The New York State Education Department (NYSED) has developed the New York State Virtual Learning System (VLS),
a web-based source of information for administrators, teachers, teacher candidates, parents, students,
and the public. VLS is designed to encourage the use of the Internet as a tool for teaching and learning
and to help classroom teachers locate and use Internet resources for instruction. The vision is to create a
comprehensive education portal that integrates a range of standards-based resources keyed to the New York State
Learning Standards and includes electronic tools to help all learners reach high levels of achievement.
The VLS presents the New York State Learning Standards, including the full text of the 28 standards and their
respective key ideas and performance indicators, as well as the alternate performance indicators for students
with severe disabilities. It offers thousands of resources that classroom teachers can use to support preK-12
standards-based instruction, including sample tasks, learning experiences and lesson plans.
- Learning standards (28) in each of the seven standard areas;
- Performance indicators for each standard area from pre-kindergarten to grade 12;
- Classroom-level learning experiences tied to the performance indicators;
- State resource guides with core curricula;
- State assessment samples;
- Library, archive and museum resources; and
- Resources from the NYS Public Broadcast Stations.
Content items included on VLS meet these criteria:
- Be of demonstrated quality;
- Aligned to NYS learning standards;
- Keyed to one or more performance indicators within a standard area;
- Developed by or targeted to NYS teachers to assist in improving instruction;
- Reflect current research or promising practice.
The following must be addressed when content items are added to VLS.
Nature of Content
- Format: type of digital file (e.g. html, doc, txt, xml, etc.) and print version.
- Physical Location: file, server, single computer, Internet address, etc.
- Size: file size, number of pages, etc.
- Hosting and maintenance of content by contributor or NYSED
Placement of Content
- Specific items with alignment to one or more performance indicators (PI) where item titles appear on a PI selection page and users can directly access content items (e.g. Sample Tasks, Lesson Plans, etc.) by clicking.
- Content resources that generally support the learning standards are placed on one or more VLS pages (e.g. main, subject area) with a hyperlink to their Internet location.
Integration of Content
- Individual items are submitted through the VLS Content Consumption System (CCS) using a pre existing content type (e.g. News Item, Sample Task, Lesson Plan Link, Subject Area Link, Sample Test Item).
- Bulk content is imported via an XML file transfer process after linking all individual content items to the identifiers of aligned performance indicators.
We thank our staff for their hard work and commitment to the development of VLS, and we recognize the following
organizations for their contributions to the project:
We hope that, with the continued support of these and other educational organizations, VLS will continue to add high quality
educational resources, particularly in the area of teacher professional development.
Please be sure to complete our feedback survey to offer suggestions for future enhancements.
