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Speaker: OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

Anthony Burik: Hello, and welcome to this video about the California EL Civics Exchange and how you can find instructional EL Civics materials for your classroom. First, the EL Civics Exchange website address is elcivics.otan/us, E-L-C-I-V-I-C-S.O-T-A-N.U-S. The part of the website that we will review is publicly available to anyone, either in California or outside of California. All of these materials are meant to be available to those of you who are working on EL Civics projects. Let's walk through the features of the EL Civics Exchange.

We are looking at a laptop or desktop view of the website. Our site is also mobile responsive. If you switch over to your phone or tablet, you will get a slightly different view of the Exchange and the features will appear in a different order than they will on a laptop or desktop. However, everything that we see here will show up on your phone or tablet.

In the upper left hand corner, you may notice this little eye. Click on the eye to turn on accessibility features that you may want to take advantage of. You can switch to gray scale color mode, make the font size larger, highlight the hyperlinks, and more.

You're toggling these features on and off. So for example, if I select the large font option, you should see everything get a little bit bigger, including the menu itself. Select the normal font option, and it will return to the default font size. Click on the eye again to close the menu.

In the upper left hand corner, you will see the logo for the Exchange. You can always click on the logo no matter where you are in the Exchange to come back to the home page of the website. The logo will appear on every screen. At the top of the page in the Resources section, we have included some additional resources to orient you to California EL Civics, Accessibility, and Creative Commons Licensing, which are all part of the Exchange.

Visit this section of the Exchange periodically for other helpful materials that become available in the future. Click on the logo to return to the home page. Also at the top of the page, you will see a place to log into the Exchange. This login feature will allow a user to create an account on the website.

The reason why you would log in is if you want to submit materials from your program. Those steps are covered in the guidelines for submission video in the resources section. Otherwise, you do not need to log in to come to the website and see what is available. Click on the logo again to return to the homepage.

Looking down the screen a little, we have an introduction to the Exchange website. You can see what is available here and also an explanation about licensing and accessibility. Below that, you should see the blue, "Begin the instructional materials submission process" button. This is the place where you would start in order to begin the submission of your materials to the Exchange.

On the left hand side of the screen, you will see this menu for instructional materials. These instructional materials follow the organization of the competency areas for California EL Civics. CASAS and OTAN have organized everything on the exchange according to how agencies in California participate in EL Civics.

EL Civics is different in different states, but this may look somewhat familiar to you if you are from a state outside of California. When you scroll down the page in the middle, you will see the instructional materials again in a slightly different view. We have these tiles here also with the names of the competency areas, and then a little bit more information about how many materials you would find in any one of these areas.

On the left hand side of the screen, you can see a number of different ways to search for materials. Again, remember that everything is organized according to how agencies participate in EL Civics in California. You can type in a Civic objective or COAAP number. You can also search by keyword, such as employment, doctor, or school.

If you scroll down a little bit more, you can search by level. And you can also check a number of different levels. Let's say back at your agency, you have a beginning level ESL class. So you might be interested to see what is available at both the Beginning Low and Beginning High levels. You can check both of these boxes.

Once you fill in the parameters you are searching by, go ahead and click the blue search button near the bottom. And then hopefully that should bring up a wealth of materials that you can look at. You can clear all of your search components by clicking this red Clear All button at the bottom.

At the very bottom, there is a green button that says Feedback. If you come to any place on the website and you want to offer some feedback or something does not look quite right or something is misspelled or not working correctly, you can always click on that Feedback button. It will open up a form. Fill out that form and that form will come to the CASAS and OTAN. We will make sure to respond to that feedback as quickly as we can.

Click on the logo to return to the home page. We hope that this video has oriented you to the California EL Civics Exchange. If you have any questions or need more information, please complete the feedback form and we will be in touch. Thanks for watching and enjoy exploring the Exchange.