career clusters. By identifying and displaying this information prominently at the event, students can more easily identify employers that may match their unique interests.
Work-based learning
Work-based learning features are integrated right into students’ and educators’ core Xello experience. While students are investigating careers of interest in Xello they can also explore company profiles. Students are able to get an understanding of the companies that operate in their local community – what they do, who they hire, and where they’re located. Students can even use their work captured to help them build a resume to bring to the career fair or to use whenever it’s time to start applying for opportunities.
Your career fair could be just the thing that opens the door to incredible opportunities for your students by helping them to see the relevance of their schooling and develop more meaningful career goals and plans.
Xello’s work-based learning features will support your efforts to help students explore different careers and pathways, develop employability skills, and build actionable plans before committing to a pathway after high school.
2. Career planning information for students and parents
Under the bill, district school boards are required to provide both students and parents with guidance on accessing and using Xello for career planning and work-based learning coordination. You can view the specific details of this requirement from the Florida Senate webpage starting at line 1085.
Having families involved in your students’ after high school planning is key to promoting successful outcomes for students. Having tools that make it easier to bring parents and guardians on board is essential. Xello helps by offering a range of future readiness activities and resources educators can easily share with families.
Expanding future readiness beyond the classroom provides additional support to students navigating often difficult decisions. Having the support of family can enrich a student’s academic motivations and provide reinforcement of goals, plans, and decision-making.
Xello can act as a strong link between school and home for families. Xello Family allows educators, families, and students full access to the platform. Parents and guardians can view everything their child is working on to gain deeper insight into their child’s interests, goals, and plans.
Families can access their student’s progress on lessons, course selection, and career and college exploration. Xello is designed to be intuitive with built-in guidance to empower families to view everything independently, without having to only rely on educators to be part of the process.
With Xello Family, parents and guardians can be more involved in their child’s learning and plans for the future.
3. A personalized academic and career plan
Under the bill, students must create a personalized academic and career plan using Xello. They must also be provided with training necessary to access and update their plans at least annually throughout middle and high school. You can view the specific details of this requirement from the Florida Senate webpage starting at line 1111.
Preparing students for their successful futures is a big job. Xello is here to help ensure your students meet your academic and career planning requirements. As a powerful academic and career planning solution, Xello uses technology to make this seamless.
Xello Lessons can be easily integrated into any of your approved middle school career and education planning courses. The lessons are engaging and entirely online. Xello ensures a highly personalized and meaningful learning journey for students by incorporating their saved careers, schools, and interests into their lessons. The experience is designed in a manner that’s extremely flexible allowing for growth and change along with the student.
College Planning tools guide students to research the schools they’re interested in, build a plan, and then track the action items, deadlines and application progress for each institution using the College Applications Tracker.
These are just a few of the features at your fingertips inside of Xello designed to support your students and ensure you meet your academic and career planning requirements.
Conclusion
Xello is Florida’s state selected online career planning and work-based learning system. If you haven’t already, introduce Xello in your district for a seamless experience in fulfilling the new Senate Bill 240 requirements.
We understand change management is hard, but our award-winning Xello customer support team has your back. Contact your success manager or get in touch to learn next steps.
