All right. I see people coming in. Welcome. I hope you all had a nice filling lunch. I know I did. And just to make sure that everybody is coming into the correct session, you are here for digital literacy, the pandemic, and racism-- a cascade of inequitable events demanding action from adult education with Jen Vanek. My name is Marjorie. I'll be the tech host for today. We're still getting a little some people in the room, so I'll give it a few more moments before I start here. And I hope you're all having a great session so far. 

All right. Looks like the number of people coming in is starting to die down, so I'll go ahead and start with my housekeeping here. The webinar is being recorded. And recorded webinars will appear on the VFairs platform as soon as they're available. I did see a message saying that the ones from days 1 and 2 are available. So go check that out. Everybody in this webinar, you're all muted, except for me and Jen. If you can't hear for any reason or if your system or if your volume is too loud or too quiet, you can adjust any of that by going to the audio settings, which is in the bottom left-hand corner of your Zoom window. 

If you want to chat with anybody in the webinar today, you can do that by selecting chat at the bottom center of your Zoom window. It's defaulted to all panelists. But to chat to everybody, make sure you change To field to all panelists and everyone. If you have any questions for Jen today, go ahead and enter those in the Q&A section so that they're not lost in the chat. In order to make your screen smaller, if you want to get to your desktop for any reason, in the upper portion of the screen, it'll say, your viewing so and so screen, you can click the down caret in the View Options pane and Exit Full Screen. And if you don't Exit Full Screen for some reason, you may need to just drag your cursor into the upper-- one of the upper corners, and click and drag to make that window smaller. 

There is an evaluation that will open when I close the webinar later today. Just make sure you continue to get to that evaluation. And I'm going to go ahead and pass it on to Jen. 

Great. Thanks so much. I'll share my screen. And I think I'll just keep my video off if that is OK with you all. 

That's perfectly fine. 

OK, cool. And it's nice actually we have kind of a small, a smaller group here. So we'll be able to kind of pause and have some discussion on these ideas that I'm sharing here with you today. So just so I can get a sense of who is in the room, while I'm introducing myself, if you could please chat your organization and the type of work that you do, like an ESL teacher, ABE teacher, or ASE, that would be great. I would love to know if I've got teachers or admin, and what it is you teach. So if you could find the chat and add that information. And I am going to introduce myself. 

So my name is Jen Vanek. I'm Director of Digital Learning and Research at the EdTech Center at World Ed. And I do a lot of technical assistance and PD, a teacher education around digital literacy and technology integration, distance learning, blended learning. And one of the other things that you should know about me is that I live in Minneapolis, about half a mile away from the third precinct police station, which is where the police officer who killed George Floyd worked. 

So we've been aware of digital-- sorry-- of institutionalized racism in this city and segregation in the city of Minneapolis. My home is city of Minneapolis for a long time. And I just-- that episode really put a point on it and just kind of woke everyone up. And we're calling this a racial reckoning in this city. So that is how I came to this work. 

This presentation is actually an adaption of a paper that was written based on a conversation at CAEP, this past CAEP. The EdTech Center and Literacy Minnesota, specifically that the Northstar Digital Literacy Project, are the leaders of the Technology and Digital Literacy Strand at COABE And we decided to use our time at our strand session at COABE, conversation on how institutionalized racism, white supremacy, the pandemic, and digital literacy are impacting our learners. And so essentially, what happened is I worked then with Tom Cytron-Hysom, Rachel Riggs, and my colleague at the EdTech Center at World Ed, Alison Ascher Webber, to put together [AUDIO OUT]. 

So hopefully, it will be published, and I'll be able to share a PDF with you later. But until then, I wanted to use an opportunity to start throwing these ideas out [AUDIO OUT], and just to make sure-- just to see what others think of them. So like I said, I will be pausing and giving you time to-- I guess, we can have a conversation sort of through the chats. I'm happy to answer questions. I would love for you to express opinions about this. And we can deepen each other's understanding of these same issues and in our communities. 

So with that being said, I'll just move forward with this. So as I said in the 2020 CAEP digital literacy and technology integration strands meeting, this was a really strange times. And we really felt like, we couldn't ignore everything that was going on around the country, the fact that programs were operating completely remotely because of pandemic, and how we were all sort of grappling with finding a way forward after the much needed national racial reckoning, motivated by the surge of protest against white supremacy in the US after George Floyd was murdered, and I should say, not far from my house. 

These two events catalyzed many people to react to existing racial inequities and related economic, social, and education healthcare, other endemic disparities that are not like-- it's like the racial reckoning made these things impossible to ignore. So as a strand, we decided to convene to come to a shared understanding about our responsibility essentially as adult basic skills educators and try to understand what it would take, or try to understand the issue of digital exclusion of BIPOC communities and the learners that we serve. 

So here is what we wanted to know. How do digital inequities reflect and perpetuate racial and other disparities? And what strategies do you use, the people that work together in the conversation, to create an inclusive classroom or learning opportunities? So I'm just going to pause here for a minute so that you can reflect on these questions. And then ideally, even, I would love to see some responses in the chat to how you might even respond to either question one or to question two. So we'll just give you a few minutes to read and respond in the chat to either question one or question two. 

So it looks like Daniel has his hand up, but does that mean Daniel wants to actually respond by being unmuted? If that's the case, I'm fine with that. OK, maybe not. So please do answer there as you can in the chat. OK. They're starting to come in. Yeah, so access to digital resources and technology and disparity, absolutely. Unconscious bias of tech developers, yes. I totally understand what you're saying there. Yeah, that's great. Ensure access professional learning opportunities of colleagues, distributing laptops and hotspots, following-up-- yeah, so you're creating access that our broader institutions might not be facilitating. 

And you can be unmuted. If you want to raise your hand and actually voice some of what you're chatting, then it's absolutely fine. 

Internet access. So Crystal is saying that internet access is a problem, but that they're access to devices inequities. Unable to do classwork, yes. Consumption tends to be-- a lot of this is stuff that came up in our conversations. And what that says to me is that these are shared and deeply ingrained challenges that our learners typically face. 

So I'm noticing focus on digital literacy as a response. That's wonderful. So focus on digital literacy, advocacy around access learning. Great. That's great. So it'll be my pleasure now to expand on what you will have said and maybe share some of the approaches that might help you with your work going forward. 

So before I move any further, I just want to back and share a little bit of background information that I think sets the stage for this conversation. And this might be stuff you already know. In fact, many of you likely do. But it's a shared way to come together. 

So there's an interesting-- actually, my slides are already posted. I think a PDF from my slides has already posted. So you can get access to all of these resources. National Skills Coalition has an interesting recent paper on how workers of color are affected by digital skill gaps. And I just read this quote here that you see on the screen really resonated with me. "Workers of color are disproportionately affected by digital skill gaps. For example, Black workers comprise 12% of overall workers but represent 15% of the subset of workers who have no digital skills or 21% of those with limited skills." 

And you see other communities of color also seem to be disproportionately impacted by digital skills gaps. And these are folks who are employed and who have jobs. Similarly, just to add a layer to that, these reports-- These are some statistics drawn from the Digital US coalition's report. 

The EdTech Center @ World Ed leads the Digital US coalition. It's a coalition of policy organizations, very large employers, other non-profit organizations like ISTE. And together we are trying to create advocacy and an understanding of how to make it possible for every adult in the US to have access and digital skills. 

So what we know from this report, this report underscored how inequitable access to opportunities to develop actual foundational technology skills is and how this compounds existing disparities in educational and workforce outcomes for traditionally underserved or communities that have had more barriers. So for example 8 of 10 middle-skill jobs require digital skills, yet 18 million households in the US don't have broadband. 32 million adults identify as not having really deep internet or-- sorry, computer skills. And half of Americans are uncomfortable using these technologies. 

So if you're interested in the source for these data or these statistics, you can check out the digital skills coalition report, which is linked in the notes on the PDF that I put on the website. So it's a tough situation, where we're expecting a lot with respect to technology, but we're really hampering the possibility that everyone can have access to those jobs and succeed in those jobs. 

So further, this is California specific. The source for this is the Public Policy Institute of California. And we can see here that though most demographic groups have seen increases in broadband subscriptions at home, there's still a gap that persists for low-income households where people might have a little less education, or it might be more rural, or they might be African-American or Latino heads of households. 

And between 54% and 67% of these households had broadband subscriptions in 2017 compared to 74% of all households. Among the low-income households without broadband, 54% cited lack of interest and 25% cited affordability. And notably, these are the households that really rely on cell phones in order to gain information or study or do whatever they need to do to fully participate in economic, civic life or work, schooling, anything in this country. 

So I want to pause for a second. And you've heard some statistics. I want you to just reflect on some of the stuff that I've said and comment on how this aligns with your observation of the lived experiences of the learners that you support. 

Do you notice this is true? Is there something missing from these data, something that you've observed that you think is important to attend to? Do you notice that your learners are smartphone dependent? What do you what do you notice here? And again, you can unmute yourself or you can raise your hand to be unmute if you would like to comment. 

Pew has some really interesting data too. I believe it's like 54% of households with an annual income of $30,000 a year and less are smartphone dependent. I imagine there's a very strong overlap with the demographic of the student that ends up in our programs. So even smartphone use in rural areas. 

Right, and so Hillary is suggesting that this reliance on technology is maybe unintentionally excluding lower level ESL students. Yeah, and everybody trying to use the same Wi-Fi. So you might have access at home, but it might be inadequate to sustain all the needs of the family, working and studying together at home. Absolutely, yeah. Thanks for sharing those observations about how this is impacting you and your students. 

So the connection in the digital exclusion is one element of this. The other element of this that I want to share is the pandemic. So I came across this really interesting image on the left. It's actually a still screenshot of a short news clip that was published by NBC News this summer. Actually, there's a link to this here. 

But essentially, what you see here on the screen is a visual illustration of how digital exclusion has been compounded by the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. And then the economic, social, and health impacts of the pandemic have been especially harsh on those lacking digital skills and connectivity. So with so many tasks required for daily life being online, there's this inherent racism behind the digital skills gap that become undeniable as we observe the harsh penalties accruing to communities of color. 

And we know these gaps are directly affecting our students' ability to access and benefit from the services we provide. We know that. You all just chatted about that. But even more serious, I think, is to consider the overlap-- What you're looking at are three different maps of Chicago. And I'd like you to consider the overlap of the high incidence of COVID-19, which you can see on the far left on the blue map, and the digital deserts, which you can see highlighted in red on the map just to the right. 

This is a clip from CBS, a national news story. And again, you can link to it. You can see if you watch the minutes here where this comes out. And then I went a step deeper to figure out who was living in these areas where there are these digital deserts. And I found a map from the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning. This is the Chicago metro area. It's comprehensive so regional planning organization. 

And they took census data and mapped demographics of-- oh, gosh, you can't see it. For some reason, this map isn't showing up. It's showing up perfectly on my screen. Maybe if I stop for-- here we go. There we go. Oh, actually, sorry, I had an animation in there. 

So the left, again, is the COVID deaths. The one in the middle here, this is no internet. And then what you see here, these are neighborhoods that for the last sort of 70 years or 50 years have been traditionally African-American communities. So what I'm showing here I think is the shocking consequence of racially redlining access to broadband, where you can see these things overlapping nearly perfectly. 

So there's a lot of focus, I think, on digital exclusion in rural areas justifiably. The point here is that we can't neglect that or ignore the fact that there is also digital exclusion that appears to be aligned with the redlining that's been done around broadband infrastructure even in urban areas. And that tends to be more racially-- or have deeper impacts for communities where there are people of color at least in the Chicago area. 

I think National Digital Inclusion Alliance has similar maps showing assuming digital redlining in Cleveland and Baltimore and other neighborhoods. So this isn't just more than one city. This is something that's been documented in other places too. 

So again, I would like to pause and see if there are any questions. Wendy, actually, you just anticipated my question. I would love to know if you would have recognized this racially motivated redlining in your communities. And do please chat. So we see southeast sector of San Francisco is another place where this is happening. Any the other places? 

South Stockton. I want to note too, that even in a place-- like in Minneapolis, we have public Wi-Fi, public broadband. And this is definitely helpful, but the level of connectivity is nowhere near what is possible if you can afford to pay for one of the mid to higher tiers of, say, Comcast or one of the other providers. Even though there isn't an attempt at providing access, it is definitely not equitable if what is free is lesser and is not as useful, and if it's primarily people living in these redlined areas that are relying on it and it's not as good. Great. Thanks for saying that you recognize this is happening in your communities also. 

So now we get to the other part of this story or this narrative and this reality that we're all experiencing right now. So the murder of George Floyd, along with police violence against others in the Black community, as you know, led to widespread protests and civil unrest all around the country. While many issues around racism were discussed and highly visible in the protest, digital exclusion wasn't necessarily highlighted as a focus of any of this stuff. Yet, it's so interesting that it was through digital media the impact, I think, of the event in one place had really, really motivated spreading involvement in the protests all around the world. 

So while our field has talked passionately about racism and attendant are resulting in the inequities, there are areas where adult education has fallen short. And one of these, until recently, I think has been the deeply inequitable nature of access to technology and opportunities to develop digital access, and then how this affects the communities we serve. So I already see from the chat that you all are thinking deeply about this and have started to strategize and put into the process some programs and things to do to mitigate this. 

But we need to do more because we know from educational research on exclusivity that students who are marginalized or discriminated against-- not singularly, but there are generally multiple forms of exclusion and marginalization for these learners at the institutional level. So this is like the intersectionality of digital exclusion because we know that we have redlining that appears to be racialized because of where the boundaries are drawn. We know that we have exclusion in communities where people are living below a family sustaining wage. 

So it's not just one thing, and then, of course, all the other barriers that came into play to get in the way of our learners having had fulfilling and completely useful formal education before they came to us. So I really feel like digital exclusion plays across all of this. And so that's why it's important for us to think about it. 

So as we came together at COABE again, we came together to answer these questions because we know that we need to try to attempt to support equity in our work, and we know that our students face these barriers. And to do our best to respond to these realities, we need to think really creatively, but we need to operate on two levels simultaneously. So first, we need to dedicate ourselves to helping our students obtain digital literacy skills devices and online access, the access needed to decrease their marginalization and enhance the chances of success, both in and out of the classroom. 

But secondly, we also need to step up, and we need to advocate at all levels of government for equitable policies and spending to diminish the racial digital literacy and access gap. So in our planning for the conversation at COABE, that's how we arrived at these questions. We thought both of these things were really important to talk about. 

So there were certain themes that came out. And all hit each of these themes and how some ideas that were shared for how to address these issues. So the first big theme was around access and devices. So most adults in the US have access to mobile devices, but many low-income minoritized adults are smartphone dependent, lacking an internet at home. 

There's also a racialist element to this form of access, meaning being smartphone dependent. 82% of whites in the US own a desktop or laptop computer, but only 58% and 57% of Black and Hispanic respectively adults do. With access to broadband at home mirroring those statistics. This is Pew Research, which just shows right off the bat it's very easy to see that access itself is racialized. 

Also, a recent study on COVID-19-- a recent study that I was involved with on instructional shifts made in response to the COVID-19 pandemic showed that the most commonly identified barrier to learners continued participation in adult basic ed during the pandemic was in fact access to technology. Yet, only 38% of the respondents-- this is 800 respondents. 38% of those respondents reported that they had device-lending programs in place. And most programs that filled out the survey-- most of the participants reported relying on non-digital learning resources to some degree. 

So I think both of these points, the fact that less than half had lending programs and way more than half also used non-digital stuff, points to the need to ensure that all of our learning opportunities are flexible and free or low cost, and that programs need to start beginning to invest in lending programs if they haven't already done so. And it's heartening to see earlier in the chat that many of you wrote that you were doing that. So lending devices is super important. 

And actually the little screenshot you can see up here is an example of a clip from Dover. In Dover, they have this laptop loan agreement. And Dover, like many other communities across the US that has set up these programs, has great success in getting these devices back and having them treated well. And losing the technology has not been an issue. So that's the first strategy that was talked about. 

If any of you all have lending programs in place and you have resources that you've created like a laptop loan agreement or an inventory sheet or just media or resources that you use to run your lending program, if you have a link to that, I would encourage you to throw that in the chat right now just so that others can take advantage of the good work you've likely already done. 

So the next really important thing to do to support access is to share information about existing deals. The best place to find a recent list of deals is on the National Digital Inclusion Alliance on their free and low-cost plan list. And the link is here. Again, you can get it in the slides. They're are on the website. 

This stuff is a really good place to start. But I want to say that a lot of these low-cost plans are slightly problematic because you don't always get the speed and the bandwidth that you need in order to do something like a Zoom class. So it's really important that when teachers share information about plans to learners that you investigate ahead of time exactly what students are going to be able to get with that. And make sure that the instructional resources you're requiring for your class align with what is available. But do check out NDIA's list. 

Again, so like I said, these free plans or the reduced cost plans are somewhat problematic. This strategy of tier flattening where they only offer the lowest speeds is really a problem to pay attention to. Let's see. And then also, of course, referring learners to where there are public hot spots that they can go to is another strategy here. 

So one other thing that I wanted to point out with device lending that I forgot is that I heard of an excellent example-- of a few examples of people, actually of programs or community college programs using CARES Act funding to support acquisition of devices and access. So that's just one thing. I think probably all of that is gone, but if there ever is another-- if anything ever comes out of the federal Congress again around economic support around the pandemic, explore to see if it's possible to leverage any of that funding to help adults secure devices and access. 

So then finally, this final area of access I want to talk about is all around building partnerships. This is maybe one of the most powerful things you could do in order to support access. Partnerships are needed with funders and community-based organizations who might also be adults with basic skills needs and in need of access. 

An excellent example of this was shared in our discussions at COABE. In Baltimore, there's a nonprofit called Dayspring Programs whose mission is to support unhoused children and families. Dayspring partnered with several innovative partners including a cooperative internet service provider and a workforce and business development organization. These partners created a new initiative called Digi Baltimore with the goal of increasing access to the internet for families with school-aged children so that they have a place to study when social distancing forced schools to close, yet they were living in places where there was no internet or definitely couldn't come to a public place. 

So the thing that is cool about this partnership-- and you can read more about it in the link on the slides. But the diversity of this partnership, I think, suggests a really creative solution for boosting access and also suggests that this shouldn't fall squarely on the shoulders of just the education providers. Business partners need to be brought in, other CBOs need to be brought in. And these public private collaborations and partnerships are really important in times when we're all so stretched. There are only so many public dollars available to support this work. 

Another interesting example is the Chicago Citywide Literacy Coalition, which has worked for many years to boost access to technology and by-park communities in Chicago through the mayor's office and with the state of Illinois policy leadership. And so this is a an example of multiple municipal and state collaborating together in order to try to make this access work. So broad partnerships rather than just partnerships within one sector or just a group of CDOs coming together tend to be able to exploit the leverage across different funding sources and are really creative ways to move forward. 

And I just recently actually heard of a good example from California. The California Department of Social Services is planning to send laptops to lend at CalFresh and to CalWORKs participants. I'm wondering if anybody has heard any of that. Have you heard about this CalWORKs initiative with the California Department of Social Services? And if you have any more information about that, about how that's been working, I think you could throw an observation in her. I think people would be really interested in hearing about it. 

So let me pause for just a second and see if there are any more questions or any other-- I noticed the chat has been very active with work that's happening around the state of California, which is just great. I would love it if you could continue to chat examples of ways you support access. And also, let me just pause to see if anybody has any questions or give you a sec to add some information to the chat. 

OK. Well, let's push on then. So the second theme that came out of the responses to the questions that we discussed was in the area of-- oh, sorry, this is just one building partnerships. Sorry. I've got a few more things to say about building partnerships. There is a new model here that we're working to share and support through our EdTech Center, and that is of the Digital Navigator. 

So digital navigator services are new delivery model for providing not only access to technology but also access to support using that technology. And what often happens in a Digital Navigator program is that a social service provider or an employer or even a public business would have a digital navigator service where there might be device lending and actual support for figuring out how to use it. And that these services all happen in the process of the learner doing whatever it is they were going to be doing when they go to that spot. 

So a classic example of a digital navigator service would be, let's say, a workforce development CBO that has somebody coming in for maybe get access to unemployment insurance or finding support with career exploration and job search. And in the process, the Digital Navigator steps in and says, hey, what's your access like, do yo need devices, do you have questions? And then through that conversation, the participant or learner is then empowered to actually make better use of the services they went in to receive because they now have access to some support and the digital access to actually accomplish the tasks. 

So we have active pilots of digital navigator services in California, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nebraska, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and DC. We have more coming online. And I hope that you'll be looking to read about some of this stuff as we're studying it and are able to provide some new scenarios and actually user manuals, user guides about how you can set up your own digital navigator service. 

And if anybody on the call here is involved in the Digital Navigator pilot in California, feel free to let us know. This isn't actually my hands-on project, so I'm not exactly sure where the pilots in California are happening. But I think it's a really interesting model. 

Some of the more unique things I've heard about actually before the pandemic when they were starting to explore this work is-- I actually believe it was something in Berkeley. It was called Cybercafe. And it was a cafe where people could go in and actually sit and work. And there was device lending and there was support of digital literacy support while people were actually there. 

I've also heard of this-- an example in Syracuse, New York, in a boxing school, a boxing gym, where parents would bring their kids in for boxing lessons. And while they were there, they would get access to digital navigator services just to help them help make sure they had the tools they need to be fully engaged in all the tasks required for us to do online. These partnerships, these Digital Navigator pilots happen not through the auspices of one organization. But in every single setting, they are done through collaboration of different types of public-private partnerships or tiered public partnerships in order for them to actually happen. 

So the next area where we found some themes in our work was in the area of instruction. Not surprising since I think it was a room full of teachers. I'm going to talk about three things here that really were salient to me as I was reading through the notes from the conversations. And that is teachers need strategies to understand digital learning needs very broadly, teachers need to create digital literacy action plans for learners, and teachers need to optimize materials for smartphone use. 

So I'm going to talk about each of these things. But I would love it if you would just take a look at this list. And I'm going to give you a second. And which one of these things resonates most soundly for you? Are you focused more on understanding digital literacy needs? Are you really focused on helping learners understand their needs, or are you really working on getting smartphones going? What works for you here on this list? 

I'll give you a little bit more time. This is just to get you to read the list and really start to anticipate what these things are going to be about. It's my schema building instructional strategy. 

So let me move on then. All right. So to begin with, instructors need to understand the digital learning needs of their students obviously. Instructors need to define exactly the skills that they intend to foster. But just as workforce skills extend beyond simply learning how to clear a drain if you're a plumber, digital literacy skills are not confined to just a single process using a single set of tools. Instead, digital literacy instruction has to address cognitive processes and social dynamics involved in using these tools to solve actual real life problems. 

So digital skills instruction must be specific enough to prepare learners for their immediate employment and academic goals and broad enough to make sure that those skills and that learning is transferable and can help them become digitally resilient. Meaning, that when they encounter a challenge in any setting, they can draw on their past experience to address it. So we have to support learners to be able to transfer these competencies so that they're actually problem solvers using technology and that they can then move to becoming lifelong learners with the use of other technologies. 

So a great place to start is a digital literacy framework. It's just understanding what the skills are to begin with and what the range of skills might look like that's really important. So what you see on the screen here are three different frameworks that you can use to do that. 

So the first one, the Northstar Digital Literacy Standards, place digital literacy skills into three categories. Essential computer skills like turning on a computer or operating a computer. Essential software skills is the second one, like using Word or PowerPoint or something like that. And then using technology in daily life. So for example, their information literacy. 

So Northstar, it's just digitalliteracyassessment.org. Northstar offers a list of standards on the site, plus learning modules, and assessments aligned with all of those standards. And what's cool about Northstar is that you don't actually have to have a license to use it. If you just go to digitalliteracyassessment.org, you can have access to free versions of the assessment. But they also have very low cost licenses for programs so that they have access to all of it, plus a unique URL to deliver the assessments, plus access to a database. So you can see the results of all of your learners. 

So the second framework that I want to share with you was created by Maryland's Department of Labor. Their digital literacy framework for adult learners framework is really interesting. It's divided into practical descriptions of skills like technical skills or investigative skills, with a lot of guiding questions, descriptions of the schools or the skills, and application examples. And they even have a supplemental instructor implementation guide to help you understand how you would use them. 

So if you're looking for any of this stuff, again, you can have the links on my slides, which you could find the website. But you can also just google Maryland Department of Education adult Ed digital literacy framework, and you'll find this stuff. And then there's another approach. This is the broadest approach possible. 

So Northstar is basically a list of discrete skills. The Maryland framework, they've attempted to try to package these discrete skills into applications about how you use them like these are technical skills that you would use for very technical tasks or these are investigative skills. So they're trying to create categories. 

And ISTE has the broadest categories possible. And they actually list very broadly-framed objectives like empowered learner or creative communicator or engaged citizen, which actually have nothing to do-- on the surface have nothing to do with technology. But with their correlated sub-standards, you can start to see how you would use a technology to accomplish or live up to all of these standards and sub-standards. 

So if you go to iste.org, you can find their student standards. And what's also great about ISTE is you can join an online professional development community of practice if you're an ISTE member and learn about how other teachers are bringing these standards into their own practice. So I see a question here, does it make sense for teachers to use these as guidelines and create their own that align with their program? Renee, I think there has been so much work gone into writing standards that no teacher should be writing their own digital literacy standards. 

There's a lot here. And I intentionally showed you these three because they are at varying degrees of granularity. With Northstar being the most granular and ISTE being the most abstract, I really feel like it's possible for you, for any practitioner to find what they need in these three different frameworks. It takes a lot of time to write frameworks. But I do think that you are aware as teachers of the skills that are required for learners to succeed on the instruction that you're creating. 

So I wouldn't create your own fresh standards or frameworks. But it does make sense for you to dive into these resources and figure out how to prioritize the stuff that you see listed there. Some of it will be very important. Some of it will be less important. 

But we prioritize standards in our instruction all the time, even staff at the CCRS where I know people look at some of those standards and just think, no way, my learners are not going to need that. And so it's not that you don't include them, but you might not focus on them. So that's the way I think you should think about this. 

Let's see. So this is a starting point, and the goal is to build dynamic, instructional opportunities that require the skills that you have identified as important through these standards and you're working toward digital resilience and learner agency. So it's really important to not just maybe stick with the Northstar view where we've got these silos of skills. But really start to push to looking at these more abstract and higher levels of categorization to help you understand or think about how you can make sure that the digital instruction that you do creates transferable skills. 

So I'm going to move on from standards and frameworks. I'm wondering if there are any questions or observations. So I'll just pause for a second. 

Yeah, and Wendy, I agree that these are often institutional level decisions, and it's up to teachers to enact them in their instruction. And I think that too is an equity issue where if there is a higher level or standard that's shared across, all of these settings, then all the teachers are all working toward the same thing. 

One of the things-- this is an aside, but one of the things that came out of the COVID research that I did were observations from teachers about how low-level ESL students can't learn online. And that was a perception held at the beginning of the pandemic, and the teachers that we-- we interviewed 45 teachers for that study. 

And what was understood, what was a shared observation among them was how surprised if instruction was carefully structured and learners weren't overwhelmed by being piled on with way too many technologies at one time, yes, their ESL learners actually can learn online. And it just took altering instruction to make that possible. You have to, I think, have digital literacy expectations for all your learners. In a time when we all have to teach remotely, if you don't, then they're just going to be using paper packets and never have a chance to develop their digital literacy skills. 

And Wendy, I would love to hear more about what you said about paternalism and racism. Let's see. Yeah, if you want to build on your comment, I would love to know exactly what you're talking about when you-- I'm trying to understand if this is a critique of standards or if you're trying to build on something else I said. Or maybe it was the fact that some of the teachers said that low-level ESL students couldn't learn online. I'm guessing that's what you're responding to. 

Marina asks if anybody is doing digital literacy classes anymore. And I think it's probably really hard to do that completely remotely. The end of the COVID chips paper, one of the things that we include is a section on silver linings. And what was interesting is that it's really clear that nobody's going back to the way they operated. Nobody we interviewed imagined going back to the way they operated before, where computer skills were taught in a lab and that was about it. 

I do think there is a time and a place for direct instruction of computer skills like digital literacy. But it doesn't necessarily have to be isolated and cannot be isolated to just specific classes. So for example, when we're all working remotely, a really important strategy is to start with a shared technology. For example, I bet your students are using WhatsApp or Facebook. So they're comfortable getting in there. 

So use that as the mechanism by which you deliver support for the next technology that you want them to learn. And then through that-- I don't know, what would you call it? Like gateway or it's kind of like a leapfrog. They're kind of leapfrogging or they're leaping from one technology to the other because they've gained comfort with stuff that's new to them. And then once it's not new to them, the cognitive load for learning new content with the new technology is diminished. 

Who knows? I would love to-- a year from now let's see if anybody's doing digital literacy classes. Of course, contextualized like you show up to do job search work with a job counselor and the job counselor sees you have trouble operating Microsoft Word or Windows operating system, yeah, there should be some just-in-time support to build those skills in that moment. It's really important that these things be contextualized so that learners can actually make use of them while they are engaged in the task they need. 

So let's move on to the next thing, the digital literacy action plan. I want to credit a teacher from Maryland named Rachel Riggs who came up with this. And this is a resource that's actually on the EdTech Center mLearning sites. So if you go to EdTech-- I'll just check this link. If you go to edtech.worlded.org, and you look on our drop down menu, you go to mLearning, you'll see you can find the digital literacy action plan under the instruction section. 

Oops, we're here? Yeah. So after mapping out the skills that you know want your learners to work toward, a useful strategy for empowering learners-- remember, the point of this is to empower learners so that they have digital resilience and agency in the tasks that they need to accomplish outside of learning. So a useful strategy for empowering learners and developing proficiency is to use a digital literacy action plan. 

So this is a plan created by students to identify which skills they need to acquire to formulate a strategy for working to gain those skills to track their progress and then to reflect on their progress as they're moving along. Implementing an action plan might begin with a goal-setting lesson at the start of a class session. And during the lesson, it's important that you elicit from students the ways in which digital literacy skills relate to their life skills or goals in other areas of their life like work or family. 

So in this way, all learners have a chance for themselves to identify why the digital skills are meaningful for them and come to understand that they're ready for the next step in the digital action plan. And this next step would then be to choose their goals. The goals could be chosen from skills in a digital literacy framework like one of the ones I showed before. Alternatively, if these standards have all been chosen ahead of time, it would be the work of the teacher to facilitate a discussion with the students about how the specific goals align with or relate to the course objectives. 

But once you all have identified shared objectives, teachers know what the students are looking for, the students know what they're working toward, students can create a map to help get them there. So instructors could provide scaffolding for this like a graphic organizer or a list of tools and resources to choose from. And learners could work in small groups to do this. 

So then after learners have plotted a course, like done a graphic organizer, made a timeline, something that shows how they see themselves moving to reach their goal, then the final stage is to actually sit down with something like this digital action plan where the students put it all together. And the way Rachel does this is by sharing a Google forum with her students. So no, she doesn't start with the Google forum. She starts with some reflective activities and reflective mind mapping, timeline making, where students actually have some agency and have a chance to think for themselves about this before they have to react to a forum that the teacher has given them. 

So this is an opportunity for aid agency in their own teaching or in their own learning. So I think this is a really great resource. And like I said, we just added it to our website. Next area that's important in the area of instruction. Sherry Lehane from Providence Public Library has done really great work in helping the teacher she supports understand how to create teacher materials like teacher creative materials that are optimized for website use. So here are the five points. These are the five points that Sherry's come up with in order to do this. 

And again, we have a resource in our mLearnings on our mLearning page on the EdTech World website that includes more about this information. So the key here is to limit the main points on a screen, to plan the layout with a smartphone in mind. Meaning, plan for horizontal rather than vertical when you're doing slides. Improve readability by having larger fonts and lots of spaces between lines, choosing colors that contrast so that they're easily seen, and then choosing file types that increase accessibility. That means you don't have to download a huge PDF in order to access the materials. And then also design things that can really leverage smart-screen navigation. 

So here is an example of a slide that would align with what Sherry has set up. So you can see it's very clear, font size is, big there's lots of contrast, there's hardly any clutter on this page. This is a video that plays right there on the screen. There's no need to download the video file in order to access it. 

And the way she set this up, she has hyperlinks in her slides. So the students can use the touch screen to go to the next slide. So that's what that last point means. So again, if you check out our website, the mLearning page on the edtech.worlded.org site, you'll find more information about this. 

So before I get to the third category here, any other instructional strategies that you all use to help build the resilience and agency that your learners feel when they are engaging with digital resources or working on digital literacy? I'll just pause and give you a sec chat. 

If there are no questions or other suggestions, I will move on. So the third and final area that came out of the conversation, the theme that came out of the conversation, was around the work that teachers need to do themselves. So none of the strategies and information that I just shared is going to have any impact if teachers don't attend to them in their instruction. So PD is critical for creating opportunities for teachers to leverage their time with students to mitigate the negative impact of digital exclusion. 

I would say, given the intersectionality of marginalization in this country, meaning, no one is discriminated against in just one way, this is really important for BIPOC students that are in your community. So you can't just focus on being a really good teacher. You also need to also understand that the work that you're doing in the classroom needs to be directly applied to what's happening outside of the classroom so that students feel like they can accomplish the task they need to do. 

So we've got a few ideas here, ways that you can help do this. We need to build teacher skills and comfort with using technology themselves. You administrators from the call here, this should be done with a growth mindset rather than a punitive mindset. The rapid pace of change in digital technologies really has put us all in a position of being lifelong learners. 

And if you're going to have assessment of teacher skills, make sure that there's very close follow up to nudge teachers to reflect on how they're going to fill skill gaps. And I really think that's an excellent way to assess learner skill or teacher skill is through self-assessment. I know that OTAN has a really excellent self-assessment tool, or has used one in the past, I think, with the DLAC program. 

And actually, that has been altered or built on or shortened for use in the state of Massachusetts by SABES, which is the organization that leads most of the technical assistance and PD and digital literacy and distance learning in Massachusetts. You can see a screenshot here. And what's cool about the SABES' work is that they-- oops, sorry. They created a holistic self-assessment tool that serves as a great example because it has teachers not only report on whether or not they've tried to do a skill, their comfort doing the skill, but then also how comfortable they feel integrating the skill in the classroom, and then finally, how comfortable they feel showing another teacher how to integrate the skill in the classroom. 

If you can teach somebody how to do something, then you truly do have mastery of that skill. So it's a really great tool. Again, you can find it on the website. It's actually linked to on my slides. So I hope that you'll check it out. 

The second thing I want to say is when we're trying to help teachers build digital literacy skills, it's really important to integrate digital literacy into other PD that's happening. So simply teaching discrete computer skills, we know is not effective for students. It is also not effective for us as teachers. So digital literacy support and PD needs to be widespread and sustained and promoted through lots of active learning, rather than compartmentalizing digital literacy or technology and PD because that reinforces the siloed nature of computer skills instruction that happens in a lot of classrooms. Well, was happening in all the classrooms. 

So it's really important, now that we're doing a lot of this PD online, that as you're shaping your PD. you're mirroring what you want teachers to do with their students. And caveat or a disclaimer maybe, what I'm doing right now, I hope nobody is doing what their students. Just talking at someone for 90 minutes and hoping that anything comes of it is really hopeful thinking. 

So I tried to make it as interactive as I could by pausing periodically. I also posted the slides so that you can engage with the media on your own and in your own time. So figuring out ways to embed interactivity as you can is super important. So let me just-- Hang on a second. 

I just want to pause to see if anybody has any other points around professional development and ways of thinking about how to integrate digital literacy into PD. What things are happening? Obviously, we've got PD on using technology. But in what ways let's say PD on like math, or literacy, or numeracy, is there a way to authentically engage people in digital literacy development as you're doing that kind of PD? 

I think that perhaps relying on blended formats of professional development is a really excellent way to do this because we understand that we have very limited synchronous time when we can all do PD together. It's really important to create blended experiences. And a really excellent way to create a blended experience would be to have a small informal group of educators that maybe meet in a professional learning community, maybe it's a programs professional learning community. And then together, they make use of technology to access independent learning that they then bring back to the group. 

So in a sense, we're hoping the PD is going to mirror the experience that you hope your teachers will use with students. I see there's a PD Google Classroom. That's a great idea. Using a learning management system in PD that you hope teachers will use with their students is an excellent idea. And a lot of states across the US are doing that so that teachers have the experience of being learners in learning management system that they are expected to use with their students. 

But there's another element to this. So teachers, I think, need to understand that having access, owning a device, or building computer skills alone won't solve the issue of digital exclusion. Digital exclusion, it's like there's this interwoven issue that's aptly represented when I think of it as three legs of a stool. So we've got access to internet, access to devices, and digital literacy. 

And the teachers really need to be working across all three of those areas in order to support digital equity in communities of color. And I add that qualifier to the end because we know so many of our learners who are from communities of color are living in places where there is digital exclusion. So it's not enough to just teach the digital skills. You also need to advocate for access at your program and support access in your program. And you also need to advocate more broadly in order to try to end the digital racialized redlining that happens. 

So here is the call to action to wrap up with. So as I've been saying this whole time, there's a connection between digital exclusion and other disparities that happen because of institutional racism and white supremacy including access to jobs, education, economic opportunity, and even good health. The pandemic has widened these disparities and presented in more stark relief how BIPOC communities suffer from digital exclusion. 

And teachers across the US who weren't previously engaged in this issue are now wide awake to it. And they realize that they need the skills and resources to leverage the technologies that the learners have so that they can actually use them to support instruction or and-- I would say, and they need to scramble. You need to scramble to advocate for your learners for more access. 

So how can you do this? So I guess, if somebody tuned into the webinar right now, this is what I hope they would take. That you need to try to implement some of the strategies and PD options that I suggested previously. You really need to embed support for access to devices in the internet, whether it's a digital navigator program, or when you get the slides, you can link to these California Resources for supporting access. 

You need to support students to share their own stories about the impact of digital exclusion or benefits for inclusion efforts to make them really vivid and understood by everyone, how there is a connection between what they're experiencing and the digital exclusion and many of the other intersectional exclusions that they're feeling in their lives. It is actually connected. And I think that giving a safe space for learners to have conversations about that, it can help with you as a teacher understanding. 

But then also just knowing that someone is listening and sees that too is very helpful in creating a shared understanding that can support trust moving forward in your instruction. And then finally, do engage in advocacy at the state and national level. There is the Digital US coalition has a lot of great resources, and the website is linked here. The National Digital Inclusion Alliance is doing excellent work. 

The National Digital Inclusion Act is actually-- well, nothing's happening right now in Congress. But once we get beyond this speed bump and hopefully moving into the next calendar year, that legislation will be enacted. So I hope that your ears will stay perked to hear about movement on the National Digital Inclusion Act. You can find information about that on NDIA's website. 

So being a digital equity warrior for your students is more than just digital literacy skills. It's all of these things put together. So I hope that this has been interesting, and you've gotten some ideas about how you might be able to get involved. And so now, we have about 10 minutes. If there are any other questions that you want to ask or any other suggestions, I'd love to try to answer them, or you can email me here. 

I'm just going to check the website to make sure that I posted the right version of the slides that has my notes because a lot of the links are in the notes. So if you go there-- my email is right here on the slide. Somebody asked what my email is, but I can chat it here too. It's Jen-- here. There's my slides. No, there's my email address. 

All right. Well, any questions, any ideas, anything I missed? I'm learning about all this too. And I and I'm also learning how to talk about racialization of these issues and white supremacy. As a white middle-class identifying woman, I'm new to talking about this too. So that's the disclaimer. 

If I framed anything in a way that unintentionally was, I don't know, not put the best way possible, I guess I apologize for that. And I would love to learn how I can talk about these things in a way that is very big ten and inviting. Oh, so there's a question from Hillary. I'm curious about the intersection of digital exclusion and public health. Has your research documented any causal relationships? 

So Hillary, I am not a public health researcher, but I draw on research done by others to help-- I drew on research done by others to help frame this presentation. So I can't answer questions about causal relationships. I think there's probably plenty of published research literature out there that might. Certainly, we know from the pandemic that if you have access to the internet, you have access to information and engagement in the world, but that's not possible if you don't. 

Oh, BIPOC is biracial, Black or Indigenous People Of Color. Yeah, so interesting. I don't know, I could look for some more information on that, the causal relationship. But in social science, causal relationship is really a sticky thing to try to assert. I actually think that it's sufficient to draw correlations in order for us to be moved to take action. 

All right Jen, there's another question in the Q&A section from James. It says any recommendations for getting buy-in or helping the deficit-minded support their students and their own tech literacy needs. 

Can you say that again? 

Any recommendations for getting buy-in or helping the deficit-minded support their students and their own tech literacy needs. 

So the deficit-minded, that's a description of colleagues who have a deficit mindset about their students. I'm assuming. 

James can you elaborate? He says, yes. 

Yeah, I'm starting to be very careful about this. I think that deficit language is a huge turnoff and disconnect for learners in the classroom. I don't talk about low-literate learners. I talk about learners who have literacy needs. Minority students is also problematic, instead minoritized students. 

So I actually have a resource-- we're putting together a resource at World Ed that frames how to avoid deficit language. And I think the best way to convince people who don't notice is to just be consistent in the language that you use yourself. People don't necessarily notice that they're using discourse that excludes others. And sometimes just need either a gentle nudge and consistent guidance through example. 

And often, these things start at the grassroots level and then percolate up to higher levels. Like for example, in Minnesota in our Department of Education, we had a whole department that was dedicated to supporting limited English-proficient students. The whole idea was that defining our students by their limits is not a very supportive way to engage in instructing them. 

So it was a grassroots effort to get the department to change the name of the division. And so then there was this reinforcement at the top that's reinforced changes in the way people talk at the bottom. So I think you just need to be consistent and aware. 

Yeah, Peggy, I'm just been thinking how I can get a copy of this to you. I need to find it first of all. But I can share it maybe with Penny, would that be a good way to get it to you? Penny could disseminate it or I could put it-- you know what I'll do? I'll put it in my-- I think I have a page on this website. 

I think I remember uploading slides. So I'll throw it in there if I can find it, so you can check there. And I'll do that right when I get off this call so I don't forget. Any other questions from the Q&A? 

Nothing that I'm seeing. 

Well, shall we wrap it up? 

Sure. We can do that. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you, Jen. 

Yeah. Thanks for the active chat, everyone. It made me feel like I wasn't speaking to myself in an empty room. So I appreciate that and it's always great to be connected to you wonderful teachers and admin in California. Lots of great work happening there. So I hope you all have a wonderful afternoon. Take care. 

All right, take care, everyone. Just a reminder that when I close this webinar, you're going to be taken to in an evaluation page. Just make sure you hit Continue to be actually be taken to the evaluation, OK? Sessions are done for the day. We'll see you again tomorrow starting at 8:30. Take care, everyone, have a great rest of your day.