Dani Pedrotti: Good morning, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us. My colleague, Beth Pickett, is actually going to do the majority of the presentation today, but I wanted to take just a couple of minutes to introduce our organization for those of you who are less familiar with the NROC project and the different things that we do, and how we support educators across the country.

So the NROC project is focused on collaborating with educators such as yourself to come up with new ideas to engage students, develop content and tools to address those needs, test them with your learners and your educators, and then refine those over time and get them out into the great, wide world so everybody can benefit from them. Our organization has been around for many years now, founded in 2003. We are a nonprofit, mission-driven organization.

And our model-- even though we're self-sustaining and we do have paid memberships that help us do what we do over the long term, our model is to really work with foundations and other funders to build those core content and educational technology assets that we then get out to you in a couple of different ways.

One is to make it freely available. We're going to dive into that in detail this morning. Free to individual users-- so individual teachers and students anywhere can access our resources today and use those with your students. And we hope that many of you will jump in when we're finished with showing you HippoCampus, and try to do things with your students.

And then we have low-cost memberships. If you really want to do a deeper integration with something like Canvas, your learning management system, or other systems that you use at your school and you want to be able to look at student data and that kind of thing to really help guide the learning experience-- so that's when membership comes into the picture.

So just a nice overview. I like this slide because it shows both the core content materials that we've used grant funding to build. And those include a two-semester Algebra 1 program, a developmental math sequence-- which, maybe the name is misleading a little bit. When you're in higher ed, you call it developmental math, and I think everybody else calls it the math you really should have a good knowledge of when you graduate from high school.

We also have an English program. Again, it's designed for that transition between high school and college, and making sure that students are really solid in their reading and writing skills as they make those transitions. We have a couple of different tools that we offer to actually deliver this content to students.

So one is EdReady. Hopefully we'll be doing a session on that in a few weeks to give you an idea of what's available to you there. But today we're going to focus on HippoCampus, which is an amazing repository of digital learning objects that are at your disposal and completely free to you, and Beth is going to be diving into that a little more deeply.

The one question did come up-- and I'm going to use this new-- new to me-- Zoom functionality. I'm going to answer live. So someone asked, what does NROC stand for? And it actually goes back to our origins in 2003 when we started out as a curator of open educational resources, and it was called the National Repository of Online Courses. And at that time, like I said, we were really focused on curating, making sure that the resources we pulled together could be used readily.

So you understood exactly what was in front of you, how it applied to your day-to-day curricular needs, and you could get it into the hands of students. Since then we've actually started building things, and have really focused on the needs of educators in math and English as they help students with transitions in those areas. And so we decided-- everybody knew NROC, so we kept the NROC project as the name. But the acronym has kind of gone by the wayside now. So with that, I am actually going to turn this over to Beth Pickett, who's going to do a great deep dive for us into the HippoCampus application.

Beth Pickett: Perfect. Thank you so much, Dani. Let me make sure I've got all the right buttons pushed. Can you hear me? Yes. Perfect. All right, I want to make sure that that is working. You should be able to see my screen right now.

I will go to the home page of HippoCampus, because we were jumping around in there a little bit before we started the webinar. So thank you all for taking the time to come and be introduced to HippoCampus. You may know, if you took biology or physiology in college, the HippoCampus is the part of the brain related to learning and memory. And we've made a bit of a play on words here with the hippopotamus on the screen.

HippoCampus is basically like a digital library that is free and open access for everyone to use and to share. I'm going to go ahead-- and speaking of which, let's stop my video, buy a little bit more bandwidth for you. All of the content at HippoCampus is free for people to use, easy to access, and multimedia content curated-- passing through under the nose of subject matter experts to make sure that the content we offer is academically sound.

So you can go on YouTube and look up a subject that you want to teach to your students, but if you want to know that something is high quality and it's organized in a really easy way to find it, come to HippoCampus. It's there for you to use.

I have been asked to make sure that my descriptions today will be appropriate for people who are visually impaired, so I'm going to try to build those descriptions in as we go. So here we are on the home page of HippoCampus, which is where everything starts. You'll see two basic boxes on our home page.

On the left is a Browse Subject box. It has a listing of 13 different subject areas in math, natural sciences, social sciences, and in the humanities. There's another box on the right that says Browse Collections. These have the logos of our 20 different collections that are housed at HippoCampus.

They run through our own NROC project collections of math and English, plus content from Khan Academy, Phoenix College in Phoenix, Arizona-- not to be confused with the University of Phoenix-- Why U, Art of Problem Solving, content from Mt. San Jacinto College. If you come to HippoCampus and you know of a particular collection from which you would like to see content, you can go straight to the Browse Collections area and click on any of those icons to get that content.

But most people are not necessarily familiar with those different collections. So what the teachers would do is just come to the HippoCampus home page, and go right to the different subjects. Because OTAN is an NROC project member, however, you guys have a special version of HippoCampus that is branded for OTAN. And I'm going to show you, now, how to get there.

If you look in the upper-right-hand corner of your screen, there is a black navigation bar. And right in the center of that is the label Login. You should see it right there. I'm showing it with my mouse right now. If I click on the Login button, I get a dialog box that pops up with three tabs. And the default tab is Log In. It's divided into three horizontal sections.

I don't want the first section yet. That first section is if I ever need to log in for some reason. We'll talk about that later. But right now, the very last of the horizontal sections says if you want to visit someone else's My Hippo page, you can look them up here.

So I'm going to come here and click and type My OTAN into the box, and then click the button that says Look Up. And voila, it opens up, now, to the home page of the OTAN-branded HippoCampus. So now that we're on the OTAN-branded HippoCampus, it means a couple of things. Not only does everybody know that this is a resource that OTAN has provided to the students and the users. It also make sure that you're not seeing any ads as you go through the content itself. Any questions so far?

Not yet. So I am going to show you one of the subject pages. Starting over here on the left-hand side, in the Browse Subjects box, the first choice in the math category is arithmetic. I'm going to click on that button to get to the arithmetic subject matter home page.

The core area of this arithmetic home page-- and all the subject home pages-- divided into three columns. And on the far left-hand side of the column is basically how you navigate around and find what you want as far as the content. This content at HippoCampus-- it's video, animation, simulations, and interactive activities.

There are very few PDFs, Word documents, anything text-based. This is all multimedia. So over here on the left you have some olive, horizontal, colored areas that tell you-- they ask you, basically, are you looking for a presentation on something? That would be when you're teaching a student for the very first time about a topic. Some worked examples that the students can watch to see how a problem might be solved, and some simulations with which they can interact.

So let's go ahead and start in our own NROC collection. One of the listings on the left-hand side in this far left column is developmental math, arithmetic. So I'm going to click on the developmental math, arithmetic. And as soon as I clicked on that, you might have noticed that the middle column populates with the names of a bunch of different learning objects. In this case, they are all videos.

Dani Pedrotti: Beth--

Beth Pickett: You start with-- yeah?

Dani Pedrotti: Pardon me. Can you make your browser window larger so that we have a larger view of HippoCampus, or make your browser fill the whole screen?

Beth Pickett: I can try that. It's going to stretch it out a little bit. If I zoom in too much, when I go to maximize it a little bit, I'm going to run off the screen. But let's try it.

Dani Pedrotti: Thank you.

Beth Pickett: Does that help?

Dani Pedrotti: Yes. And then I think you're going to get to this question, but we had a couple of questions about if and when you might actually need to set up an account.

Beth Pickett: Right.

Dani Pedrotti: But I think you're going to address that a little bit later.

Beth Pickett: I am, but especially for people who may be somewhat new to technology, I want to reassure them that they and their students can use HippoCampus without ever creating an account. If you'll notice where I've been so far, I have not logged in. I have not added a password. I just go.

It's an open resource. It's right there, available. So don't worry about the passwords, or even create an account if where you are technologically, you don't want to go there and do some of the things that that would allow you to do-- basically, which is create playlists, and we will get there a little bit later in the presentation.

So this should be a little bit bigger on the screen. Hopefully it allows you to see things a little bit better. So what I had just done, on the left-hand column, is going into developmental math, arithmetic. The middle column now populates with the names of all the different videos that are available for developmental math, arithmetic.

And they are shown in sequential order in the order that most teachers would normally teach that content. There is a tiny button above the middle column. It's a pull-down menu, and it says Sort. And if I click that little arrow, I can go to an option of sorting by the topic name-- which is an alphabetical sort-- or sequentially, as is the default.

I'm going to stick with the sequential. The very first topic under whole numbers is place value and names for whole numbers. If I click on that name, the video pops up in the video area, which is the third column-- the far right-hand column. And there is a media-- a play button-- all of the controls for the volume.

It'll tell you how long. This particular video is almost five minutes long. And then underneath this whole third column video area, sort of in the lower-left-hand corner there's a little tiny word that says Maximize. So I'm going to go ahead and click that so that my screen is shown a little bit bigger. It's easier to see the video. So let's take a look, for just a few seconds, about what this video looks like.

[video playback]

- How much money would you rather make in a month-- this amount, or this amount? Of the two amounts, of course you'd rather make this amount. But why? Well, all numbers are made up of one or more digits. A digit is one of the symbols 0, 1, 2--

[end playback]

Beth Pickett: So you can see that he goes really back to the beginning. And because this is a developmental math course, the audience and the examples that he uses and the level of speaking is for an adult-- even an adult who, like your adult basic education learners, may be having to go back to square one to learn this material. Within the video box, in this little control bar, is a tiny box called CC, which-- you can probably guess-- means Closed Captions.

And especially for our NROC contents, we not only have the captions in English so people can read along in addition to listening to the audio, but we also have the closed captions available in Spanish. So down here at the bottom of that Closed Captions box that popped up when I clicked the CC, there-- it starts off, the default is in English. But if I move my cursor to the right a little bit and click Spanish, you will see the audio, if you listen, is still in English, but they can read along in Spanish. And for those who are English language learners who are also having to learn math on top of the language, being able to read the content in their native language can help break down those barriers, keep them engaged, and help them learn this material. Any questions about that?

Good so far. All right, I'm going to turn off the closed captions, minimize my screen again, and introduce you to some of the different collections we have here at HippoCampus. One of the reasons we have multiple collections-- not just our own-- is because we understand that different presentation styles hit students in different ways. One student might totally love Khan Academy. Another student might find his level of vocabulary to be somewhat intimidating.

So we have a variety of different ways to teach the same material. And I want to show you what some of those are. In particular, there's one I wanted to show you from the STEMbite collection. Now, STEMbite was created by a high school physics teacher using Google Glass to present videos showing how math and science are used in the real world.

So here's one on order of operations.

[video playback]

- (WHISPERING) STEMbite.

- Hello! For this STEMbite, we're going to get baby Penny dressed. Now, I have a two-year-old son, but getting a little girl dressed is a whole other matter. Hey, hey, hey. Little girl outfits have a lot more parts to them. Sometimes I'm not sure what all those parts are for. But it reminds me, in math, of order of operations.

When you're doing a math problem, it really matters whether you do the addition, subtraction, or the multiplication/division first. It can totally change your answer. And the same is approximately true when you're dressing a baby. Should we put your pants on? Here you go!

Take, for example, the onesie. Here Penny's got her pants on-- don't ya? And I could strap the onesie underneath. Now, I think that looks just fine, but my wife tells me that's not the right way to do it. Boop, boop, boop, boop. The onesie's supposed to be snapped underneath the pants.

So in the same way, let's say you were simplifying an expression, and you do the addition/subtraction first, before the multiplication. You might end up getting a funny answer, just like Penny looked kind of funny when I did it the wrong way. It's OK, don't cry.

So long as you follow the rules of math-- the order of operations-- or the rules of society-- the social norms-- you can be sure that your final product looks exactly the way it's supposed to. Here you go! There you go.

- (WHISPERING) STEMbite

[end playback]

Beth Pickett: So these are the kinds of things that can help students relate what they're learning in class, or why it's important to learn certain things like order of operations, in a way that they can really relate to. So STEMbite is one of my favorite collections for that aspect of learning things like math and science.

We have another collection called Art of Problem Solving. This particular collection is more aimed toward middle school and high schoolers who are learning math, but it may also resonate with some of the adult learners, because the gentleman who is teaching it, Richard Rusczyk, has such a passion for math and is so able to get into the heads of people who are trying to learn it. I really like his style, so let's look at something from the Art of Problem Solving. And we won't go through the whole video for most of these, just little snippets. But I liked the Penny one, and I wanted to see her get dressed.

[video playback]

[music playing]

- Today we're going to talk about rules. Now, I know, I know, I know. You don't like rules. But you're thinking about home rules, and home rules are always about what you can't do. Math rules are better, because they're about what you can do.

Now, I'm going to start with one of the simplest rules of addition-- the commutative property. We'll start with an example. I'm going to count some hats here. I've got two floppy hats, and three fuzzy hats. That sounds like 2 plus 3 hats. There's also three fuzzy hats and two floppy hats. So that's 3 plus 2 hats.

[playback ends]

Beth Pickett: So in general, Richard does a really good job of explaining things first in specific examples with numbers, and then later-- especially in the algebra content-- teaching students how to take those numbers and step back and start using variables. He's really good at explaining all of those things. By the way, if you hear sniffing in the background, it's because I put dogs in the laundry room, and they're trying to wonder where I am and why I'm not letting them out. And they're sniffing rather loudly. So I apologize for that.

Dani Pedrotti: I wanted to just-- one question has come up a couple of times, and I thought it might be best to answer it live. So one question is about content specifically for the ESL learner and whether we have collections that address the very specific needs of those learners. So maybe you want to just talk to that for just a moment?

And then another one, which you are going to get to in a while, the college and career readiness standards for adult education. We have done alignments for those, and those are available for math. And a little bit later on in the presentation, Beth will show you how to access those.

Beth Pickett: Yes. In fact, we're almost there. Not quite on the standards, but as far as the ESL goes, no. We do not have one specific collection that focuses on that. We do have areas of our English collections that also talk about how our content can be used for ESL, but no. We don't have anything specifically and only for them. We do have supports, like I showed you in math, with the closed captioning. But other specific material for teaching English as a second language, we do not have a collection for that.

However, we are always open to adding other free resources to HippoCampus. So if there are resources that people want to suggest to us that we could approach the creators and incorporate it, we are always willing to take a look at that. So what I'm doing right now is going a little bit through the different collections to give you an idea of the variety of what we offer.

Phoenix College, so as you could tell a little bit with Art of Problem Solving, that audience is a little bit younger than our adult students. Not that our adult students wouldn't be able to learn from that. But again, like everybody else, the adult students may have a different sensibility for how they like information to be presented to them. So now-- and I forgot to do this earlier with the art of problem solving-- I've gone back to the arithmetic home page, left hand column, and I'm choosing a different collection.

Earlier, I chose Art of Problem Solving and I picked the very first video available for them. Now I'm in the Phoenix college collection, left hand side, I'm clicking their Arithmetic. And it has populated the middle column with all of their different videos available. So Phoenix College, I think I'm going to show the first one, Adding Integers with the Same Sign Using Color Counters. And you can tell that this particular presentation style is very straightforward. If you have a very no nonsense adult who just wants to learn it clearly, here we go. I will maximize the screen.

Video 2: Welcome to our lesson on adding integers with two color counters. In this lesson, we'll look at examples of adding integers with the same sign. In the next lesson, we'll look at examples of adding integers with different signs. An integer is a number that can be written without--

Beth Pickett: You can see, quite straightforward there as far as how he's presenting it.

Dani Pedrotti: Beth?

Beth Pickett: Yeah?

Dani Pedrotti: Can you open one of the NROC math topics or videos that has the closed captioning in Spanish and just show our viewers how you toggle to the Spanish version of that closed captioning?

Beth Pickett: Sure. We'll do that again. So on the left hand side, left hand column, I've gone to the NROC collection, Developmental Math: Arithmetic, and I clicked that to populate the middle column with all the videos. I clicked on the first video, or I might as well click on a different one. You've already seen that place value.

I've clicked on estimation video, which populates-- it makes that video pop up in the right hand side, the screen where we show things. I push on the play button in the media control panel that's there. And here we go.

Video 3: Do you have enough money to buy what you need?

Beth Pickett: I'm going to pause the video now. Click once on the CC button. And it defaults to the English closed caption. Now our closed captions are a little bit different than some you might have seen on TV, which are two lines at the bottom of the screen. Ours is over to the right in a column. The default, as I said-- and you'll notice, when I have the mouse inside the viewing area, the control panel is available to change the volume, click on the CC, or play or pause. When I move my mouse outside of that area, that clears the screen, and the control area goes away. It makes it a little bit easier to see.

So over on the right, you can see we have the English subtitles available. And all I do is click on Spanish if I want the Spanish version. But again, he's still speaking in English.

[video playback]

- About how much more does one item cost than another? These are common questions that rounding and estimating can help you find the answer--

[end playback]

Beth Pickett: Does that help answer that question?

Dani Pedrotti: It does, thank you. And then you'll be talking about playlists in a while. There are folks who are asking about how these materials might be shared or assigned to students. And so people are itching to figure out how to actually implement.

Beth Pickett: Perfect. Well let me take a sidebar. If you just have one video that you want to share with students from HippoCampus-- if you'll notice over here, we're in the far right under the video viewing area. And the very last little icon, below the box that includes all these three columns, is a little-- it's supposed to be a chain link. It looks like a sideways snowman or a number eight. And it says link to this topic if I roll over it.

If I click on that, you should be able to see that a dialog box pops up with a link. And you can copy and paste that link. You can throw it in an email. You could put it in a Word document or a Google document and share it with your students. So in this example, we're looking at the estimation video from the NROC project. In the dialog box that popped up, all you have to do is highlight the entire link, starting with http, and copy and paste it anywhere you want.

So that's a really easy way to grab videos and animations sort of onesy-twosy and use them for your students if you want. A little more advanced, one step up from that is the playlist where you gather a bunch of those together. We'll get there.

Dani Pedrotti: Perfect. Thank you, Beth.

Beth Pickett: I still wanted to show you one of the other collections, which is Why U. This is an animation. And this particular one had to do with factoring. So what I've done is in the far left hand corner, I found the Why U collection, pre-algebra foundational concepts.

I clicked on that title. It populated the middle column with all of the different Why U videos. And now I'm clicking on the title that says factoring, and now I can play the factoring video.

[video playback]

- Hello. I'm Professor Von Schmo-hawk, and welcome to Why U. In the previous lecture, you saw that numbers, which divide evenly into a natural number, are said to be that number's factors. For instance, since 3 divides evenly into 6, we say that 3 is a factor of 6. Numbers that have exactly two factors--

[end playback]

Beth Pickett: So one of the things with the Why U video is that they have done a very nice job not only of professionally animating these math concepts, and using ding and a highlight, or changing the text color of the numbers from black to red, showing how things move around, which can be a really helpful visual way to learn the math. But their goal is not only to teach how something is solved, how a math problem is solved. But why do we do it that way?

To help those students who have that itching desire to know, I understand the formula, but why does it work? Hence the name Why U. Now, you will notice that Professor Von Schmo-hawk is holding a pipe. And we have had people write to us and say, oh, we were trying to get the kids not to smoke. Totally true. It's a bubble pipe. And every now and then, probably not often enough, you'll see the little bubbles come out. So it is not a tobacco pipe. He's not actually smoking anything. He's just got a bubble pipe. That's an item there for Why U.

If you scroll then back over to the far left hand column, in the simulations area-- so we had presentations, we had worked examples, we have simulations. Oh. I'm going to show a simulation, then I want to go back, because I want to show you worked examples as well.

Simulations, the PHET collection is one of our collections. They are interactive activities. So we were just learning about factors in one of our earlier videos. Now we can go to the PHET interactive simulations and practice.

So here we have multiplication. I'm going to go to factor and click on that. This is not an animation, but it's a little bit cartoony in the way that it looks. There are three boxes available, which are supposed to represent easy, medium, and hard. I'm going to click the first box, which is the easy one. And I've been given a times table grid.

And beneath the times table grid, it says ? X ? = 16. And basically, what it's asking me to do is find on the times table grid the two items that we can multiply to get to 16. Now my grid only goes up to six. So I can't use 2 X 8. I have to go and take my mouse and scroll around in the grid until I get to 4 X 4.

And if I click on the 4 X 4 box, [computer dings] I get a little audio signal that I have done that correctly. Now beneath the grid, the formula has changed to what times what equals 20? So I can either go to the 4 X 5 box, or the 5 X 4 box. Either one of those would work.

It gives the student an opportunity to practice what they just learned. So those are how our simulations and interactive activities go. Now I forgot to show something just a little earlier. Do you remember when we were in-- on the left hand column all the way at the top, NROC collection, under the presentations, we had developmental math arithmetic, and we went to the place values and names for whole numbers, the presentation. If a student wants to watch the presentation and then see how it is used, they can go back over that first column, scroll down to the worked examples area.

And also, in the NROC collection developmental math arithmetic, click on that. And they'll get all the worked examples that perfectly align with the presentation they just watched on place value and names for whole numbers. So let me play one of those worked examples for you. I think you'll recognize the person who is teaching it.

[video playback]

- Find the place value of 3 in 4,356.

[playback ends]

Beth Pickett: So yes. These are from Sal Khan of Khan Academy. We hired him to do these for us years ago before Khan Academy really got as big as it is today. So these are actually folded into the Khan Academy content on his website as well. But these are the worked examples that he did specifically for us to align to the presentations that we give the students in our developmental math, the arithmetic, and all the other developmental math sections that we have.

Dani Pedrotti: Beth, we have a couple of questions.

Beth Pickett: I think Andrew is next. Yes, Dani?

Dani Pedrotti: One, actually at the end of the presentation, I will circle back to this. Sarah is asking if we provide student worksheets and can things be downloaded. Can the media be downloaded when students don't have internet access? And at the end of the session, I will share with you some OER resources that are text resources that are aligned specifically to NROC math and English. It's sort of separate, but I'll make sure that you have the URL for that. And Beth can address that question, then I'll go to the next question.

Beth Pickett: So remember that the focus of HippoCampus is the multimedia, the video, the animation, the simulation, the worked examples. So we don't have on HippoCampus itself a whole lot of text based workbooks, PDFs, any of that. Dani, you asked earlier, you passed on a question someone had about the standards.

So let's say we're back in the left hand column. And we click NROC collection developmental math arithmetic, and we're at place value and names for whole numbers. I like that video. And let's say that I want to find out if it is aligned to any standards that I'm looking for, because I need to fulfill certain standards for my students.

So here we are. After I click the name of the video in the middle column, it's popped in back over on the right hand side. And underneath the video, to the left of that little link that I showed you just a few minutes ago, there's a checkmark. I'm going to click the checkmark. And it pops open a new dialog box, the standards dialog box.

At the top of the standards dialog box is a drop down menu. If I click my mouse and hold it on the drop down menu, I have four options of standards that I can look at that align with this particular video, California standards, College and Career Readiness Standards for adult education-- ding ding ding-- National Standards, and Common Core standards.

So of course, for OTAN, I'm going to the Adult Ed standards. And it immediately populates in that dialog box by grade level CCRS a, b, NBT 1.1a, and all the other standards for which this video helps meet that standard. So that's one way to do it starting with the video. You can go the other way as well.

So I closed the dialog box. Now I'm back on the arithmetic subject page with that video still popped up there. But at the very top of the main box where the three columns live, you'll see some tabs that I haven't mentioned before. We have been in the default tab, it's orange now, it says browse topics. Then there's a tab called launch a course, textbook correlations, but the fourth tab is called standards correlations.

If I click on that tab, it takes me to a new view of the three columns. And instead of the collections and course names in the far left, now I've got the standards. And I have it sets for adult education grade five. And it's got all the different standards here listed by CEE 1.1, CEE 1.2.1, let's say I want CEE 1.3.1. If I click that in the left hand column, it populates all the different videos from any collection here on the arithmetic page at HippoCampus that help meet that standard.

So for example, here's one, multiplication of multiple term radicals from NROC. Here's one, one variable fractions part two from AOPS, that's art of problem solving. If I scroll down a little bit more, square roots and real numbers from Khan Academy, rational exponents from Why U.

Add as in earlier, if I click on any of those video titles in the middle column, I click on it and the video pops up on the right. And I can go ahead and watch it. Any questions on the standards?

I do want to show you how to change if you don't want grade five, if you want a different standard. Here in the olive horizontal bar, where it says standards, I'm going to click on a button that says settings.

I click on the settings button. It pops open a dialog box called standards settings. And here again is a dropdown box, content standard, which one do you want? And it's the same options we had earlier, California standards, college and career readiness for adult education, common core, or national.

So I've got my college and career readiness. I can pick the subject. We're on the arithmetic page, so it's only giving me math. It's not going to give me any English subjects. And then I can choose anywhere from third grade to twelfth grade.

So let's say I'm searching for math twelfth grade. I click the save button, lower right hand corner of the dialog box, and those are the standards. One, two, three, four, five-- we have six standards here for which we have content at HippoCampus. If I click on one of those standards in the left column, again, we get different content popping up in the middle column. And I can click on it, the name, the title, and the middle column, and it pops up on the right.

How are we doing? Oh. I just did something. And I need to tell you what I just did. How we doing so far? Any questions?

Dani Pedrotti: We did have one question come up that asked does each collection explain its target audience?

Beth Pickett: No. You have to figure that out either by sending me an email, and I will tell you. Or watching it a lot. You'll pick it up pretty quickly when you watch it, especially the collections that are aimed at a bit of a younger audience, the middle school and high school. You can tell those pretty quickly. But there is not a description overall of the collections.

Dani Pedrotti: Thank you, Beth.

Beth Pickett: So it's more trial and error on that. Or, just shoot me an email and I can help you with that. OK.

So here's something to pay attention to. Here we are on the arithmetic subject page. I want to take you to English and show you what's there, but there is no way to get directly from the arithmetic page to the English page. So I think of this sort of like a Christmas tree with a star at the top and a string of lights, 13 lights going straight down to the bottom. If you're at the bottom, if you want to go to another string of lights, you have to go back up to the top.

So I'm going to click on the OTAN logo. It will take me back to the HippoCampus home page. And now, I can go to a different subject page. So we're going to go over to English and take a look there.

Dani Pedrotti: And Beth, we did have a request to show a grammar lesson when we're in English.

Beth Pickett: I'm just about to get into all the English stuff, so perfect. This is great. OK. So we have our own NROC developmental English collection. This is for students who are graduating high school. They need shoring up to be able to do credit level college English. And we do that pretty quickly in 10 units.

Now I've told you a few times that HippoCampus is based on video animation, simulation, interactive activities. Our own English collection is the one place on HippoCampus where you will find a PDF because each of our 10 units revolves around a reading area. What we've tried to do in our developmental English is it's an integrated approach.

And here's how it works. Students are introduced to a topic through a reading. Let's say, the topic sentence. And they read something, and they learn to spot a topic sentence in a reading. And then later when they go to writing, we ask them to write their own topic sentence.

So it's almost like the reading is sort of role modeling how to do it. And then they get to practice it in the writing. Now our installed English course actually has a feature, a writing center, where they can correspond with the teacher, write the paper in that software. HippoCampus can't do that.

HippoCampus is not tracking any student. Notice, we still have not logged in anywhere. We're on the OTAN home page, but it's free and open to the public, which also means it's not tracking any one student's activities. We're not big brother watching who's doing what. We don't know what any one particular student has done. That's not the purpose of HippoCampus. That's something for Ed Ready, which is a different webinar.

But anyway, I want to show you--for example, in this middle column now, we've got the 10 units of NROC developmental English. We've got the introduction, we can go here. Actually, what was I going to do? Oh, I was going to do the writing workshop.

So here's the writing workshop from unit one. You may notice that all the stages for each unit are the same. Introduction-- and this is the order-- introduction, pre-reading, reading, post reading, pre-writing, writing workshop one, writing workshop two, and then grammar in context. So let me go ahead and play just a little bit of this.

Video 6: Imagine it's the bottom of the ninth, two outs, and your favorite baseball team only has one more chance to win the game. Coach pulled you from the stands to bat. What do you expect to do?

You have a great imagination. But in reality, the odds of hitting a homerun on your first at bat are discouraging. Writing is no different. Success requires patience and commitment to write, read, and reread to create a polished final draft.

Beth Pickett: We're really teaching them about the entire writing process as we're developing their skills as writers. So I want to show you something in particular in one of the other collections. If you want straight on grammar, that would probably be-- of course, we have our own NROC collection. I'm back over on the left hand column right now. I'm going to go over to the Mount San Jacinto, which is a community college here in southern California.

And they have two of their instructors, Larry and Ted. So we kind of call this the Larry and Ted show. They do a wonderful job of presenting fundamental information on how to put together writing bits and pieces to create an actual paper. They call this course Crafting an Effective Writer: Tools of the Trade. And so I've clicked on the verbs and adverbs lesson from that middle column. Here we go.

Video 7: All right. Now let's take a look at verbs and adverbs. Verbs indicate an action or a state of being. And adverbs are going to modify verbs, adjectives, and even other adverbs. Without action verbs, your prose is going to seem lifeless. It's going to be pretty short and simple. So if we take a look at an example, you'll see how you can add to your verbs with adverbs. This particular sentence lacks energy. The seals got out of the water, moved across the deck, and made sounds at the spectators. So, how did they get out of the water? And how did they move? How "made" sounds?

I mean, all those are vague verbs. We can bring more action verbs into this. The seals leaped out of the water. They slid across the deck. They barked at the spectators.

Beth Pickett: In other examples from Mt. San Jacinto, they will show you red, cross outs, what you expect to see somewhat in an English paper. But they really break it down quite nicely, especially in those grammar lessons. In addition, this particular Mt. San Jacinto-- I'm going to take you to a new place here at Hippo which we haven't been. It's not hard to get to. I'm just scrolling down the page to what we call below the fold.

And you'll notice that there are two columns below the fold. On the right hand column, it says links. And there's a link here for something called the course reader for Crafting an Effective Writer: Tools of the Trade. And it's basically a free handbook. I clicked on that link, it opened a PDF-- a 90 page PDF-- in a new browser tab that goes along with this entire free set of presentations. So that is also available as a free resource to your students.

Not only do they have a free workbook, we have a free handbook for our Developmental English. And when I say our, I mean the NROC project. And that's over here on this left hand column below the fold. It's called the teaching English blog, but actually the blog a while ago was replaced with what we call these English foundation lessons.

These are HTML pages, but they correspond to the same 10 units for which you saw the videos earlier. And these deal with specific topics in reading and writing that may be of interest to your students. And in particular, if we're looking for grammar, we've got a listing here for prepositional phrases, subjects and verbs, end punctuation.

So let me click on end punctuation. It pops open a new browser window. It gives a bit of a lesson, and then there are several items we can click on to expand. Practical application, an example of how it's used, your turn to let the students practice a little bit of this, and then metacognitive questions with sample answers.

So that is a second option. Again, all of this is meant to find what works really well for your students. What is going to resonate with them? One student may really love the workbook from Mt. San Jacinto college. Another might like the foundation lessons from NROC. It's all good as long as they're learning the material. Let's see.

Dani Pedrotti: And we are coming relatively close to the end of the hour. I think there was an interest as well in understanding how to put multiple items into a playlist.

Beth Pickett: I will go through that really quickly because you're right. We are running out of time a little bit. I do want to show you, just in case-- I'm going to show you how to make a playlist. If you forget, also below the fold in the right hand column, there is something called-- it's a 4 minute video called How to Make a Playlist on HippoCampus.

OK. So until this time, I have not logged into HippoCampus. I'm just a random person out on the web, or maybe your student, or yourself, coming to HippoCampus to learn material. If I want to make a playlist and collect things that are saved, then I need an account. To do that, I need to go back up to that black navigation bar in the upper right.

I'm going to click log in. There are three tabs in this dialog box. The first is log in, the second is create an account. I already have an account, but if you want to create an account, this is where you would go. Be sure that you're on the OTAN branded HippoCampus before you create your account so that you can create what we call a child account of OTAN and not just the public HippoCampus, so that you can get the branding and no ads.