Speaker 1: OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

Mansoora Shah-zaeem: Thank you very much. And here is our report. Our team-- me, Mansoora Shah-Zaeem, I am the tech support, Canvas support, and ESL teacher.

Frances Tornabene De Sousa: And my name is Frances Tornabene De Sousa. I'm the team leader for DLAC. I teach ESL and ESL distance learning. We got a mandate from our principal that we would have to move to campus. We are working with our administrator, Dr. Lockwood, our ESL department chair, Lilya Berenboim, our high school diploma and GED head, David Williams, and our CTE department head, Judith Solovieff, also our registration and testing staff have been phenomenal, John MacDonald and Pamela Spindel and our IT tech from the district, Johnny Vigil Jr.

We have about-- pre-pandemic-- 2000 students a year, where they're a community of learners, recent immigrants, and local residents aged 18 to 80 from San Francisco East Bay communities of Pittsburgh, Antioch, Bay Point, and Concord. We offer ABE, HSD, GED courses and currently four ESL levels. We also have independent and high school diploma studies just as learning for ESL. And our testing site for Pearson VUE, we now have online registration. And our CTE programs offer training and CNA, and allied health careers, business and computer skills, and floral design.

We have academic counselors-- you can change the slide-- and a transition counselor who offers job search assistance. We have approximately 35 instructors in all departments with evening and day classes. These are some of our students and their testimonials. Our allied health is a very strong department. And we also have EMT emergency check.

One more slide, and there's our graduation. And we have many, many hiring events. All pre-pandemic but we're still working online.

Mansoora Shah-zaeem: And how did IDEAL 101-- to me, it was very beneficial. And all of the support that we got from Destiny and all of the other team members. So I pretty much broke this down by each module, what our outcomes were module-zero blended learning. First of all, what was blended learning? We had no ideas. Pre-pandemic, we had no idea. Post-pandemic, now we know there's high flex, there is hybrid, there is online learning. So we learned quite a bit about all of that.

Module 1, getting everyone involved, which was very, very important, because administration needed help, teachers needed help and the students. Going to the students in module 2-- recruitment. As you saw in the previous slide, we have a postcard that went out, which saved us quite a bit of money. And since the pandemic, we couldn't do in-person registrations. We had to do everything online. Go ahead.

Frances Tornabene De Sousa: So, wait.

Speaker 1: Go ahead.

Frances Tornabene De Sousa: Slide?

Mansoora Shah-zaeem: OK, module 3, students testing. We had to do online as well, which created a lot of work one on one. We ended up creating an orientation, which we will get to. And teachers were provided with tools to help them, enable them to learn. Module 6 guided students for success. We had to, again, do a lot of surveys to find out what it was that they needed. Module 7, our major program that we'll get to is merging ASAP with Canvas. And then feedback, getting to talk to everybody and seeing what was working and where we are in our progress and how to be successful.

Frances Tornabene De Sousa: So we have some wonderful experienced teachers, but we had very humble beginnings. We began with a teacher who had a flip phone and no computer at home, and the pandemic hit. And so we have moved from that and this scary mandate of let's move to Canvas from almost no online work to a situation where we now have a waiting list for a high school diploma and plenty of graduates this year. Only two teachers knew about Canvas. And COVID really made us move more in the last year than we have in the last five.

DLAC helped us to form a team. Myself and two other teachers got trained on Canvas. And our online orientation to bring our students online was our biggest achievement to improving our enrollment. And our tech support's position was created to meet the student's needs and the teacher's needs.

At this point, all students are enrolled immediately. Once they go through the registration process online, they're enrolled in a digital boot camp/ study skills orientation, emailed the Zoom meeting link to a practical class, where all the basics for participating in class prepare them for Zoom, Canvas if they're class is using Canvas, Gmail on Mac, use it, talking about all their different devices, seeing what they need. And we have a multilingual trainer who is able to switch between at least three languages while she's explaining the teacher's expectations, when and where to pick up your books and other class materials. And our tech support is daily-- at some point every day.

Mansoora Shah-zaeem: And how did we get to all of that? Well we had to first sit back and find out what our strengths were. Thank you, Dr. Porter. And we had a wonderful coach, Francisca. So me and Frances, we knew exactly where our strengths were. I'm the tech person. Frances is the writing person. So we knew what our strengths were and we would love to be able to implement this with our other teachers, so that they can also work as seamlessly as we do.

Frances Tornabene De Sousa: And special thanks to Dr. Porter. We have to keep saying, because he gave us a lot of guidance of how to work around and with all of our staff. With our teachers, we face challenges in getting the information to all the teachers and a lot of barriers of technical equity, as I've already mentioned, for teachers and certainly for our students, many of whom are on smartphones. Our students were overwhelmed with kids, family, technology, time, but our teachers really rallied with support and gave them all sorts of positive feedback about being super moms and super parents. And our administration saw the need for change and provided resources to all of us.

Mansoora Shah-zaeem: And some interesting ways that we had to deal with the resistance, of course, the first thing that teachers saw was more work for them. So how did we get them involved? Of course, more involvement, asking for their suggestions, predicting. The biggest in all of these categories was building those relationships and understanding, yes, the teachers have more work, but then we can augment that by offering training that's paid.

For students, equity was very important. Quite a few of our students again were on flip phones, didn't have laptops, but we didn't find out that information unless we built those relationships. And with admin, they were struggling to find staff who had knowledge and time, as we know time is very short. And again, that happened by going through all of these process, getting them involved, asking for suggestions, and building relationships with them. The outcome of all of this was the tech support position, which I have right now, that was created, which we will get into.

And this is the orientation-- our piece de resistance-- that we have going on. So what happens as soon as they're registered, by room one, we mentioned John and Pam they go ahead and get an email from me letting them know when their orientation will be, the agenda. We do cover Zoom etiquettes, which I found was very important. I let them know where their books are. And I let them practice and use Canvas. And I give them the information for their teacher's Zoom link.

In addition to the orientation, we have to have outcomes. So in the outcomes, I can let the teachers and the administration know that what I have taught the students, that yes, they are prepared and ready to go. They know how to share their screen. They know how to go to breakout rooms, raise their hands, mute and unmute, send a message. In addition to this, I also troubleshoot if they have a Mac versus a PC.

Our next big project was getting ASAP and Canvas to speak to each other. So we had to start with this ASAP report. It shows all of our classes, and it shows this event code that we needed. And then we had to figure out how the hierarchy for our classes will work. Here we are-- adult education, how many courses, how many sub courses, how much-- ESL has five courses but two sections. So planning all of this took some time.

And doing all of this, we had to come up with our own hierarchy of work, who was going to be responsible for what? So Johnny, as we mentioned in the beginning, he is in charge. He's our tech person for writing the programs and getting ASAP in Canvas to talk to each other. I'm the support person in the middle trying to delineate the information from Johnny to all of our department heads. And then we have Frances who has great knowledge for all of these departments and merge everything together and provide support.

This is what after we've done the merge what Canvas will look like. And once it's been copied over from ASAP, that ASAP event code that we had now becomes it's SISID code. So this is just a screenshot of that. And then from that handwritten hierarchy of our courses, we came up with this and created this in our system to show where each class would be. And each department head would be responsible for maintaining theirs with my support.

This is a shell that we created for Canvas for the teachers, so teachers always have an introduction. And then they have their week that they can load whatever information or however they're going to be teaching for that week. I also created a Canvas 101, where all of the teaching material for all the courses are there and teachers can collaborate or take whatever information they need.

This is what the students will see in Canvas. They see their icon. And then they get to see what the class looks like. And so again the teacher's introduction is here, any directions the teacher wants to give. We do have the agenda. And SBS stands for side by side, F stands for future, and B stands for Burlington.

Frances Tornabene De Sousa: So our next steps are to go ahead with more professional development training and for teachers who have really, really learned a lot in this year from a world of not being online at all in class to sharing their best practices and our further Canvas training. Our students we want to give them strengths and career surveys and develop more equity in technology. We have some classes that are primarily the students are on smartphones. And our administration is going to help us to add an aide to a weekly orientation, so that we'll have someone else to be doing the orientation and has gotten us Canvas support tech training that we can use for our teachers.

What support do we need? OTAN trainings, technology, software, OTAN office hours. We have gotten so much information from OTAN. I have spent so much time in OTAN they have a little theme song for me when I hit the office hours. And resources-- it's a free education, you cannot give it up-- and resources, we need more Canvas shells. We want to integrate CK 12, because mathematics, no matter what core, CTE, ESL, all students are wanting to have improved abilities in mathematics. So CK 12 is important for that.

Mansoora Shah-zaeem: OK, in summary, at this point where we've gotten to, the teachers are much more confident. As we said in the beginning, we had a teacher who was on a flip phone is now teaching Canvas using, utilizing Canvas. And teachers are more confident. They have laptops. They have all the resources that they need. In addition to the orientation, I also have Monday, Wednesday, Friday office hours with the teachers can come if they have questions, technology problems. I can help them out with that, Canvas, Burlington, Future, anything online that they need help with.

We have found that students-- and doing a lot of surveys that students are participating more since they're at home. From what the rest of our teams have also come to the conclusion is that they don't have to worry about transportation, child care, all of these other struggles that they had. So being able to provide everything online was very, very helpful to them. Our administration, I don't know if they're here, but they have been a great support to us, again creating all these relationships, getting them feedback, and going back to them and letting them know and them helping us out by providing us what we need.

Frances Tornabene De Sousa: We want to send out a big thank you to our coach Francisca Wentworth, who did an amazing job with us. And she also did something fabulous, which is that she had three teams, she put us together in weekly meetings. Sometimes we would be talking as three teams and we would never get to our breakout time, because we had so much to discuss.

And I can remember back when we were first talking about Canvas and the other cohort members were saying, well Canvas what is it? And now you can see how they are excelling in this area themselves. We wouldn't have even had our first Canvas training if our cohort hadn't participated, because we didn't have enough warm bodies to justify it. But by the time our February Canvas meeting happened, training happened, our principal decided to pay our staff, and we had 20, 25 participants in that.

So Santa Clara Adult Education and Campbell Adult and Community Education, we thank you so much. Penny Pearson-- I want to remind you that many years ago, I said I want to be a non-paper teacher. I want to be a digital teacher. I think it's finally happening. Dusty Simpson, you gave us so much guidance and activities to do that taught us so much. Neda and Dr. Porter, thank you. Thank you so much.

And of course a big shout out to OTAN staff and the SMEs, Melinda Holt, Marjorie Olavides, Anthony Burik, and the SMEs Diana Vera-Alba and Alisa Takeuchi and Brandon Wilson. Secretaries are essential.

Mansoora Shah-zaeem: Thank you so much.

Frances Tornabene De Sousa: We would not have been able to do it without you. And we are so grateful.

Mansoora Shah-zaeem: I can't even imagine having to do all of this without having support. We were just talking about that. And I said there's just no way we could have done it, so thank you so much.