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Announcer: OTAN. Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

Lief Williams: Good morning, everyone. And Happy Friday. My name is Lief Williams, and I'm here together with my DLAC team member, Susan Rausch. Next. So Susan and I are both ESL teachers. We might say seasoned ESL teachers. I'm also the ESL program coordinator. And besides Susan and myself, we also have on our team our MAE Director, Susan Murphy, who has been very supportive of us with our journey with DLAC.

Martinez Adult Education is located in Martinez, California, about 20 or so miles as the crow flies from San Francisco. Martinez said all education is a small but mighty school. In 2019-2020, we had a student enrollment of about 1,300 students and 200 ESL students approximately. Beside ESL, we have ABE program, the high school diploma program, and the CTE program.

Go ahead. So speaking of CTE, our CTE Coordinator, Bruno Sablan, is also part of our on-site DLAC team. He's one of our Canvas administrators at our school, and he's also teaching our IET intro to financial services entrepreneurship class, co-teaching with Susan as our ESL instructor. Also, we have Aimee Wallace, who is our ESL program assistant. And as I say, there she really is, the glue that holds our department together. She's a great support for both our students and also our ESL staff.

So about a month ago, we opened our school up to in-person classes. And we also have, as you see on the right side there, a food pantry, which partnered with our local food bank. And we've been supporting our students and families, and community members since September with a drive-through food pantry pickup.

So, in these slides, on the left, you can see some an ESL class with some of our in-person students studying in the classroom. And we also, on the right, is our Wioa computer lab. And we've been fortunate to have gotten permission from our local health officials and the school district to have opened up our testing lab since last fall. So we've had students come in to do their courses testing, and we're also a HiSET Test Center, so we've had students taking the HiSET as well with the proper safety protocols. Next.

So many of our classes are on Zoom, but we are having our students come in one day a week for in-person classes, and some of the teachers are experimenting with simultaneously having students on Zoom and in the class at the same time. So on the right, you can see some of the technology that we have in our classrooms, with a wall display screen and the mobile webcam, and all connected to the teacher's desktop along with the docu camera. So we're piloting it is a work-in-progress. But some teachers are doing very well with that. Go on. Next.

So we survey our ESL students at every turn just to check in with them to see how they're doing with their online classes and their Canvas LMS. So this survey actually we just did this week. So, as you can see, the devices that our students have, majority of them have laptops and some, as we know, use their smartphones along with other devices. So that helps inform us about their technology at home. Next.

And in this survey, we also want to find out their needs as far as their technology and tech skills. So, as you can see in this survey, it's cut off. But the one that has five students is about accessing and using Canvas, and then no surprise number. The second one, with nine students, they need help with submitting their homework on Canvas. So those help us understand how we can best support our students with technologies help. Next.

So this is our DLAC goal. So we started with the title, Blended ESL for All. So we're hoping by the end of this year that to have 75% of our ESL students enrolled in blended classes. And we believe that you know, tightly integrating the online LMS Canvas with the in-person, face-to-face, be it Zoom or in-person classes. And we believe that will help with persistence and increasing their speaking in reading, and writing skills, which will consequently increase their CASAS test scores and EL Civics results. So go on, Susan. I think you're next.

Susan Rausch: We want to say a great shout-out and thanks to Destiny and the IDEAL 101 course. We have, with the help of the course stay within our framework to develop our site plan and stay focused. We've discovered various ways to do new things and helpful tools and strategies as well as we've been able to collaborate with other DLAC members to make this happen.

Accomplishments so far, as we've had mentioned earlier, Aimee is our glue, and she has gone to OTAN and providing us great wonderful tools for online registration and orientation both in Canvas and for-- for Canvas and for Google. She's made technology digital a skill survey, and I made a teacher share desk, which I'm going to share with you just briefly.

Hi, real quickly I want to show you the teacher share desk that we have created, or I have created for our teachers. So, basically, it's just a through or announcements through Zoom, and I'll just scroll through it so you can kind of see the different things that we have. I created this. I got the idea from Maren Anton, who was in the previous DLAC cohort. And I work with her at Mt Diablo Adult Education.

This is a place where I can put things and find them like a library as well as easy retrieval. All the teachers in our ESL department are added as teachers, so they can add things to this as well as take things and put in their own class. So this is basically what we have done to keep our things in order and accessible online.

I interviewed a student of mine, and I'm not going to be able to show you the whole interview, but I wanted to show part of that. So--

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Susan Rausch: I skip ahead to-- I think we're going to start right here.

Payal Dhameliya: Then tell her to-- I want to take this class, and they gave me this class.

Susan Rausch: Awesome. And how was learning the Canvas or learning management system?

Payal Dhameliya: Yeah, Canvas is-- it was difficult for me, but now I enjoy a lot. And yeah, it was convenient for me.

Susan Rausch: Convenient, OK. And speaking about convenience, in the future, if you have the choice to go to class in the face-to-face learning in the classroom on Canvas or taking a class on Zoom, in both cases, we would probably use the Learning Management System Canvas. But which would you prefer and why either to come to school or to learn on Zoom?

Payal Dhameliya: Although I enjoy the face-to-face a lot because I take the previous class with Ms. Susan, but I can try you, and I have more responsibility at my home. I want to go for Canvas. And for Zoom session, I enjoyed the Zoom session a lot.

Susan Rausch: So that's very convenient for you because you can't drive, right?

Payal Dhameliya: Yeah.

Susan Rausch: Well, I want to say thank you so much for letting me interview you, and we appreciate having you at our school.

Payal Dhameliya: And thank you'll. Thank you, teachers, for giving us this opportunity, and thank you, Martinez Adult Education Center to support us like that.

Susan Rausch: Hi, this is Susan Rausch, and I'm from-- OK, next slide. So Payal, in the previous part, she had mentioned that she was in four of her classes, so this is one of the class. It's the basic computer skills for ESL learners. It's actually taught by a CTE instructor, and we've had this year two sessions, I believe, of eight students each time on CANVAS.

In addition, this is just a picture of the module that we have for the intro to the financial services and entrepreneurship course that Bruno and I are teaching. Payal is also in this course. We have a natural collaboration, as I mentioned. I also work at Mt. Diablo Adult Education. And Maren, who is a previous DLACer, is working over there. So she has shared with us the community resources for Contra Costa County newsletters that she has created. And I have shared with her information that we have gleaned from our search community emergency response training, Lunch and Learning Series sessions that our communication skills class attended this spring.

Here are some links that we will share further about that you can get to see more about what you've done. And how have we used the DLAC virtual skill training sessions? Well, we want to say, first of all, thanks so much to Blair Roy for coaching us and helping us with team building and communication skills. And we also want to put a shout out to our Director, Suzanne Murphy. Thank you for setting the culture for change and learning. Knowing that especially, this year, we're in a big huge building program in terms of rebuilding the way we teach. And we're making adjustments and trying new ideas as we pilot Canvas or are learning new teaching methods, and we have great support and knowing that we are learning and we can always do better next time. So we appreciate that.

Also, we want to have a shout-out to Dr. Porter. Thank you for encouraging us and finding out what our strengths and our weaknesses are, so Susan, Leif, and Blair are all working together within our strengths that we've learned from Dr. Porter.

We, like everybody else, have had challenges, and time is one of the big ones. Also, technology challenges. Most of the time, when Leif and I are meeting with Blair, it's always how do you do this or how do we get over this challenge? And not only are we having challenges, but our students, and then us, of course, instructing our students in that piece.

Because we spent a lot of time on technology challenges, we have lost a lot of students and haven't been able to reach out to them because we're dealing with the technology issues. So there has been a challenge. We have also spend a lot of time with our students encouraging them to return to school for testing and on face-to-face learning.

We have made several changes in the past year. Transitioning at the first, with the pandemic, most of our teachers went to Google Classroom. And then, in June, we started with the Canvas LMS and implementing the courses and the remote testing. That's been a big huge challenge that Aimee has continually worked and improved upon. We have also purchased new technology for our classrooms, and Leif, I believe you're on?

Lief Williams: So in our next steps as part of our action plan, we plan to start small and develop a model of a blended ESL class and what it looks like. We're also going to work on some teacher-students templates for an interview assessment for one-on-one to check in with our students. And also a teacher-student agreement of the expectations of being in the blended class and also, of course, professional development for our ESL staff with implementing a blended learning class. And, of course, developing an in-person student digital literacy training. And, of course, all of us trying to market to the community and recruit students lost during the pandemic. Next.

To help us understand what our teachers are ESL teachers, strengths and weaknesses are with their technology, skills. We had a look at our CIP, our continuous improvement plan teacher assessments. And this graph shows blue is weakness over here, and adequate is green. So looking at this, we can have an idea where we can focus our efforts to help train our staff with integrating technology into their classes. Next.

So, in summary, we feel good about where we are with our site plan and where we're going. We have a good idea of the next steps. And we look forward to learning more from DLAC next year. And we know it will help us with the implementation of our site plan. So thank you, everyone.