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Otan, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

Margaret Teske: So welcome, we have our panel today myself, Margaret Teske from CASAS, Program Specialist. Used to be South Cal but now I'm Northern California as well now, but we actually cover the whole state all of us.

Crystal Korbas is here with Pleasanton Adult and Career Education. She's the Assistant Director, has lots of good stuff to share with us, and she'll introduce herself a little bit later with more in-depth information. But she's a cool person.

Gilbert Leos has tons of experience. He's at Pasadena City College in the Noncredit division right now, EL Civics Specialist and a technology specialist as well. He's done a lot for their program and today you'll hear more about him.

I'd love to hear more about you and your agency. But before we get to that, just a second, the slide deck is posted in the chat. If you can't get it there, feel free to get it on our Google Drive. Let me see if it will copy here, so that you can get it. All copied into the chat real quick. So that you can all get it some people were having trouble. Not everybody's on their latest version of Zoom, so sometimes those files are hard to get if you're not on the latest version.

OK, we'd love to hear from you in the chat at any time. We'd love to hear from you right now, if you could just let us know your name, your agency, your position, we kind of like to know who our audience is, so we know where to go fast where to go slow things like that. Don't be shy, I don't see anybody posting come on Cathleen. We'd love to hear from you, also we have set aside after each of our speakers some time for questions and answers. So feel free to join us then. And you can unmute that point and ask us questions or briefly share about your own experiences, OK. Thank you Amy. Thank you Cathleen.

OK, well, today we're going to talk about CASAS Remote Testing, various procedures for remote testing, we're going to share about remote testing at the local level, Pleasanton Adult and Career Education. We'll be sharing how to start small and then build your expertise. And then part 3 is how they're doing it at PCC which is more of a larger agency, transforming from challenges into successes.

Our intended outcomes are to provide an overview. Can't connect everything all at once but we're here to provide help and to reach out to you with our experience and to let you know what works, OK. Once you to hear from the field on tried and true techniques, then start thinking about how this can work for your school. You're able to express some concerns or ask questions. And discuss really what works at your school but of course, we have to keep that a little bit brief. We have 90 minutes, we we're going to try to do this in 60 but it didn't seem to work so we added and we added an extra half hour thanks to OTAN. And so we have that time, OK.

I'm going to get started, unless anyone has a questions so far. Please continue to let us know who you are and what your jobs are. We have a remote testing person, personnel on the office, customer manager for Burlington OK Dinello thanks and Britt Peterson, records and report clerks. So some of you may be our proctors or you're dealing with orientation and registration you want to know more about what we're doing in eTests so and EL Civics so. Good and Laurie thanks for coming.

So again, our presentation is posted in the chat just go to the very top of the chat. And if you can't get there, remember we have that Google Drive link. So I'll post that again. OK there are four main approaches to CASAS remote testing. And we'll call them approach one, two, three, and four. Remote control is the first one, that's one on one. Then the second and third one are one to one or one to multiple test takers. The first one is using Windows 10 PCs. The third down the list is-- Oh I missed and oral in there sorry, a one to one or multiple test takers using Chromebook or iPads. And the fourth approach has to do with oral responses.

And all of a really good description of all the approaches is on a YouTube video and I posted that link there. Each approach really has their own unique requirements guidelines. So, I would recommend starting with the one to one remote control, especially for ESL beginners, people that are not very tech savvy and CASAS has some great examples that use Zoom. And Zoom breakouts are really great for approaches two and three. So if you can group your students by devices, integrate into Zoom sessions, that also helps and remember that one proctor per five students. You need to monitor and help your students. Each student goes to their own break out when they're ready to take the test. So I'll explain that a little bit more as we go. And if you have questions, please post. Our panels very happy to answer questions as we go.

So one thing to remember about remote testing agreements is that you have to have about remote testings that you have to have an agreement and the first type of agreement called an Agency Remote Testing Agreement and there's one specifically for California that includes CASAS eTests, El Civics, and citizenship testing. So all three in one agreement. And that should be done once every year. Of course, you can change it and modify it as you go through the year both your program specialist and your CDE consultants should be given copies of those.

And in addition to the school or agency remote testing agreement, also proctors need to be aware even if they're only EL Civics proctors, that they should do a product or remote testing agreement. OK now for CASAS eTests, they also need to have testing certification. It's not hard to do, it's online. All this is online, so it's pretty easy to do. Those are the links, so when you get a copy of the PowerPoint you can just click on the link OK.

So for students, test agreements are a little different because they're not through the CASAS website or anything. What really helps is that you get students prepared or as much as you can before they have to take the test. So it helps you to set up some time to work with them one on one, that could take 30 to 45 minutes. But one of my local network schools Hacienda La Puente Adult School they wrote up their testing guidelines for students in the major languages that they have for students English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean. They put that together, and they helped their students once they wanted to get registered automatically getting into a Google Form and going through the rules and guidelines in these languages, so that they could understand what's expected of them for pre-test and how to do that pre-test.

So they use sign up Genius for that and you'll hear, I think for Crystal later, how they use sign up Genius this is a Google Forms form that's used by Hacienda La Puente. This is kind of a dummy form I'm going to copy it for you right now and put it in the chat again. You can use that to kind of guide you as what might be possible. If you have questions, you can always contact Maria Tellez. If you don't know her email and you don't get this PowerPoint, you can email me and ask me for that OK.

So preparation, you got to schedule your students and set up meetings. The first part is to get them ready for the test, and then the second part, part B is actual test. So sending meeting invitations to each test taker by email or text, you know your students best what works for them. And if you can include the Zoom link or whatever link you use to connect with them. And send them the speed test URL that will help them know how fast their computer is already, hoping that they use the same computer when they're doing the test, not always true but you've got to verify that, and expect that from the student by letting them know.

You want to include a link for each eTest sampler, so that students have some practice and they feel more secure taking that test knowing ahead what's ahead. Adults we like to know what's coming up so. Meeting with the students prior to the test is-- that can take 15 minutes or more, depending on student tech abilities and also what you've sent them ahead of time.

So basically, when you meet with them, you want to talk to them about the basic procedure for the test date. Ask them about what device they're using, and emphasize that they need to use the same device maybe tomorrow when they're giving the test when you're giving the test to them. Do the speed test together, if they haven't already done it. Make sure they have 2 Megabytes per second or faster. Usually faster is better.

Check their desktop, you want to make sure that they don't have a lot of possible programs like Google where they can search for the answers open. You want to make sure everything's closed. And it's great time to confirm that they're still available for the test date and time. And then give them the URL link for the test for the appointment for the test not the actual test, OK.

So approach one, one to one. So I know some of you have some experience with one to one. If you have comments about one to one, about remote control, please post those comments in the chat. We want to make this interactive as well. So, this is where the proctor gives remote control access to the test taker so that the test taker actually enters the responses on the Proctor's computer. And this works with the Windows 10 PC. The proctor's computer is registered for testing and is remotely shared through with this examples with Zoom. So it can be easily shared that way.

Ok Cathleen's been doing it so Cathleen has it worked pretty well for you guys. It takes a lot of time one on one, yeah.

Cathleen Petersen: Yeah is it OK to talk?

Margaret Teske: Yes sure.

Cathleen Petersen: Yeah we've been doing it. We've got one, two, three, four, five people and they only work part time so they're only getting two a day. So we're trudging along we got the help from the teachers. We're getting the teachers the list we had a list of students we get we're trying to get go for the post-test right now. And then we're also working on the pre-test for a high school diploma by remote.

And it's hard enough to get the students to do one time, so we've been doing the part A and part B together in the same session. Because these are post testers, so they've already tested on in person on each test on a Chromebook so that's what we're doing. When we do the protesters I'm sure will we might have to do the second day because they're new to the school and they haven't taken they haven't taken the test yet. So--

Margaret Teske: Have the high school diploma students done better at doing it faster, a little faster?

Cathleen Petersen: I don't know I haven't checked the results yet, but that's something all right, that's something I will check.

Margaret Teske: Because that's what I've heard from the field that as the higher levels they just go faster not on the test of course but getting ready for the test. So the whole procedure goes faster.

Cathleen Petersen: Oh yeah I understand that part now. OK oh yes it's so much easier and that's why we have when we have like one Vietnamese liaison. So she's calling in and talking to the students lower level students in their own language until they get to begin test.

Margaret Teske: Yes, you can do that. So it's good

Cathleen Petersen: That our school mostly has Vietnamese. So, there's more so we're letting the we're encouraging we're having our Non-Vietnamese speak proctors schedule and propter the higher levels of English. So that they would have more and more level and higher levels of digital--

Margaret Teske: Legal issues, yeah yeah. Great so, if you're new to this whole process it's great to watch this YouTube video. I'm not going to show it now because we're just-- it doesn't seem like you guys are that new according to the comments I've seen from Tamara and Amy. It's Amy, I think. So, great.

If you need to look at it the YouTube links there there's guidelines there. This video just takes like seven minutes and it really helps train your proctors as well as get you ready, if you're doing it so it's great training for proctors I think. The more they start with one, on one the more comfortable they feel and then they can move into like approach two or approach three.

And approach two, it's still you can do one on one but it's great if you can move up to doing like 5 to 12 students. So that's what they're working on in the field now is enlarging it from 5 to 12 so not every agency can do that it's kind of by special request at this time. So keep it to five but once you're comfortable with five that's not two a day, it's more like 10 a day. So that's great.

And how it works is that the proctor is setting the students up in a private breakout room. And so they have five private breakout rooms and they work with the students in the main room and then they go to private breakout rooms check their ID, make sure their room looks great, and they get him started on the test. And then they come back to the main room, grab another student like that.

So really it's very helpful if you have two people. Because one can be the moderator teacher person, and then the other Proctor person can take them into the breakout rooms. And so students have something to do in the main room while the proctors taking them enter the breakout rooms.

They can also practice the sample test items when they're in the main room as well. So as you can see, if you had two proctors, in addition to the teacher or moderator you could do twice as many students so. The proctor's job is basically, we'll talk about it, but proctor's job is to monitor once they get them all set up, monitor how they're doing and circulate from breakout room to breakout room, OK. And I know Crystal and Gilbert will be talking about that a little bit more too.

These are just the basic approaches. So you know what to do. For test takers on Chromebooks and iPads that have to be in a special mode, one is called kiosk mode, the others guided access mode. And again, you have to check they have to register their computers for each eTest, they have to have a certain speed for that. And again, you can do five test takers at a time. And same as above, in approach two. So it's very similar, it's just different devices.

I mentioned registering the students computers. So that's done and again a special videos available on CASAS website, well on YouTube so go directly to YouTube if you like. Proctors work with the student to register his or her computer. If you're familiar with TE and eTesting there's a special code that you get and you give that code to the student, and they can register their computer. It's pretty easy to do as long as our speed is as good, and students understand, right?

Approach four is basically for Windows 10 PC for the proctor and the proctor's computers registered for eTest. And then the proctor's screen is shared with the test taker but the student don't have the ability to do you like the remote control. So they tell the proctor the answer. And then the proctor writes down the answer for them. The test taker can use a tablet for that, Chromebook, Mac, PC or iPad as long as they have a webcam so you need to have a video on them. So and it's limited to one student at a time.

If there's no webcam, you could use a smartphone camera as that-- there is some remote I call this approach 4.2 because it's used a lot with EL Civics for oral tests and for the citizenship oral interview and it's best to do using a video calling app. What's the most popular video app that your students use? I know what I've heard from the field but--

Oh good Cathleen's working on approach two, that's good to hear, it'll help. WhatsApp, yeah Vicky, that's it. WhatsApp is a very, very popular, especially with Asians I believe. But other people are getting into it too. It's really easy app to share with and it's more private I think than Facebook, but maybe I'm not up on privacy so much. But it works well with a small group that I work with. And it's actually we're working with cell phones in a pilot test right now for listening, the CASAS listening tests.

So they're also working on it with goals testing so we'll see how that goes can the cell phone be big enough to read things. We're not sure yet. And to do math problems, I think for listening. It's pretty much a natural and it's working out so far. But there's another month of testing to come and we can cross our fingers because students have smartphones. So that might be the easiest way, we'll see. Probably will be out of COVID before all this is just like that. In the future students still want to do some online testing.

So all right I'm at the end of my parts are there questions for me? Anything that you want to ask for me and of course, you'll have more questions as we go along from the experts in the field so. Any questions about-- because now is the time for the continuous improvement plan are you guys focusing on remote testing, what payment points are the most important for you to focus on, as part of your goals, let's say.

Cathleen Petersen: We're just trying to get them. We're just trying to get paired scores.

Margaret Teske: Yeah.

Cathleen Petersen: We've been working on it, and like I said, we have a team of maybe 12, and we're just plugging along. But you know what, we're doing it. So that's going to be our narrative.

Margaret Teske: That's good, that's good. And as you you'll get a lot out of Crystals' I know because you guys are starting small. And you want to grow a little bit with that, that's good. OK, all right. Well let's move on to Crystal, Crystal there you go.

Crystal Korbas: Well thank you so much Margaret, I appreciate it and thank you for inviting me to be a part of this today. Hopefully everybody can hear me all right, I wanted to give you a little perspective before we dive deeper into what we did at our school just so you can kind of compare and get an idea of who we are and what we're doing.

I came on as the assistant director this past year in October, so it hasn't been a long time, and the first thing my director said to me was we need a remote testing program and he is not a heavy adult Ed background, he's more on the career tech Ed and does a lot for K through 12, so it was all about me jumping in and doing this kind of work.

And the great thing was I had some background coming into it and we'll talk a little bit more about that. But I will say I had 5 to six years, about six years of teaching ABE and ASC and being the Department chair at Castro Valley Adult. And from that experience, I was very comfortable with testing, of course in person that was not an issue, we did it all the time in our classrooms. We were smaller school too, so we just tested as students came in during a certain time of the year a couple of times a year.

And so when I came to Pleasanton, I felt comfortable in the in-person testing and the one-on-one. I'd done quite a few sessions of the one-on-one testing over the summer, and at the end of last school year trying to make sure we got those gains.

And so a little bit more about the school I'm currently at and what we were doing. So our school is one that had been swept and was reopened back in 2016, we are part of Pleasanton Unified School District, a K through 12, and we're in the East Bay San Francisco Bay Area.

Our demographics, we are predominantly an Asian population in our area, and mostly ESL students, so the majority of our students are and you'll see that I think on the next slide. Age, predominantly 45 or over, and female is 84%. So we have a lot of women in our program and very highly educated in their home countries, and the percentage is really high of diplomas and degrees from outside of the United States.

So very, very incredible group of people, very smart, very capable. An older group so may be a little bit needing of technology support, but anyway that goes through that slide. Thank you Margaret, I appreciate it.

So I wanted to give you an overview of just how many students we're talking about. So last year we had about 326 ESL students, and right now we are down. We're about 192 ASE and ABE programs. We had about 12 last year, so not a lot of students in that program, but it is growing. And definitely with my background it's a priority that I'm looking at, I'm being able to support more students and moving some of our ESL students that need into our ABE program.

And we also have started the ABE program this year, so that's adding a couple more people into our program as well. Really focusing on those students, so I see that growing more and more. So next.

So some of our testing challenges. Like I'm sure many other small schools, especially those that didn't carry on over the time that funds have been swept by districts, we have testing challenges because we don't have classrooms that belong to us. In our case, we do not have any daytime classrooms that belong to us, we at night time use the local continuation school Village High School as our location when we're not in COVID.

And we use a scheduled kind of shared district room for in-person testing. When I say shared I just mean we have to schedule it, and then it's our room. But we don't have a dedicated place that we can test people on our own, we have to make sure that it's available and there's up to 10 students that we figured out can be socially distanced in this room, and we use a Chromebook card and Chromebooks for testing at least in the in-person environment.

We have an older student population as I mentioned. And so we needed to pursue remote testing because there was some vulnerability in that population, and people that were uncomfortable coming in. We have a lot of parents and grandparents in our community and they are really looking for that literacy and to support children and grandchildren, and so it's very important. But they also needed some technology support, and that was kind of a challenge as well to do that remotely but they needed that remote test environment. That is definitely one of our challenges.

Next, OK so just to give you an idea of how many students we've tested, so I was actually really thrilled when I saw these numbers. So when I talk about it we've had 306 students tested, they might be duplicated because they pre and post tested with us in person this year, and they were using mostly Chromebooks, yeah, they would have been using all Chromebooks actually in our testing environments.

And then when I switched to remote, which was when I come came on board in October and we started really working at this, I will talk to you more about how that took place and how the proctors were trained, but basically we started with one or two at a time and then worked our way up, and we've gotten to 83 students tested. Again, some pre and post tested, so they're duplicated in that number.

So that's 25%, that's not bad that we've been able to get through. I will agree with Cathleen with the comment of you just have to keep working at it. It is not an easy thing, and you just have to say I'm going to try to get 10 people tested this week, or whatever it is.

And recently we've gotten up to 10 people at a time and two proctors on, and actually we have three just to see if we were going to capture more than 10. So we can make it work but it is a challenge, every test is a challenge. Next one.

So how did we handle our students sign-ups? And some of this is going to be more along the administrative side, I'm trying to touch on it, but honestly Margaret did such a great job of covering the different options. So I'm just going to kind of cover some of the things that might be helpful that we took away from the experience, but not try to go in-depth into every piece of the puzzle as far as testing.

So each week we would send out emails to our students, not the entire student population but those that we saw had either not pretested or they had 40 hours of instruction or more and needed a post-test at that point. And so we would just gather that, our data person collected that information each week and send out a report, and then we would literally cut and paste into an email. And pretty much the same email went out every single week, why change it, it worked and it connected them to a SignUpGenius form.

We actually would have one SignUpGenius form for every week, So that it just dropped off and we got rid of all those ones that were already done, and it worked really nicely and was clean. And the students obviously could do that, it wasn't a problem for them to jump on and to figure out, oh, I want this date and that time, we wanted that to give them the flexibility.

I want to say in here that you need to be patient and professional and just ask them to sign up, and I think we all are but sometimes in this game of trying to get as many students in, we kind of try to push them and be demanding of you need to do this by this date, I don't like that, I'm not that person. I just had grace with them and understood that they were uncomfortable and that it wasn't this easy thing I was asking, and so if I didn't get them that week I just kept asking every single week, we just kept putting it out there and then enough of them started talking about it in class, that they felt like I could try that I could do that myself.

Eventually nearly all of our students either signed up for the remote testing or the in-person testing, which I should mention the SignUpGenius didn't just have the remote testing spots, it had the in-person as well. So that it constantly was in their mind that, oh, I have a choice. I can go in now if I feel comfortable enough, or I can go ahead and do the online.

And I mentioned using the SignUpGenius, it was just the easiest, most flexible way that we could think of to get students to sign up, and then we would use it to send a reminder later and we'll talk more about that on future slides.

Margaret Teske: Yeah, I put a note in the chat that it's a great tool for practicing calendaring. And EL Civics does that as well as in some of the EL Civics they have calendaring.

Crystal Korbas: I just wanted to show you what that look like, we are smaller so we don't have massive numbers of students that wanted to come in every week or sign up for these, so we were doing a couple of sessions a week. And at first of course two or three people, and we'll talk more in a minute.

But I wanted to kind of give you an idea of what it look like and it would just go out to the students each week as a link saying this week is this link, this week is this link. And we do two weeks in advance, usually of dates that they could choose from and we tried to mix up afternoon, evening, morning, some in-person, some especially when we first were starting this in like October, November, we were doing three or four sessions a week of a mixture of in-person and remote.

And it added, we just wanted to add that flexibility for the student to have choice. And like I said, we used it for the in-person testing, I think it just gave them the ability to maybe switch to in-person which we could handle 10 people in-person, so it kind of made it go especially in those early months when we weren't doing 10 at a time. It allowed us to be able to have a few more people in a session at the time.

Margaret Teske: Crystal, Cathleen I think, asked, how do you schedule more than one student at a time at the same time period?

Crystal Korbas: It allows up to 10 people on the SignUpGenius, is that what you're asking?

Cathleen Petersen: I guess it would be, how do you know when the ten is up, when it's full? So will it stop after--

Crystal Korbas: It won't let them sign up after.

Cathleen Petersen: --drop, and say not available or something?

Crystal Korbas: Right. It just won't even allow them to sign up, and of course they don't have the link at this point. So they have to sign up for us to send them the link of how to get on the Zoom to do the sign up.

Cathleen Petersen: So there's a setting that you can do for that?

Crystal Korbas: Yes, it's part of the programming of available spots. See how it is, I have a Windows 10 and then it's just 10 in parentheses after it, that's how many spots are available.

Cathleen Petersen: OK, thank you.

Crystal Korbas: If it was 10. Yeah, and it'll go down and say nine or eight or whatever as you go. Yeah, thank you. Next, OK. So after there was this whole thing of how do you then know and I agree Cathleen, how do you know how many people, well it was a process we had to take off the SignUpGenius, we left them on there of course on the list, but we would take their name, put it on to another list because our proctors and we'll talk a little bit about our proctors in a moment. But because they were not teachers, they didn't have access and we didn't give them access full on to ASAP, so they didn't have all the student information.

So we had to have some mechanism to give them the information they needed like email address, phone number, their language, their ID number, that kind of thing so that they could have that information available. And then the Google Sheet, let me see, they needed to have access to student information yes, and after the session, we also had that same sheet be useful to our people in the front office. They would then create an email and send out the test scores to the student and the teacher on a test score report. And so I had somebody else who would access that and do that work to send it out and communicate with everybody after the fact.

And this is just an example of what that Google Sheet look like, we would include the Zoom link, who was in charge of the session and then I was always the second person, which I know is a lot but if you don't know that you're going to have more than five people, you need to have somebody who can put some extra support in there. But be flexible enough to walk away when you're not needed.

And I didn't want to schedule somebody for 2 and 1/2 hours of testing when and not have them do it, I wanted-- I'm very sensitive to hourly employees since I did work in that environment for many years, so hourly teachers are close to my heart. So I don't like to schedule people unless I know that they're going to be able to get paid for that 2 and 1/2 hours or the two hours that I've scheduled them for, so I just made it so every session I would jump in for half an hour to 45 minutes, help out and then if I wasn't needed for the rest of the session I walked away.

We also use the same document to put the station registration code for each of the sessions. It got a little bit confusing because we were doing multiple like ASC and ESL and pre-test and post-test because our pre's would gather all of our information, and so we had multiple tests that a student could be taking, and we needed to make sure that we had the right session station number for that. So we would kind of use that off to the side, we would just put it up there. And I think that's good enough for this one, OK.

And then the day before the student actually came it was a great reminder that one of our staff members was sent out to the student, here's your testing session, your Zoom link, we all look forward to seeing you there. Here are the translated instructions in the language that you've designated is your first language, and it included a screenshot document.

And we also would make sure that the primary proctor was also sending out that same document again and establishing contact in case there was problems along the way. I should also mention that the email would have our cell phone numbers because you had to have that quick contact with the student to be able to make sure that they needed to be able to get a hold of you if they-- something happened in their session and they needed extra help.

The primary test proctor also emailed them that language, that translated screenshot and then after the session, the front office staff would send out the score report. I probably copied that one again, sorry about that. So a little bit more on or a little bit on selection and preparation for our proctors.

So our teachers they were busy, they had a lot going on and normally they were somewhat involved in our courses testing in the ESL world, which was the majority of the teachers we're talking about. And so we really kind of identified early on that, that remote testing function needed to be done by others not the ESL teachers, they were at home teaching and they needed to be connecting with their students.

And so what we did was we used our high set proctors to support our courses testing. And so in any case they had started from the beginning because they then HiSET testing, they didn't do CASAS testing. So when I came on I started getting them trained, I worked with them individually and as a group in remote in our sessions remotely.

And they were really good with scaffolding instructions, which I felt was really important that they be able to just focus on what's the next thing we need to work on and support to get that student up and running online. And so I did some introduction to the whole testing process first by having them do in-person tests just so that they could see how do I set up a session, work out the kinks of how do I know if they are-- what session they're needing to do, how do I pick the computers, all that kind of stuff. So we worked on that first just to get them familiar, and Margaret could you move me on?

And I'll throw in there again that I was the new director or assistant director and I had done in-person testing, actually the school had only done in-person testing up until this point, they hadn't even done one-on-one testing. So nobody was familiar at the school with the testing remotely. And then many students they still needed the pre-test, but many didn't want to do the in-person testing, they were really uncomfortable with it. So it kind of really pushed us towards this remote testing.

And so we conducted one-on-one, I had conducted one-on-one remote testing at my previous school. I had a little bit of comfort but I'll tell you I was not like running towards this, I was like that, seems really hard. I've done one-on-one remote, and I think I'm a little uncomfortable with the idea of two, let alone five, I don't know how I'm going to get there.

And so I then took on, I can't just throw people at this that haven't done this before. And so I jumped in and did the one-on-one again just to remind me how to do it, and then I started working my way up. Started slow, and then did 1 on 2, 1 on 3, and we started getting better and better at it. But it wasn't a jump into 10 or jump into five with one proctor, it was try it and work at perfecting it.

And by the way, so go to the next slide. At the same time, I brought those proctors in and let them watch. So they could see, oh my gosh, what am I getting myself into? And they were so adaptable. I was so blessed to have people that were really just willing to jump in there, and they just started supporting pretty quickly.

And again, it was that whole, a couple of my students worked and adults with disabilities programs, they understood the students, they understood scaffolding. I'm not trying to compare, I'm just trying to say if you understand scaffolding and I'm going piece by piece and describing and talking through it, but showing through it too using different techniques when it's not working, they really did a great job of doing that.

And so I stress to them though be patient both with yourself and with your students that are on there, and just acknowledge everything that they do that gets you one step further towards this. Give them a clap if you can't pat them on the back, at least give them a clap and say great work. So far this is not easy, and I think that helped, I love your bravo.

And so the second sessions I started transitioning to the second proctor and we started getting a few more students in so that my first proctor, the primary was now becoming my proctor that I wanted to run these sessions. But still not running we were still just dipping our toes, and I'll tell you, sometimes you were just clapping because you got it took you an hour and a half to get all four or five people up and running, and then other days were like wow that was like 20 minutes, how did I do that?

So I thought that was pretty great when we were getting that much quicker, but every once in a while you'd go back, you take a step back because it would be a different group of people, different issues would come up with a technology, and then around the third session they were able to run the session. And I was able to take a big step back and be able to just support, and then I just continued to support the first 30 to 45 minutes, rarely does it go much longer than that.

So recently I mentioned, we've started to allow up to 10 students. Actually I should say that we were prepared for up to 15 one Saturday because we were trying to intake a bunch of pre-apprenticeship or apprenticeship students adults that were needing ESL support from one of our partners in the area. And so we had set it up for 15 students, we only made it to 10 but we did have two proctors, three proctors at one point, but then went to two proctors and it worked, and we were happy about that. And I guess that's kind of that second bullet, we don't have that many but when we do, I stay on the whole time if we do. And I always schedule myself so that I can always step out if nobody's there, but stay if I need if I'm needed.

We were really fortunate in that we had one of our teachers is-- one of our proctors is CTE teacher, he's very big into graphics and I hadn't thought that through enough. And he just grabbed it and ran, and I felt so fortunate to have him willing to just jump in and translate. And then we found our district has some supports for checking our translations and we have a student, we have a IA that supports us with translation for Chinese in our classroom. One of our beginning classrooms so she helped. But we really found that this was huge, this was a game changer for us when we developed these detailed documents with screenshots. It just step them through the process so much easier and in a comfortable space for them.

Margaret Teske: So it's a lot easier when you do that?

Crystal Korbas: It's a lot easier when you do that.

Margaret Teske: Great.

Crystal Korbas: Yes.

Margaret Teske: Highly recommend it if you're not--

Crystal Korbas: Highly recommend it, yeah. And so getting students ready for testing, we had started back and I think the fall before I got here, they had been passing out the Chromebooks that we had in our Chromebook carts. So our students that needed computers were getting computers, and all of those were preloaded with CASAS eTest. So it was already in Kiosk mode, we already had all of that figured out so that was easy.

The harder students of course were the ones that didn't have the Chromebooks, and were happy with their Windows 10 or their iPad at home. So we had to get used to using really all three, but we don't use the iPads very frequently, it's not a norm. Students borrowed a school Chromebook if they didn't already have one, we found a lot of our students would come borrow it and then return it because they had what they needed at home. But we'll explain, there are some issues that crop up that sometimes you need the student to just try using the school Chromebook instead that's already pre-loaded.

And we provided them that translated document that really helped get our students ready to go usually the day before. So the testing procedures, we use the approach two and three. And we did both, one to multiple with Windows 10, Chromebooks, and even iPads but not very frequently.

And I don't know what my time is, I may do a quick time check. Am I running too long? Go a little quicker? I can do it. So we created binders, that's a good testing procedure, I think is create the binders for the proctors to have right in front of them because you can't be looking in multiple Windows on other devices, you really need to have it sitting in front of you. I think it's too hard to be talking on the Zoom and be looking through all these different documents and guidance, it's better just to have something in front of you. And we use the quick reference sheets at the beginning, but they kind of tell you to go up and do this part if you haven't already, and it kind of it was a little bit difficult.

And so we just took the key components and made a quick checklist for ourselves based on how we were running our sessions, and I would suggest that it kind of helps to have it in the order that you're going to do it just to make sure you hit all the things you need to do. You had mentioned earlier Margaret that I think it doesn't talk about moving them to the breakout room necessarily before you're checking IDs, but that is I'm going to do ID checks and what the room looks like when they're private, I don't want to do that. So the breakout room part was pretty important to us, and so we wanted to have that step through so it flowed. And that's good, so you can go to the next slide.

So lessons learned. The Windows 10 computer, one of our big lessons is especially in a population that has a lot of translation tools that are often embedded at start-up, so when they start up, restart their computer. It just comes on in the background and oh by the way, it's their husband's computer or someone else in the family's computer. They don't even know what's starting up, and they aren't very well vast in technology necessarily. So now they're in a room by themselves and the CASAS test program's shutting down.

So we found that was something that happened and yes, I totally agree going to the Help Desk is a very good idea. However, when you're in the middle of it you're kind of left with-- we have to figure something else out and so often that's something else out was do you have an iPad? Can you bring an iPad over? And I was the resident iPad person because really we rarely did it, but I knew to pull up the instructions and run through the steps and get it into the-- I can't remember if it's-- no it's not Kiosk mode it's the other mode but it's the guided access mode, and so I was--