Good morning, everyone. We're going to give this just a few seconds. We do know that the webinar allows attendees to join the room one at a time, so it's like a funnel, and we need to allow time for you to get in the room. I will go ahead and start going over the general housekeeping, which I know you're all sick of by now, and I do apologize for that, but I will make it as short and swift as possible.

This meeting is being recorded. It will be available tomorrow on the vFair's platform and will stay available through the month of December. So you can go back and review it, you can share it with colleagues, print out the handouts if you weren't able to grab them before. Whatever you need, it'll be there through the month of December.

Your volume can be adjusted. You can turn it up or down in your system settings. The chat is enabled, and that'll be your way to communicate with attendees and panelists because you do not have the ability to speak.

Right now, I think we're going to-- I see a Q&A going, and I was just going to say, "Can we get resources through December, too?" Yes, I believe. That's what we're hoping for, is to keep them online.

So today, we're going to try to limit to the chat if at all possible. If you need to use a Q&A, go ahead, but they will monitor the chats. At the end, you will have an evaluation pop up, and all you need to do is select Continue to go ahead and fill that out. The evaluation is also on the session agenda. I think that's all we need to go over other than the chat.

When you start your chat, it defaults to panelists only. Please change that to all panelists and attendees. That way, others can see the questions you're asking. Otherwise, when they hear the answer verbally, it may not make sense to them unless they can see the context and the question that was asked to prompt that answer. I will post reminders of that in the chat.

So with that, we are ready to go ahead and turn it over to Marci England, who will do the introductions for her team. Marci?

Hi. Good morning, everyone. We're so excited you're here. We're glad you're here this morning to learn about what we've done at Corona-Norco Adult School to take our school beyond emergency remote teaching.

So first off, we're going to start with some introductions, and then I'll go through our little bit of housekeeping. And while I'm doing this, Kevin, can you manage the chat? Because we might need to put the link for our website in there. Thank you.

OK. So I'm Marci England. I am an ESL teacher and ESL program lead at Corona-Norco Adult School. I'm also the tech team lead. Then we have Kevin. Go ahead and introduce yourself, Kevin, then Christina, and then Colin will introduce themselves.

Good morning, everyone. My name is Kevin Belcher, and I am extremely fortunate to be an ESL and ABE teacher at Corona-Norco, as well as a tech team member.

Hi. I'm Christina Hyatt, and I'm an ABE math teacher and a member of the tech team.

My name's Colin Cordell, and I am an ESL teacher, as well as a member of the tech team.

Thank you, guys. These are the brains behind everything we do. Just a little background on our school because I know we have a large group here from varying areas. Our school is located in Southern California.

We are the Adult Education Program for our school district, Corona-Norco Unified School district. Last year, we served over 3,600 students, and we have programs basic education, GED preparation, high school diploma, ESL, CTE, and fee-based classes. So I think we're kind of like a medium-sized adult school in Southern California.

So the format for our presentation today is a little different. We wouldn't be the tech team if we weren't thinking out of the box in a techie way. So we are going to talk all about the tech team today, and we're going to talk about what we've done to build technology at our school. So the format today is a website.

Instead of actual PowerPoint slides, we've created a website. And we decided to create this website for you so that you would have as many resources as possible at your disposal. And so, as we go through our presentation, we each have a different page that we'll be presenting on our website. You will see links, and you'll see images, and you'll really get a very good in-depth look at what we're doing at our adult school.

And our hope is that you'll be able to look at what we're doing and that will trigger some ideas for you, and you'll be able to implement practices that work at your school. So there are no slides. There's just a website, and you can just feel free to look all over the website and then hop back to where we are on the screen share however you want to do that, but that's our format for today.

I will be managing the Q&A, and so after-- well, Kevin is right now. He's doing an awesome job. And then when I'm finished presenting, I'll be managing the Q&A, and I think we'll go through each section and then pause to answer questions because we really do want this to feel interactive, and we'll do our best to answer all the questions that we can. Anything that we didn't address in this session, our emails are at the bottom of every single web page. You can just email us, and we'll reach out to you with whatever we can do to help support you.

So I want to show a quick video that shares kind of where we feel we're at. This will kind of give an explanation to what we, as a tech team-- and probably our school and everyone can relate to this video. And it really works to the analogy that we're using in our presentation today. Bear with me for one minute and 20 seconds, and I want you, as you watch this video, to just think about how this applies to your adult school and what life has been like for the last few months.

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Thank you, Colin. Thank you. So we really feel like we've been through a storm, right?

There are always storms in our, life and what we're going to talk about today is, really, how we prepare for those things. We grow, we support throughout, and then we build to sustain and persist. And I hope your takeaway from this is really a mindset of building systems that are created not as band-aids not as temporary solutions, but as long-term things that can hold your school together for a long time.

These strategies that we're going to share, we really took on this mindset of building a system that can lay out and support our school for a long time. So we want to be that big forest. So I want to start by talking about the foundation, and so my section is on preparing the soil. And our school has been really fortunate in that we already had a tech team in place, and we had a school focused on innovation.

We participated in the DLAC Academy. We had adult basic education already set up a hybrid fashion, and we had options for students as a WASC school to increase online and distance education. So we already had this mindset or the foundation built. So as we're going through our presentation, I want you to understand that we already had a rich soil. We were set up for success.

Depending on where you're at your school, that's something that you can do. You might be in the preparing the soil or the growth. You might be at a different place on that continuum.

So a couple of things we needed to do right away is we need to look at data and understand how we could build sustainable processes for our school to go online. That's what we're going to talk about today. So the first thing we did was we collected data.

We did a student technology need and desire survey. And then we also did data collection for our staff. What are their technology needs, and what are their desires? We needed to understand how are staff going to be teaching our students using cell phones or laptops. And the only way to do that is to not make assumptions but to ask the students.

What are you doing? That's perfect to share that. Thank you, Colin. What are you doing, how are you doing, how can we support you, how are you managing at home with your children, how is your family. So really collecting a lot of information because the information takes away the assumptions and helps us make informed decisions.

The next thing we did was we really investigated what makes a successful distant learner. These are students that are self-motivated, they work independently, they have strong study skills and strong organizational skills. So that might not necessarily sum up all of our adult students. So we had to consider how do we build support for those that don't have those required skills.

And my colleagues are going to talk about a lot of these pieces in their sections. I'm just going to give a little overview of everything. So we looked at data on persistence for students. And then, we also turned to teaching the tech skills necessary for online learning. And in our ESL department, we had already been teaching digital literacy, civics, objectives.

So then on the other side, we needed to look at what makes a successful distant learning teacher. So we got a lot of feedback from teachers that a few things that were essential was consistent communication. They needed timely, consistent, and transparent communication. They were feeling insecure. They were feeling unsettled, and they needed to know what's going on, what can I expect, what is this going to look like.

And sometimes, the answers were, "I don't know." But just knowing that we didn't know and that helped everyone knowing that that communication was open, and just saying, "I don't know, but we're going to get through this." So then the next thing they needed was a lot of training. And Christina is going to talk about some of the training, and Kevin is going to talk about the training. They needed a ton of training, and so we helped manage that for them.

And then, we also created support systems like hubs of information and teacher autonomy with the training. Instead of saying you need to do this, this, and this, there's so little in our life that we can control right now. So we gave them autonomy. Here's a bunch of training. Please pick what's best for you.

So then the next section that we worked on was consistency and support. We made sure that all students were undergoing the same orientation, that all students had access to technology, and that all our classes looked and felt the same, both with synchronous and asynchronous learning. We built digital homerooms so that there was a classroom, a place to go, a landing place for these students. And then, we created similar learning platforms, similar delivery system, like Zoom. And then used specific program-wide asynchronous learning. So these are some of the things that we used to prepare the soil or to be ready to move to this distance learning format.

At the bottom in green, you'll see that there are some deliverables there. These are things that we used. Colin already shared our distance learning survey. And for teachers and for students-- Colin, can you share a picture of what the virtual homeroom looks like?

This is one of our teachers' virtual homerooms. It's amazing. When a student enrolls, they would get this link and go to this room where they can see all this information. They get an email from their teacher, and they already know, OK. I am in for some great learning. I'm in for success.

We hop back to the web page. We also used this kind of a design for tips for learning from home, like how helping students be good online learners. We really worked to build that foundation. So next, we're going to have Kevin share about the growth that our school underwent.

Thank you so much, Marci. As we're thinking about growth, we're going to take a look in three key areas. Talking about student growth, the tech infrastructure that we built and developed and continue to develop, as well as our developing Corona-Norco Adult School work culture, changing from the inside out.

But before we begin, by looking at student growth, I want to bring an idea to the forefront. As we were going from brick and mortar classes to blended learning and then to the distance learning that we currently have, one thing was always on my mind. And it's going to sound silly to say, but it is actually one of the guiding principles of the English language proficiency standards. The first one, actually. And it says that all English language learners have the potential to meet state-adopted challenging academic standards.

Now, this is, I think, one of the simplest of the guiding principles. But it's something that I also think is one of the most complicated, too. The idea is that all our students, all English language learners, have the potential to succeed. No one's left behind, and I think that that is a concept that we can bring that it has to be brought to the table in this transition. That we all have the potential to succeed in bringing distance learning to our students and creating a more equitable situation for them.

And so with this, this mindset that I think we can term a growth mindset here is something that we really emphasize with not just our students, but our staff as well. And one of the ways that we bring this in with our students is by having deliberate focus on incorporating growth mindset lesson plans and activities for all levels. Teaching, sharing with our students that the brain is malleable. That its growth is the product of our actions, of our habits, and of our practiced behaviors. That no matter what our prior experience is, how old we are, that we can grow our minds and learn new skills.

This is foundational for approaching the challenges of learning new technologies. And one of the things that-- again, jumping back to this guiding principle here, what makes it possible for all students, all teachers, everyone to succeed is scaffolding, right? Having various opportunities in growing and going up and up the ladder here.

The next thing that we focused on, after building our growth mindset-- and you'll see on our website that we also have a Padlet that shows one of these examples of our lesson plans for the growth mindset that you can use. Is we needed to develop a tech infrastructure that went from our ABE blended learning program, which we developed with OTAN as part of their Digital Leadership Academy, and developed that into distance learning. Now, as we know, the need for more flexible and individualistic learning, it's not born out of the pandemic.

In fact, when we gave out survey to our students in 2018 thinking about how we can better help our students achieve success, they said that they wanted more opportunities for co-enrollment in courses like high school equivalency and GED classes. They wanted more flexibility for their busy schedules, and they wanted more individualized instruction.

These are all features that we have today with our current distance learning. And these are all values that are going to remain with us as well once we are past this pandemic and we bring in more brick and mortar and blended learning classes again. And so, keeping these values with us of opportunities for co-enrollment, flexibility, and more individualized instruction, is going to be key, and it's something that we're looking forward to in the future, too.

When we switched to distance learning, however, it felt like something that once seemed impossible became a reality for us overnight. But new websites and distance learning technologies, they sprung up from everywhere. From agencies like OTAN, KALPRO, COSIS, to educators throughout the state that work together to share where they are at, and so much of the work that we were able to create is the product of that collaboration.

When we first switched over to the distance learning program, we first incour-- I don't want to give the impression that we knew what we were doing straight from the get-go. We didn't. We encouraged our teachers to do what works.

And what arose from that is that allowed us to see what strategies answered the call. And even more than that, it showed us what was possible. And the result of this is we now have these classes that have the values of more individualization and flexibility in our classes that's going to carry past just this distance learning pandemic time.

Another thing is that we also had to develop new systems that expanded from the normal work of LMS' that we were used to, and into something bigger in terms of equity and in terms of making devices available to fill the gaps in equity. Over the years, what we have done is we have focused on on-campus technologies. So from laptops that are available at all of our campuses and partner locations to establishing a tech team to provide student-teacher support along the way. But the pandemic required us to rethink these practices for distance learning. So laptops became teacher devices, and workstations and different systems were established to disperse laptops, Chromebooks to students quickly, securely, and effectively.

On our website, you'll see several deliverables that we have throughout the website. But particularly on the growth website here, you will see our process for deploying the laptops, as well as certain forms like the student agreement form and various other processes of this. And I want to take a moment to say that this came out of a need for equity. Our students needed to have the devices in order to succeed in taking distance learning classes.

But when we started it, we had no clue where to even begin. And if it weren't for OTAN, for North Orange Continuing Ed, for Escondido Adult School, and for many others who took the time to share their processes with us and to share even just ideas of what to do and what this would entail, this wouldn't be possible. And so we're very thankful to that, to their collaboration with us in that regard as well. And so we're hoping to share that back here today.

This process has allowed many students to connect and to complete their work. We know that the goal has always been to meet students where they are. And I believe that the pandemic and going into distance learning has really helped us realize that goal. That now, we have students-- I know for myself, I currently have a student that is pregnant, and she would not be able to attend right now if she didn't have a computer and be able to take the class from a distance. I think that we can each think of a few stories, too, of students who are able to attend today that might not have been able to attend in a normal brick and mortar format.

The last section of our infrastructure that we really looked into was something that we've been working on for years but has shown a new light for us. And that is our digital badges. So digital badges are, for the lack of a longer explanation, digital certifications. And it shows where the student is in the process of completing their high school equivalency, their ESL program, and such.

We have been working on digital badges for three years. Developing the process for creating the badges and for delivering them to our students. However, today, I think that it has never been more important to deliver those in online format. So we are continuing to work together to develop the process to further connect our students to the digital certificates more quickly and seamlessly.

Now, the final section for our growth is that we needed to-- I think that one of the most underrated and maybe overlooked characteristics of this switch into blended learning, to distance learning that we're in right now, is the work culture, and developing a growing work culture that is collaborative, that is built on strengths. So we've already have had monthly programs and PLCs and professional development where our teachers have the opportunity to share ideas, insight, best practices with other teachers. However, when we went into the pandemic, this became of the utmost importance.

First off, we realized that our normal sharing of best practices, that was at the PLCs, of course, but also developed around the copier and the coffee maker, they shift into an online environment. We actually had a kind of a professional development day where each tech team member shared their strength. Whether that was for Mine, Padlet, Canvas, Google Classroom, Zoom techniques, you name it.

And the energy that was felt with our teachers back in March was something absolutely inspiring. That our teachers, when faced with the enormous challenge of going online, they dug and they connected with each other, and said, "OK, I don't know this yet. I don't know how to use Zoom yet," and kept that growth mindset.

And along with professional development from the wide range of agencies, I've already said before, too, we were able to, I think, overcome some of the hurdles by coming together, developing our skills, and sharing those back amongst our teachers. So these were three of the ways that we grew as a school the most. By focusing on a growth mindset, by developing the appropriate infrastructure of technology, and by continuing to work and develop our work culture.

And before I switch it over to Christine Hyatt to share how we supported those programs along the way, I think, Marci, we're going to pause for a few minutes for questions?

Yeah. Kevin, we have a couple of questions. Actually, more than a couple of questions about digital badging. Would you feel comfortable to talk just a couple of minutes, maybe open the Padlet-- maybe Colin can open the Padlet for digital badging, and just specifically share an overview of how students earn digital badges and when.

Maybe give us the short elevator talk on digital badges and where someone could start. We could do a whole presentation and have done an entire presentation about badging, but can you just sum that up in two minutes?

Yeah.

It's just the important than ever now that everyone's online.

Absolutely. And so I think that the elevator pitch of this would be that the digital badge is a digital certificate that is filled with data. It shows what the student has accomplished.

So for example, if they have their full completed ESL program digital badge, it explains what did they do in order to complete that, the CASAS scores that they achieved in order to complete this. And these are badges, certificates that they're able to possess, as well as share electronically on social media, as well as, more importantly, in my opinion, with employers. And it shows what they have completed, as well as it can also show where they are going to. So for example, if they've completed only up to a high intermediate level of ESL, that they are working towards the completion of their ESL program.

Thank you, Kevin. Thank you, Kevin. Colin, can you show the Padlet really quick one more time?

We put these resources. These are available to everyone if you'd like to have some more information. This is actually a resource page that we put together for our staff and to help support students in the transition and the understanding of digital badging.

Almost everyone is participating in digital badging in some way, shape, or form. This just helped us articulate that connection to our students and how what they were doing could show up in the form of badges and how they're collected in the data. So everyone has access to this. It's available through the website at the link right there. So right there, thank you.

OK. So we're going to go ahead and move forward. We have a couple of more questions, but I'm going to pause, and we'll answer those in the right spots about more information about our tech team, and more information about the structure of our classes. So Christina is going to talk a little bit more about tech team, and then Colin will talk about classes and address those questions. So, Christina, can you tell us about support and how we build habits?

Thank you, Marci and Kevin. You know, before I start, I do want to say the most important key for us has been the support of an amazing administration. We have fabulous administration at our school. We have amazing administration through our school district. We fostered that relationship, and so we've been really fortunate to reap some of the rewards of just top-down, fabulous structure at our school.

So now that our seeds been planted and we saw this really rapid growth, we quickly realized that we were going to need some supports to hold up our growing program. And the purpose of the support we provide is to sustain the growth we've made and to prepare for all the future growth that's yet to come. And so we've provided many types of support, but on my site here, I just wanted to go over three of them. Building hubs of information, providing tutorials for staff and students, and the creation of the IT team.

So before, right? Can we just call it before? Are we far enough into it yet? I don't know.

But before, our school, we tried so many different ways to create a centralized place for information. And suddenly, disaster struck, and now we had a need. All of the sudden, everyone needed that information we've been trying to get them to before.

And we started off with the Google Doc. We thought this is easy. Everybody knows how to use Google Doc. And the Google Doc started to collect the links we needed them to have, the tutorials that we wanted them to have. And then later as it got bigger and a little bit messier, we started organizing it, putting some graphics on it, putting stuff into tables to try and make it more accessible.

But we quickly outgrew that, too. So we realized we needed something more permanent. Something that would grow as we grew because this isn't going away. I think that's the whole point of what we're talking about. That this is just beyond the emergency. That this is going to continue, right?

So our Google Site was born. And it's much like the one you guys are looking at now. And if you click here on the tutorials, you'll get your own links to how to create tutorials as well. I believe we have our Google Site linked under Kevin's page on Growth.

One of the things that I've loved the most about the Google Site was that it can grow and change with us like I mentioned before. As we build more supports, they get housed on this site. One of the things that's come up for me as the ABE teacher is I have three new ABE teachers working with me, and I'm constantly getting asked, where is that again? Where did that go?

And so I created a Google document specifically for the ABE teachers and hid it on our Google Site. Only the ABE teachers have access to it. And now when they ask, where did that go? I say, remember we linked it on the Google Site. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's right.

A second thing I love about our Google Site is that now when a teacher asks, like I said, where is that? It's always the same answer, right? You can find it on the distance learning resource site.

And the final hurdle was making sure that every teacher knew where to find the distance learning resource site. So, luckily, our IT worked with us, and we were able to link this on every teacher's home page. So they always have access. It seems small in retrospect, but ahead of time, it was big that we created this space for teachers to have the information they need and put it in a place where everyone can find it.

The second hub of information for us was our tech team, and Kevin kind of talked about this subject expertise. So each of us do have strengths. And early on, we identified who would be most useful at certain tasks, and we work to those strengths. In our PLC, we chose the topics that were most relevant to the staff according to the expertise. Well, now, we can perform most of the tasks.

It's really nice to know who's going to be the best one at that. And being able to do that has allowed us to divide the work more evenly, alleviate the feeling that, Ugh, doing all of it.

And it's also helped create trust among each other and created this cohesive team that I know that if I give a task to one of my team members, because it's playing to their strength, they're going to do it way better than I might have done it. Or if they give me a task, the same thing. I think all of us will say, too, that our favorite thing each week is when we have a tech team meeting because it's where we get to have this meeting where we're innovating, and we're serving the people we love.

The next thing we had to consider when it came to hubs of information was our students. So we have three ways that we disseminate information to students. Kevin talked about one of them, our learning management system.

Every student has a learning management system where the teachers can post the most important information. Because the teachers are really that point of contact. And so if we give the teachers the information and they get it up on the learning management, now, all students have that access. Another access point for our students is our website where we try to design it so that students have the most relevant information up top, and can get to what they need with the fewest amount of clicks possible.

And then the third one was Padlet. So at the time of the shutdown, several of our teachers stepped up in such a huge way and created these Padlets with emergency resources. And the one I've shared here was a resource for students for food, for housing, for jobs, for government resources, right? The things that students needed the most.

And I'm so grateful for this because the times when students had a need, I don't have to go searching. I can just share the Padlet that's on my learning management system. But back to the earlier point, right?

Finding the place where it houses. So we've really, really thought very hard about where do these things go, where do we want to put them, where will the most people have access to them. And so we continue to grow our Google website and build it to meet the needs of the teachers as we go along.

The second support that we added were countless tutorials. So little side story. My dad's a repairman. He can fix just about anything, but he lives 40 miles away from me.

So when something breaks, the phone call usually goes something like this, "Dad, it's broke. I need help." And he says, "Well, I can't see it." I say, "OK. Well, let me send you a picture. I'll send you a picture."

And then I'm on the phone, and I say, "Did you get the picture?" And he says, "Well, no because I'm on the phone with you. I can't look at the picture," right? You can imagine these calls. How they continue with my technology-challenged 80-year-old dad.

And after COVID hit, well, him and my mom tell me all the time his least favorite thing is repair by phone. And now, in this time of COVID, I kind of get what he's talking about, right? Because it is so difficult to explain over the phone, click here, type this email with this letter, especially when our students sometimes don't have English as their first language. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but how much is a video worth? Tutorials have become our best friend, and now when a teacher or a student is asking for help, we can just create a tutorial and send it off.

A couple of years ago, we came across Iorad, and I absolutely love it. One of the things I love the best about it is the flexibility. And so, Colin, if you'll click on the Iorad tutorial, I'll show you a few features. So one of the things where you see Try It, the student can actually choose to go through it as an interactive, just view the steps as a list, they can watch it as a video, or they can print it out for future reference.

Another thing I love is the number of languages it translates into. I started to count, and then I thought, I don't have this kind of time. But how helpful is that? That your student can have it in their language, so they understand.

So we'll go through this tutorial. This is a really short one. It's teaching students how to get on my Canvas page.

The first step is to open Google and click Search. Type mycnusd and press Enter. Click Corona-Norco Unified School District. Click myCNUSD. Type username, not the entire email, and press Tab.

You can type anything, Colin. Yeah.

Type password you created at school. Click Sign In. Click Bookmarks. Click Canvas Adult Ed SAML. That's it. You're done. Now, you try it.

One thing I love about this tutorial is when you create it, you don't have to do the words. The system automatically creates the dialogue, but you can go in and edit the dialogue to say exactly what you want it to say. And another thing that's really useful about it is that I could go back and change this tutorial.

I can add more steps. I can take steps out. Every time the process changes, because processes change, I don't have to go back to the beginning then make a whole new tutorial. I can just go in and edit the one I need with the additional or changed steps.

This year, one of the ways we are using the Iorad is when a student calls requesting help with registering online, it's extremely difficult. OK. Well, you need to know your email. You need to go to this site.

But instead, we can just send them an email. With a tutorial, they can walk through the process. The link they need is in the tutorial so they can get right there immediately. Problem solved.

So if you're interested in learning more about Iorad, on my deliverables at the bottom, I do have a video showing you how to do it. It says, "Be an expert in five minutes." It really did just take me that long to become an expert. It's a very short learning curve.

I think that's their whole model, right? We're going to sell this product to you because people are going to learn faster how to do what we need them to do. They do have a free version, and then they also have a discount pricing for educators if you're interested.

The other two tutorials that we've used this year were Zoom and Screencastify. We were lucky enough that our district purchased it for it, but even if they hadn't, the creating of the tutorials is completely free with both of these interfaces. Again, back to trying to explain something in words takes forever. But now, we can just create a short video or a longer video to explain it.

And so with my students this year, I've noticed some of them are getting lost in campus. I can tell because they're not doing the right activities in the right order. And it's been such a powerful tool to log in and create a screencast of what they should be clicking on. I don't even do the dialogue for them. It's just click here, click here, click here. And the next week I look, and sure enough, the student's back on track and doing the right activities.

It's such a non-threatening, easy way to help students see what they should be doing and where they should be, as well as for teachers. And as Kevin mentioned before, when we did all those trainings at the beginning of COVID, the ones that teachers we felt needed the most, because they were on Zoom, they all got recorded, and we were able to link those onto our site.

The third thing I wanted to talk about is our IT team. As we continue to move past the emergency, we saw the need for an in-house IT team. Now, I'm not going to fool you. You see our faces, right? It's the same four people.

But now, we're wearing new hats because we're serving a different population, and we're taking on different roles because now our students have devices, and they need help. And so we had to bring in additional help from other people to get students going in the right direction. And what we've really enjoyed is this new challenge for us. This new thing that we can take on.

So, part of our in-house team goals were to give student tech support, and we've linked on here a form that students fill out whenever they need help. And we try and get back to them within 24 hours with the help they need, right? We've had some fun, interesting requests like I think we had-- a woman described her problem is, I have a two-year-old child.

I think we can all relate to that, right? Marci, I think, agreed to handle that, so I appreciate that. But it doesn't matter what they say in there, or sometimes they don't even say anything. Each call that comes in, we handle it with respect and as if it were our own family member asking for help.

And then lastly, the IT team started using individualized teacher support. So it wasn't just our students that were now struggling to get online, how does this work, what's the best system for this, but our teachers as well. So each teacher is assigned a tech person, and we regularly check in with the teachers to help them navigate the new world of online learning and teaching. And I think Kevin and Marcy are going to share a couple of experiences they had on how supporting teachers has led to student success.

Thanks for the opportunity to share a little bit, Christina. I think that, as we've shared, our teachers have been absolutely nothing less than inspiring at how much they have been able to accomplish, their attitude going into this. I want to talk very quickly about three teachers in particular that I think absolutely show this, and to our Sylvia Philobos and Bernadine Pohlers

Both Sylvia and Bernie have been teaching for, I believe, over 40 years each, and they are absolutely incredible. I personally have learned so much from them. And when they had to switch to online, I think it was extremely overwhelming. But instead of saying, "No, this is it. This is not my field," they dug in. And they were they asked us for help, and we were able to find ways to make the online classroom really bring out the same values of the classroom that they had in brick and mortar.

Now, when we jump into their class, it's absolutely outstanding. And they're jumping back and forth different pages of Google Classroom, sending out resources via remind, you name it. And it's absolutely amazing.

The other teacher that I want to mention is Lisa Craig. And although she didn't need our help the same way in the beginning, she absolutely epitomized what turning the overwhelming emotion of so much to do, of so much to learn. She turned it into products and resources and encouragement that has been felt, I think, at every single level of our school.

She is the one who created the emotional resources not just for our staff but for our students as well and updates it regularly. She has just absolutely-- I think that that change of also bringing that back and creating these resources and products, I think it captures the spirit, too, of collaboration that has really been energized by the challenges that we've been facing. And the teacher support is something that it's-- I'd like to think of it as not just something that happens just between our IT and our teachers, but also amongst teachers, by themselves, that I know pour countless hours into helping each other and encouraging each other along the way.

I'm going to tell a really, really super short story, but we had a teacher that, a year ago, wasn't checking district email or responding via email or using any email or communicating. I'm the EL Civics Coordinator. And this teacher has made such a turnaround that she not only is a communicator all the time, checking her email, and using Zoom and technology but teaching her students as well.

And about two days ago, I got an email from a student that said, I'm struggling with this. My schedule needs to be changed. If you could please change my schedule and move me to this class, that would be great. Thank you. And then signed the student name.

And she actually was sending me that because that's the work product for the civics objective that we were working on. But it was so articulate and so well done and sent to the right person at the right time that I emailed the teacher, and I said, just so you know, I'm going to transfer this student. So the communication was spot on, so good, that the student almost actually really did get transferred, even though that was part of her assessment. So that came from a teacher that went from not even communicating online and barely even texting. So it's there.

And just as a final wrap-up, at the bottom are all my deliverables. So I did post that Padlet made by Lisa, and all those resources that she shared with our staff are the same ones that are there. And you can see it's-- I even love at the very end, it's giving back to the community, right?

What can you do? You can give blood. They're in dire need. So it didn't just cover what we need but what we can do to serve.

And then you've got the technology support request form. When you click on that, it'll let you make a copy if you're logged into Google, and then those tutorials and information on Iorad if you want to learn more.

Thank you, Christina. We have a few questions about the hub of information page. I think that that's referring to our Google Site. Colin, can you share the Google Site that we have linked? Why don't you share the Google Site that we have linked here?

So that's linked for you. It is a sample for all of the participants. So all of the tutorials are available for you. A lot of this stuff we got, you can see OTAN. It is a great resource. That's always where we go first to our OTAN technology needs.

There are some things on here that we can't share just because of student confidentiality or teacher confidentiality. Colin, go ahead and click on Taking Attendance. Some of our systems there-- this is actually a screenshot of what we have available on there, but we couldn't have that. We can't share that because it's got too much student information there. So if you have specific questions about that, we can answer those individually.

So that link is there for you to look at. And that hub of information, we put it on our district website. So when teachers log in to the district website, it actually sits right on our district website. So they can just click it right there. And then there was a question about the virtual homerooms. And then, Christina, questions about Iorad versus Screencastify, and then paid versus free for Iorad.

So I think that Iorad and Screencastify do different things in my mind, even though Iorad can be a video, I would use Iorad because of the interactive method. That I'm going to get the student to go in and physically have that kinesthetic experience of how do I do this on my own, in hopes that they'll remember it when they do it the next time on their own. Whereas, Screencastify is more of a video. They're just seeing what I'm doing. They're not actually interacting.

So I use them for different things, for different students, for different populations. When I'm doing IT with my ESL students, I'm more likely to use an Iorad tutorial than I am a Screencastify. And right now, we are currently only using the free version, so I can't speak to the paid version except I know with the free version, you get two tutorials for free with everything in it.

We have run into, a little bit of a problem with the free. Not all the frills and bells included is being able to mask student information so that we're keeping information private. That's been the biggest thing, but if your tutorial doesn't have any private student information in it, then it's not an issue.

Thank you, Christina. You're the pro on that. OK. And then to talk about the virtual homerooms, does anyone want to address that? Or do you guys want me to talk about that?