[music playing]

Speaker 1: OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

Jill Wright: So hi, everybody, and welcome today to our presentation of engaging faculty in pandemic, remote and learning. My name is Jill Wright and I teach ESL at the Oxnard Adult School. And Viki is my co presenter. Viki you're muted.

Viki Costa: Well already a first mess up and we just barely started. OK so as you guys can tell, I'm a novice at presenting, but my name is Viki Costa and I am a TOSA, teacher on special assignment at Oxnard Adult School. And we are really excited to be presenting today. OTAN has been such a supportive program and staff to help us get to this point.

So we hope you enjoy this. And first, I really, really want you guys to get started. It's completely off topic, but I want you guys to have a happy afternoon Friday. I want you to look around.

What is in your arms reach, arms length or foot length. Of something that starts with your first name, your first letter of your first name. So for me, I'm Viki, the only thing I can find because now I think my first name is ridiculous when I have to find something is the volume button. So as you guys can see.

So if any of you guys can do that. And share with us that would be wonderful. And I'm going to call on Jill first. But I hope some of you guys also look around, see what you can find. And share with us.

Jill Wright: Junk.

Viki Costa: Junk. Jill junk. Viki volume. Anybody else want to share.

Jill Wright: I added into the chat Renee remote.

Viki Costa: Renee remote, that's awesome. That's a good one.

Speaker 4: My name is Chun Hee at the Clovis Adult Education, well my name start with a C. And Clovis Adult Education start with a C and I am drinking Coke with the ice. That's a C.

Viki Costa: That's excellent. And Mandilee, our tech host from OTAN, she did money. I like that one. Anybody else want to share.

All right. Well you guys can put it in the chat. And for some reason, if I miss the chat or Jill misses a chat, Mandilee is going to help us with that.

And definitely if you have something you want to share or something you want to ask of what we're doing or not doing please feel free. We are up for you interrupting. We will stop. We just want to work this out with everybody and enjoy our Friday afternoon.

And so now we'll begin.

Jill Wright: All right, so here we go. So why is this not. There we go. So our objective is, today, we're going to tell you what we went through. Actually, this is a quote from Brene Brown, but I found this on the Oxnard Adult School web page way back in the beginning of last March.

I thought it was quite apropos of our topic.

Viki Costa: Yeah, our administrative assistant is really amazing and she's really good at keeping up with our social media to the best that she can because she wears multiple hats. So she's always posting on there.

Jill Wright: And Viki's going to tell you a little bit about our students.

Viki Costa: So Oxnard Adult School, our student population. We have a lot of migrant workers and field workers because we are known for strawberries. The Strawberry Festival. So a vast majority of our Spanish, our students are Spanish speaking. And Spanish is sometimes their second language because then they speak also Mixteco and other languages.

So sometimes they come with us with very little skills. But 60% of our students are of the Hispanic culture, and a little bit more than that. And then we have about 20% of the Asian and then the breakdown is a bunch of other different cultures, whether they're Caucasian or European, something from those categories.

We do have 60% of our student population are in pre lit to level three. And many of these students don't have any education, like I was saying, from their home country. And so we have about 250 plus different variants of the languages.

So it does make it very difficult. Sometimes we have to involve three or four different translators just to communicate with our students. Most of our students, or a big population of our students, are field workers. I'm sorry about, it's my first time presenting over this without having a script or a PowerPoint.

Usually I just wing it. So I apologize. We have a lot of non documented workers. I mean, that come in and these students are not, and they're very hesitant about sharing personal information. And that includes their name, their birthdate, any additional information, their social security number is another difficult thing.

Our students live in multigenerational homes. And at this time, we have a lot of movement with our students in and out of classes and differing levels of student persistence. Right now, currently, we have 18 ESL classes from pre lit to level six.

We also have adult secondary education. We have a high school equivalency high school diploma and the adult basic education. We also have the CTE program. And that includes, mostly medical is our primary pathway.

So that gives you an idea of what Oxnard Adult School looks like. So a little bit, and I think Jill's going to take over.

Jill Wright: So since we have a small group, we're not going to do breakout rooms. But we would like you to get the link to the Padlet. We want to hear about what your pre pandemic class or school looked like. And I'm going to share the Padlet link.

Viki Costa: So what she means by that is what were you guys doing before we knew we were going to hit this pandemic, before we knew that we were told we're not coming back to school. And then when we left that day, what did what did your program look like when you walked away. Maybe not knowing you weren't coming back or maybe knowing you were going to take a week off. How did that look.

And then we'd like for, if you want to go to the Padlet, because we'd like to share it with everybody at the end. And we would like for some of those of you who are willing to share it to all of us as a group.

Speaker 4: I can share. So Clovis Adult Education and I am our nurse instructor. Nursing instructor. We do have a nurse assistant and the vocational nurse program available. And I've been teaching since 2014, when I joined adult education and they were Scantron, paper, and pencil.

That was 2014. And I started teaching fundamentals of nursing and I converted to everything online and I started creating the website for students to look at the handouts and schedule everything. So I actually created it by myself in the runs and then find a couple of years later after I joined the OTAN and I found out that education have access to Moodle, which is out there to add courses that come.

I love that. That was very, very convenient. So I learn all the skills just by myself. Did not have any mentor. So I already adopted it and using it before pandemic open. And then no other teachers willing to learn and they think it's too much troublesome.

But I created my own class about a dozen of them. And I was using for the clinical and the fundamental nurses, any courses that I was teaching I converted everything into the Moodle. And then if I don't teach that when I have an opportunity to give other teachers, I show them this is all my reference.

It's stored in the Moodle. You don't have to go anywhere, I don't have to give you the key to access to cabinet to get the tests and all that. So I started to kind of like, we have dozens of instructors in the campus. But I did maybe about two or three teachers I converted for them to use the Moodle.

When pandemic just happened and they were not going to come back and actually a couple of teachers ran away because they think that I just have to retire they're not going to teach. And they are not responding any phone calls. But that weekend, I went on and YouTube and got the idea how I can deliver a lecture.

And I adopted Zoom over the weekend. We got to come off something. I had no clue using Zoom but I attended as a guest a few times as normal. But that's all I could think of it but some other teacher introduced me that they can use Discord. I don't know whether you heard about it but people who play a game and they adopted Discord.

And so they're willing to use a Discord.

Jill Wright: Oh Discord. Yeah.

Speaker 4: Yeah, so I let them use a whatever. And then we rolled out and the lecture whatever we have it in the computer already. And it turned out we never stopped the program. We let the three cohorts to graduate. Just it's 18 months program and we continue to push them and use the Zoom and the Moodle.

And that's all we did. And then Google. And I also learned that some of the Google Docs and so I use the Google to have them to upload a converted assignment into Google Doc. Because that was the only freebees that students can have it, so they can upload it Google Docs and share. So that's it, Google, Zoom, Moodle. And that's how we survived.

Jill Wright: All right. So you didn't have a lot of tech proficiency in your school.

Speaker 4: Nobody has it and I'm very improfessional. But I do everything and then learn from YouTube.

Jill Wright: All right. All right. So I see somebody is on the Padlet and saying that they also had primarily Spanish speaking, mostly female, and five ESL levels. About 700 students. And significant attrition during the pandemic.

She says our older social student, our older adult students in ESL are really there for social connection. And a lot of them dropped. And I see that in my class, actually.

Many said they'll return when they are back in person. Now anybody else. All right, well I encourage you.

Viki Costa: With their school without putting into the Padlet, you can speak out on your program. OK. Well thank you for sharing your program. I definitely want to visit Clovis.

A plan of mine. I keep looking at it, so you're going to get a call from us soon and we're going to come up there and visit. Thank you.

Jill Wright: So like, is it Chun Hee, shared, we also had low teacher tech proficiency. And those teachers had not much interest in becoming more tech proficient. Most of our teachers, maybe most teachers, are closet perfectionists.

You may or may not wish to agree with that. I certainly am. Maybe not closet perfectionist. Anyway, we don't want to fail in front of our students.

And we certainly don't want to look or feel stupid, just like our students. So pre pandemic, there were very few teachers using online tools or accessing digital learning resources. And very few people who could help others learn how to use these resources. OTAN, of course, but you know, people like right here right now in person. Not so many.

Textbooks were king and ruled most classes. Now we were using Burlington English, and we've been using Burlington English since its rollout for OAS in 2016. There was the initial normal and anticipated resistance to Burlington English, that new tech, even though in class tech help was available to teachers.

That lasted about a year. And then after that, there was always someone available to help troubleshoot in the class if necessary. Although, in class tech buddies were no longer available. Some teachers even resisted using Burlington even with all this help. Some printed out the worksheets for students and gave them out like a paper packet.

Low level students, one or two didn't use Burlington at all. And then there were low level students and their teachers, they just used very little tech on a regular basis. There was no teacher accountability regarding usage of tech.

Teachers used their strengths and their experience to teach. And they were not hugely open or hugely flexible in moving to new platforms. And then there was the transition from Outlook to G Suite. Was in about 2017, 2018. Our district began transitioning to Google and to G Suite.

The district created self paved online training on a different platform called Alludo for all of our teachers. And initially, adult school teachers were not included in those who could access this program. Some couldn't even access their new emails.

Some teachers worked with Alludo and learned a lot of new stuff. Most didn't. So life in school moved along as normal, even though we had begun hearing about the strange new disease that was discovered in China.

I think most of us didn't think much of it. Even when it was detected in the US, didn't really touch us here in Oxnard, initially. And then last year in March, some of us flew up to Sacramento to attend the 2020 TDLS and we were all close together and no one wore masks, although we were a little bit nervous. So we went from this, and then that fateful day, March 13th.

Those who wanted were given Chromebooks by the school. We were all sent home thinking we had one week off and we would return and carry on as we had been. How wrong we all were.

Viki Costa: And those, and let me clarify who those were. Only teachers for the adult schools. For the other schools, the comprehensive high schools, all the students, a majority of the students, already had one to one devices. Except for a handful and they were already making arrangements to do that. But adult ed, we were left out of that whole dynamic of getting one to one devices for our students. It was not important.

But our principal is the principal of a high school, so she had extra Chromebooks and she said any of our teachers can use and sign up for a Chromebook. So that was helpful and that's what we started doing.

Jill Wright: All right.

Viki Costa: So what, and again we're not going to do breakout rooms, there's just a few of us. So we all have a chance to speak. But think about the questions. What was it like when your school shut down and how long were you closed.

Because for us, and what were your responsibilities if any at the time of the closure. So at our school, our superintendent told us on, I believe it was that Friday, the 13th, that we will be closed for one week. So of course, we all go home.

And I'm thinking, well, if I need anything I'll go in but we didn't have to do anything. We're just taking a week off. OK. So we all planned a week off, then we realized this is going on.

So we got another notice we're going to take another two weeks off after that. And so we weren't prepared. And it was just a shutdown, we put signs up on our gates and a few people were there not letting anybody in, but just putting signs up in multiple languages all around.

So that's how it initially looked like for us. And what was the responsibilities. Well, of everybody, well, for me, as one of the because it's just my principle and it was myself as next steps, just take the week off. And if you can, maybe send an email to your students, maybe contact your students.

So that was the only direction that we were going. So if some of you can share, that'd be great. Let's see, anybody have anything in chat.

Speaker 4: I'm going to share mine since nobody's speaking. I'm sorry.

Viki Costa: We want you to share.

Speaker 4: OK so remember when we went up to Sacramento for that weekend, the week before we closed. And actually I borrowed the school laptop to take it with me at that conference. The OTAN conference. And I never returned that laptop to school because, well, they closed it. That's what happened.

So, well good thing. I was thinking God must have had a good plan. Because I had a computer, I'm the only person have a school computer. Went up, came back, we closed, and then nobody else around the campus. I took a computer and I worked on it with the school computer because I was access to all the school email and everything.

And we did the same thing. It's going to be one week up and we ended up whole entire week. But I did have my daughter in law was having a baby that 13 of weekend. March 13. And so I took my computer with me and went down and my son is a computer developer.

So here I shared with him, hey, you know, he was the one actually helped me to put all that online things because he's a kind of computer problem troubleshooter. So everything I turn around instead of my IT guys, and I asked him consulted along the way, while I was teaching. And it turns out really great because he was the one suggested oh, you could use a Zoom, you could use all that.

So I just started on myself and he was available. I was visiting his house while waiting for the baby to come. And here I got all coordinated and ready to roll out every single class. We can do this. We can do online.

We can teach. Because you're all expert in the subject area, all you need to do is just sit in front of a computer and making sure you go back in class.

The school and pick up the laptop, school laptop, because they have all this screen thing. You don't have to purchase anything. So that's all we did. We started giving those the laptop that goes to computer lab and then take it back and they charging sitting there.

They just converted to teachers and all the teachers get to have their computer started lecturing following me. So pretty quick change.

Viki Costa: You sound, it sounds like we were all in the same place together. Because at first, I was like, we're not getting any direction. You know, at the adult school level.

And I had teachers that were calling their students because they had no tech skills at all. In fact, they didn't even have a smartphone, they had a flip phone. So they called each one of their students each night that they were supposed to have class. And then by the time they got done and had conversations it was midnight so they would call me at midnight to tell me, OK, this what happened with this one.

And I'm like 6:00 AM to midnight, but I didn't know which direction to go into. And so then that's where Jill and I were talking and a couple of us who had some skills. And we were working with our principal and we were trying to figure out the next directions to go.

Jill Wright: And Sima, I hope I'm saying your name correctly, Sima in the chat says that they also had one or two teachers who started with Zoom and encouraged others. And the teachers supported each other and that's what we've heard from a lot of people. That the teachers were supporting each other.

Viki Costa: And just to let you know, we also had one teacher, she just didn't want anything to do with tech. She is an amazing teacher and now she's on board. But she did not respond to emails.

Did not answer phone calls. She ran away from it all. And she's like, I just, I turned on the computer and it kicked me off so I decided I was all done for the semester. So that freaked her out, but she finally got on board. We spent one on one time with her and now she's right in line with all of us. And right on the same page with us all.

Speaker 4: We had a one teacher and he's actually 73, but he still teach. And he sent me an email. Long email that he finally decided to retire.

Jill Wright: Yeah, I think a lot of schools are experiencing that sort of teacher shift right now. So you remember, we have the picture of the teacher writing on the whiteboard. So we went from that to this. And then the spring.

Viki Costa: Then the spring came. So at that point, once we realized we may not come back till after spring break, you know, what we're going to do. How did we prepare at our school site for emergency remote teaching and learning.

And so we want you guys to discuss what you guys did. And I know, Chun Hee, you laid it out there. And did you feel ready to go remote.

Jill Wright: Saying, excuse me, Viki, sorry to interrupt. I didn't mean to cut you off there. Lisa's saying that in her district, they had some classes that were strictly online and that sounds really fortunate to me. However, our nursing assistant classes were canceled until we received a waiver from the state.

All of our classes were transitioned online. We had to be creative with classes with web components.

Viki Costa: Oh nice. So we did not actually close or cancel any of our classes. However, our medical classes we have a CNA class, we have pharmacy tech, and we have medical assisting and back office. And we were able to keep those thank goodness.

They're somewhat tech savvy and they would give additional work virtually, remotely, to the students also while having them in class just as extra study skills. And we got approval from our superintendent to, if you have three or four students in proper PPE following the CDC guidelines, you can come in after a few weeks.

So we made up the hours a little bit towards, we postponed it and pushed it off. And so we did not cancel any of our classes and we're thankful for that part of it. Because the teachers teaching those programs were very flexible and willing to make up the hours and be creative, like you said. And certain skills you have to do on hand.

We were supposed to completely close our campus. But our principal was a little flexible and was very convincing to our superintendent, so we were back open right after spring break.

Jill Wright: Oh. And now Sima's writing again that they were using Burlington in class and some Google tools. So the students had some skills, however, many of them did not have a laptop. So we use some info that West Contra Costa Adult School had shared to adapt lessons with tools on cell phones like WhatsApp, Zoom app on the cell phone.

And did paper packets for some lower level ESL students. I've heard a lot of schools did paper packets. So anyway, so here we are now.

Viki Costa: Yes.

Jill Wright: And our spring, after one week off, we heard we would not be returning to school. We returned only online by the end of like two weeks later. So that was around March 23. And like Viki said, during that hiatus teachers were supposed to make contact with their students. And the goal was to keep in touch as everybody was uncertain what would happen.

Everybody was wondering what going forward would look like. Everybody was a little or a lot scared, uncertain, feeling inadequate to the task of online pandemic teaching. At this point, our goal was low intensity teaching and learning, just showing up, seeing everybody's faces, and having some conversation was satisfying and enough. In the beginning.

We were missing the connection that we had lost with in person teaching. In terms of tech for teaching remotely, there was not a lot of guidance, like Viki mentioned, on how we were supposed to be doing this. Many teachers at our school took advantage of the training sessions that OTAN offered, which was amazing.

And in the fall of 2018, while working through our district self paced online learning game, that's the Alludo that I mentioned before, that the district made available when we transitioned from Outlook to Google. I had created a Google Classroom for Oxnard Adult School, OAS teachers.

And I called it Google training and I had already invited everybody, but a lot of people hadn't joined. And so once we all went home, I started putting a lot of stuff on there, posting frequently, and a lot of teachers joined and paid attention.

So there was increasing communication. Teachers were encouraged to participate and they attained trainings. They were encouraged to use the Google Training classroom. Our district started offering trainings and we were initially included, but teachers were not encouraged to take part in the beginning.

Many teachers were not aware of these offerings, and most of the sessions were not on topics relative or, excuse me, relevant to adult ed. OAS teachers also got together in smaller groups to learn and practice together. Now, I learned about Zoom from OTAN.

And I created a free educator account and some other teachers at our school were using Google Meet. Again, no directive on how we were expected to communicate with our students. It was like, whatever works, do it. And a lot of us were doing many, many different things.

Then we had spring break, which seemed really strange. And a lot of teachers taught right through. Some teachers who had good contact with their students, like I said, taught through other, took the break and of course we remained remote. Our attrition was extremely high. About 50%.

So some teachers transitioned well. Made good contact, got them connected, carried on. And the challenges of getting everybody connected to Zoom or meet were very, very real. As we are still discovering like on a daily basis. Some teachers did not transition well, like Viki mentioned, and they just vanished.

So somewhere around April, I think, our office began phoning all of the students just to connect with them. See what was going on. Were they attending, were they not attending, what were their plans.

Teachers were using everything to connect with students. Some teachers became very adept at managing multiple accounts. We had district email, which is Google, for the school communication. And then personal Google for student communication.

And our students, at this point, did not have district Google accounts. So they were unable to join district Google classrooms. So we're going to talk a little bit about the pub and the club in a little bit.

This threw several wrenches into everything. We did no testing at this point. No CASAS, no GED, no HSE, HSD, no EL Civics. Not in person, not remote. And initially, all EL Civics units had been canceled. Then they were reinstated later in the semester.

EL Civics testing was conducted via Zoom or socially distanced in the parking lot. In person CASAS, testing resumed in June by appointment only. Masks and other PPE required and socially distanced. And the semester ended.

Viki Costa: Let me add something to that, Jill.

Jill Wright: Yeah.

Viki Costa: So you know, Jill said no CASAS at that time. And that was true. We were fortunate to have a wonderful testing and accountability coordinator who is very on top of the CASAS testing.

So as soon as they had their hours in she called them in and tested them. So when the pandemic hit and we went through the school closures, we were pretty good with our numbers. So the reports were ran and it was only time for her to do make ups for the CASAS test. So that was one benefit we did have, even if we could not get any more students tested.

Really quick. I would like to introduce one of our teachers from our school, Kim Kavanaugh. She is our high school, our ASE teacher. She does both high school diploma and high school equivalency students. She has joined our room.

She's also one of our high school teachers at the comprehensive campuses as well. There she is. Kim, would you like to add anything else of how the spring semester went and how we just went through the media shut down all of a sudden and we didn't have much warning. All of us, we just knew it's pandemic and we're.

Speaker 5: Well one thing I thought was really great, and there is a few of us, Jill, and a few of us we're at the conference last year. And it was pretty much the last in person conference that really happened anywhere.

So at that conference, we kind of knew something was going to be happening very soon so we started like learning everything we could as it was going to like Burlington and trying to get different things. [audio out] to go out of in person and online. So I just started taking so many notes so we could do that transition pretty well.

And then also with the CASAS, our CASAS testing, especially with the HSE and HSD room, when our students had that 40 hours, we would test them. So that was really great that we were constantly always testing them.

So when we did move into that, we didn't lose a whole bunch with that. Because we did make sure that we were always doing the testing. I don't know if that helped you.

Viki Costa: No that's great Kim. Thank you for sharing. Is there anything else you wanted to add in.

Speaker 5: No. [audio out]

Jill Wright: You're really breaking up, Kim.

Speaker 5: [audio out]. Sorry, I'll be quiet.

Jill Wright: This is Zoom in action.

Viki Costa: Yeah, this is where technology sometimes fails us. So you know, she's been on Zoom all day teaching her classes at the high school level and maybe if the reception comes in better she can get in and speak. Jill, did you want to.

Jill Wright: No, I'm just, our tree man is outside.

Viki Costa: Oh.

Jill Wright: Yeah, anyway, so we went from to this. Now we're tired. And at the end of the semester, everybody took a deep breath. And so we'd like to offer you the opportunity to also have a little relaxation break. I'll set my timer for 2 minutes.

We're also available to take questions. So if you've got any at this point, now's a good time to ask.

Viki Costa: Stretch, run to the bathroom, grab a cup of coffee, iced tea, or Coke. It's still a little bit early for that after 5 o'clock beverage, so. Anybody have anything exciting happening this weekend. Jill is going to go hiking tomorrow.

Speaker 5: I'm going whale watching.

Viki Costa: Whale watching. Fantastic.

Speaker 5: I got a group on. My family's going. Going to look at the [inaudible] Islands from afar.

Viki Costa: Beautiful. It's supposed be a beautiful day. The weather has just improved throughout the whole week where it's going to be a gorgeous weekend. So everybody better enjoy it, do their walking or hiking, their whale watching. This weekend because next week, I think it's supposed to be raining and cold.

And just we're not done yet. This is just a break, but remember, when you guys leave to go out and take a few moments, to not only fill out our evaluation, but all the other sessions you went to throughout the last three days. I realized I forgot to do one from yesterday. So I was able to do it earlier this morning.

There's some fantastic speakers and presenters so please make sure you fill those out. And remember, we have that 2:30 to 3:30 session, and I know you will go over everything before we leave. But that's it.

Jill Wright: All right, that's my timer. All right, which I use all the time with students by the way. They laugh. OK, so here we are. Back at our there we are.

So now we have summer.

Viki Costa: Now before we got to the summer, though, right before we had to have them go on relaxation break, was you heard me saying that I get phone calls at midnight, phone calls at 6:00 AM. That is not an exaggeration. My earliest phone call was at 6:10 AM by our lovely dad. He's the amazing teacher.

And he would call about 10:45 at night. And we'd be on the phone an hour, two hours. And so our days were 18 hour days. And I'm sure all of you preparing for, your day's extended out too. So at the end, we just told everybody, don't even talk on the phone, don't text, just step away from your computers.

You have to have some downtime because you get tech fatigue. And our principal would say you're, a couple of times, I'd cry, oh my gosh, am I doing this correct. She's like OK, Viki, tech fatigue has hit you. Step away from the computer.

So we have to remind ourselves of that.

Jill Wright: All right, so did any of you have a summer session last year.

Speaker 5: I did.

Jill Wright: Yeah, we had a summer session at our school. All right, maybe some of you will respond in the chat.

Viki Costa: Talk about our and I'll watch the chat then.

Jill Wright: Thank you. So we decided after much deliberation and calculation of pay points missed, we decided to have a short session in the summer of 2020. And really, it was a pilot program.

We were going to have classes in ESL only. 30 hours over 4 weeks. And the curriculum would be one EL Civics co op. We chose health.

Teachers were chosen assuming that they wanted to teach administration. Handpicked different teachers. One teacher per level who was fairly comfortable with tech, who had had good results and decent attendance during the spring.

And like I said, it was a pilot program to see if we could do remote testing and how that would go. And it worked. It worked well. We advertised summer classes online only so students knew what they were signing up for.

CASAS testing resumed. We were doing that face to face by appointment only, again, safety protocols in place. I keep losing my cursor here. And we discovered we could do it.

Maybe we should say we could do it with the mask.

Viki Costa: And Sima, you did a similar session in June and one class per level. Did that seem to go well and did you have good attendance from the students. Yeah, and just to kind of go off what you said and what Jill said, we did one per level. We just tried to stretch it out.

And same with the ASC program. So we had high school diploma teachers and high school equivalency teachers available, also. There were four teachers and Kim was one of them that was representing that department. All right.

Jill Wright: All right, so we discovered we can do it even with masks. But it was tired. It took more time. And then the fall came.

And we'd like to hear, how did your school implement what you had learned from the spring. To move forward into the fall. And I think we're going to dispense with the Padlet. Just either share in the chat or break in now.

Viki Costa: And did you guys feel more prepared for the fall semester to start. And were you guys ready to come back and did you have a plan, or did you walk in the same way as you walked out.

Speaker 6: Jill and Viki, my name is Renee. I haven't said much because I am not at a school site. However, we did a lot of surveys with OTAN and CAEP TAP in the late summer, early fall. And most agencies indicated that they did feel ready to go back.

I would say probably in the 70% to 90% range felt like they had the means and at least a plan in place to be able to go back successfully.

Jill Wright: Thank you for jumping in and saying that. Anybody else want to share anything. Well, if you change your mind, decide you want to, please jump in. So once we started, go ahead Kim.

Speaker 5: OK, I was going to say something. I know that originally Jill had mentioned that our school district did a pretty good job for the K through 12, or not the K through 12, the high school section, making sure that there was technology and everything. And sometimes the adult school teachers didn't quite know that they were able to do it.

But I know that they every summer, our district does a really good technology program. And I didn't know about it until Jill told me. So that was one thing that I really learned a lot, like about Padlet and different things that I use with my, even with my high school students and with my adult school students.

So that was a really thing that helped me feel prepared for the coming up.

Jill Wright: Thanks Kim. And that's one thing that we didn't really make a point of noting in here but the communication really increased. There was a lot more communication. And it went a whole lot better. Sorry Viki, go ahead.

Viki Costa: And just to add to that, our district's really supportive of us and they do work with us. So to fairly say that we didn't have access to the district stuff, it was just as much, we never really had to communicate with the district because we were all on our own little island and they were on their island. And then all of a sudden, now that we're in this situation that none of us ever expected to be in, we didn't know how to handle it.

We were just separate. And so the pandemic has done so many awful things, so many horrific things, but it's also done a couple fantastic things. It's brought us together to work as a district. So now we work, we have a supportive superintendent district management. It's really wonderful.

And we are part of their district. But also, it's pushed us to the next level because technology was not our thing. It was not any of our things. We were moving along without it because that's the way we always did it.

And so this really, Jill and I and a few others, Kim, we always wanted to bring technology in, but we were shaking it up and it wasn't really accepted. But now that change pushed us. Yeah, it really did. So there were a couple of positives out of this.

Jill Wright: Thank you. So when the fall rolled around, there were more changes of course, but also a lot more intentionality. So we all knew in advance that classes would be remote. And students also knew in advance that classes were going to be remote.

And that was a really positive thing for everybody, because we knew what the baseline was going to be. And it also precipitated some teacher attrition, as some of you have mentioned. So we switched from Outlook to Google and now administration mandated use of Google Classroom. And this was fine, except that we didn't initially have district Google emails for students.

We had district Google emails for teachers. So now, we're talking about the club, like Melinda likes to say. And the pub. So we're trying to do the interface with district Google and public Google. And the interface was extremely bumpy and difficult.

So what ended up happening was our teachers created Google Classrooms in their club accounts, and then needed to create a parallel Google universe in their pub account. This was difficult for a lot of people to get their minds around. So in addition, oh, and we were no more Google, no more Zoom, unfortunately, but we could use Google Meet.

So again, we've got the same kind of interface difficulty going on with the district Google Meets and the public Google Meets and it was stressful. Very stressful. During the fall, district emails for students finally rolled out. So yay. We were very excited about that.

We were actually, we were thrilled about that. We've been wanting that for three years. But district accounts rolled out mid semester and it was very bumpy and my class was the first class, we piloted the transition. So I was able finally to get all of my students enrolled or signed into their district email, find the waffle, sign into my new old district Google Classroom in the club, and we made that transition.

Bumpy, difficult, but we did it. Teachers had less difficulty communicating with their students. That was great. And many students enrolled for classes.

Many students were still enrolling for classes in person. When they did this as part of the enrollment process, they took the CASAS test, they were assigned a teacher, they were provided with the teacher's email as well as instructions how to sign into Google Meet, to Burlington English, to Rosetta Stone.

And so that mini orientation was really helpful. It reduced stress for the teachers and reduced barriers for students. And here we are. Most students were returning students in spring.

They had had experience using Google Meet, Burlington, Rosetta Stone. However, spring semester brought continued bumpy roll out of student district emails and parallel difficulties joining Google Classroom and meet classes. And the interface difficulties still continued.

Teachers encountered difficulty managing multiple Google and Chrome accounts. And one thing we learned is that the Chrome account supersedes the Google account. So if you are signed into a public Chrome account, doesn't matter if you are signed into your district Google account. The Chrome supersedes.

So it dictates the parameters of what can and cannot be accessed. So using Google Meet in lieu of Zoom has also caused some bumps. So we've had a student's child join class in error. We've had a student walk down the hallway while on the cell phone in class and then the family member came out of the bathroom clad only in a towel.

We also have had incidents when a student thought they had left class and proceeded to go ahead and change clothes. So the difficulty with muting cameras in meet, that doesn't exist. We can't mute cameras and meet, but you can in Zoom. We learned that Google Meet links can break and they can be reset, but not while a meet is in session.

So the tech problems that we're dealing with have shifted from big how to, like how do I do Zoom. How do I do Google Meet, how do I sign into my district account. To smaller and more detailed questions like how do I create an assignment in Google Classroom so that each of my students has a copy. How can I use a whiteboard in meet.

How do I get breakout rooms in Google Meet and how do I use them. There's the ongoing issue of teacher accountability and that big related question of how do I continue to connect myself with administration. We have answers for some of these. All right.

And now moving forward. How about, go ahead Viki.

Viki Costa: How is your school planning to move forward knowing that the restrictions in California are starting to, everything's starting to open up slowly. Our schools are allowed to, on a voluntary basis, at least our district, we're allowed to return following guidelines.

How is your school planning to move forward now or in the future, even next school year. And what will that look like for you. I would like for some of you to share or just even moving forward. Because some of us don't know what it's going to look like for the '21, '22 school year. But how is it going to look forward from today till June.

And if anybody wants to share, please jump in. Or we do have someone, Deborah, my class sessions in summer 2020 at El Monte Rosemead Adult School, a majority of the teachers have the summer project 2020 with pay. Always they like the pay, to be trained for hybrid classes and use Moodle as their learning platform starting fall 2020 for ESL, ASC, and CTE. Excellent.

So for us, to move forward, we just got notification this week that March 15, we can return back to school till June 10, is our graduation day. We can return back to school on a voluntary basis. Voluntary for teachers and staff and students.

We are having another meeting early next week with the teachers to discuss that, to see who wants to return. And our student ratio will be 14, 14 to 1. So we'll see how many teachers we're supposed to get. They had a survey and completed it today. Let's see how many teachers want to come back.

I don't think the number is very high. And that's been the decision right now of how we are going to move forward till June. So if anybody would like to share, we would like to hear how your district in your school is taking the next step. Sima, our adult school will stay online for the remainder of the school year, regardless of the K through 12 decision.

Our students said they want to stay online this year. Excellent, I think a lot of our students, the ones that have finally gotten the hang of it, and have the devices, have everything, they really want to as well. I think blended instructions will continue. Deborah, absolutely.

Jill Wright: We agree with that as well. Viki, I think there's one more in the chat.

Viki Costa: Mr. C. How do you guys deal with the fact that budget cuts shortage while teachers be left alone with new accountability's, technology, and transitions. Emotionally it is discouraging knowing that while teachers are being asked to carry more responsibilities and the response that we get from the admin is to cut from your paycheck.

Well, I have to tell you, our district, we are very, very fortunate. Extremely fortunate. We have a great union.

So we have not had any cuts. Our principle has been, our administrative school site and district site have been, we cannot be more thankful to them. They have been very supportive, they have not cut our hours.