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Speaker 1: OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

Alisa Takeuchi: I want to give a shout out to Ryan de la Vega. I haven't seen him a long time. But he is also an OTAN SME. And he was actually one of my first mentors on how to present. And so because of him I have been able to do a lot of presentations and really become kind of successful at it. So thank you, Ryan. I'm super excited to see you here today.

All right, so let us get started because I really want to try to make room at the end of this presentation to do a live demonstration on Owl. If you were at the CASAS session a little while ago, then I was able to do it for about a minute or two. But I really wanted to share with you how we use the Owl in our classrooms.

I've done this presentation-- this particular topic-- this is probably my 10th one in about six months. And it has evolved in time because our system has also changed. And we've really taken what has been working and what hasn't been working and moving with that. But also because of the feedback from the field, from all of you, the participants, about what you wanted to hear more about, what you really didn't want to hear too much about and things like that.

So I've actually morphed this presentation quite a few times. And so one of the big things was about the Owl. At the beginning, nobody really wanted to hear about the Owl. And if you're listening to me and you're having no idea what I'm saying right now, an Owl is a 360 camera that has a built in speaker and microphone in our classroom. And so I can talk about it a little bit and then demonstrate it.

As time has been going on, more and more agencies tend to have been interested in more about it. So I do want to make sure that I include some of it but not take up too much time. So let me go ahead and get started.

So my name is Alisa Takeuchi. I am an ESL Instructor for Garden Grove Adult Education. And we have been very fortunate. And a couple of aspects is that our district has really opened up our school quite early. We were online remote during the pandemic for one year exactly. So I was teaching remotely for 367 days.

And then we actually were able to open our school back up again in March, 1 year ago-- recently. So we have been one of the first schools to actually open up its doors for students. And I'll tell you about the challenges and successes of that. I also do work for OTAN with deputy Ryan. And I am a Subject Matter Expert.

So I think this is how the agenda is going to go depending on time. I'll do a quick introduction and some background about my school. And then we'll talk a little bit about pandemic because I really want to use that as an opportunity to show how the transition went. So for some of you here-- this is actually going to be kind of an interactive. So if you were thinking about multitasking, you might want to stop because I'm going to be asking you some questions and having you reply in the chat.

Because I really do like to get a feel for the room and then just kind of get some information about where people are at. I will talk about how we as an agency prepared for what we call HyFlex, which is a simultaneous instruction. And then from there I will talk about how do I do the instruction that engages both the in-class and the online students-- and then successes and challenges.

So a little bit of background. My school is actually called Lincoln Education Center. We're part of the Garden Grove Unified School District, the K through 12 system. We are south from Los Angeles. We're right probably in between Los Angeles and San Diego. My school is, for reference, 1.5 miles away from Disneyland if that kind of gives you an idea of where we are.

Our population is primarily Vietnamese right now. We do have a lot of Latinos in our population at school. And then we used to have quite a few Koreans. But they have actually moved on to another city. They've kind of migrated to another city next to us.

All right, so if you could in the chat, I'd really like to know what part you take in adult education. Are you an ESL instructor? And if you are, what level do you teach? Are you CTE, HSC, ABE, everything like that. If you could type that in the chat, that would be fantastic. And I actually-- let's see here. Let me get my chat up so I can see.

Maybe you have hats. You can type that in there too. Admin, yeah, I see admin. Resources. Academic. Wow, we've got a full gamut.

Nice. Thank you so much, everybody. I really appreciate that. And I usually do this at the very beginning. I thought I had a slide on here. But if you haven't done it yet, if you could do me a favor. If you could put your name and your agency, that would be fantastic too. Usually that's an OTAN thing.

But I really do enjoy-- I do go back to the chats after my sessions. And I read all the chats. And I read the question and things like that in case I missed something during the session. So I appreciate that, thanks.

Woopsie. Oh, no?

So I'd also like to know what model or models of instruction you're currently using at your agency, whether it be online only still or in class only still or are you doing some sort of HyFlex or are you doing some sort of distance learning? I'd like to get to know what types of instruction are being offered at your school.

So Carla is doing in-person and online. Simultaneously or separated? Audrey at Sweetwater is doing in-person and distance learning. I know-- I just had a conversation with her that they are thinking about doing the HyFlex soon. Still remote, yeah. In person, yeah, a lot of you are still-- it's-- yeah, Patrick is still doing in-person online and hybrid. So you're offering a variety of instruction.

Great, yeah, I love it. Like I said earlier, Garden Grove-- all of our classes and all of our departments are using the HyFlex model. Whether that be just-- whether or not they have students in online or in class because we give the students a choice. So upon online registration, the students will choose which mode of instruction they would like.

All right, so this will be the last one I think for a while. So what are your thoughts when you hear simultaneous instruction? Are you like, huh, what's that, or eh, I don't know, or hey, I'm OK, or I'm open to it?

What are your thoughts when you hear simultaneous? So some of you are in the thick of it right now. Some of you are thinking about it come fall or maybe your summer school classes. Oh nice, Lynn, yeah. First HyFlex with an Owl. I see. You got it from the get-go, nice.

Yes, Clara, that's exactly right. It is a learning curve. That's exactly right, Ryan, too. And that's a big issue right now upon-- I can't make these flat statements or these umbrella statements with all of you because we all have different capabilities within our agency-- funding, tech, support, things like that. And so all I can do really is give you my perspective from our agency.

But I do understand that we are very lucky here. But for three months I did have a different situation. So I can give you that perspective as well. Nice, Scott. I love the enthusiasm. Good, all right. Let's get going. So again, this is what we're talking about. This is straight from our online registration, which we had to create when we went pandemic because we were-- the traditional students came into our office and filled out a huge, long triplicate that had all the wheel information and stuff on it.

And then we just we developed a Google form and translated all that information onto the Google form. And we added this question. Do you want to be in-person or online? So the students have a choice. And it wasn't that they were going to be in-person in one class and online in a totally different class. They were actually going to be in-person or online in the same class.

Oh yeah, Christina, I hear you because I do beginning students as well. We'll talk about that. All right, so this might look pretty familiar. From March 2020 to March 2021 my class was solely online. Pre-pandemic I had about 40 students in class. Once March 17 happened, I had 16. So I lost more than half of my class.

And no matter what, no matter all the outreach that I did, the texting, the emailing, the calling, having the liaisons call in their language, some of the students just did not come back for a variety of reasons. As time went on I gained a lot of new students, which was a real surprise to us because we had students that weren't able to come to our school before because they lived far away.

So a couple of those students that you see in this picture, they lived in Fullerton which is about maybe a 40 minute drive. So of course they weren't going to be driving to our school every day. But having an online class was the perfect solution for them. So we actually gained some other students that we weren't expecting.

So in March of 2021, one year after we started remote instruction, we got the call saying that our school was going to be opened in April. And so the last week of March, the teachers were allowed to come back to school for the first time and really kind of decide how they wanted their classroom to look. And so I came back. I had a vision in my head of what I thought I wanted my class. But then I kind of had to see what it would look like.

I knew I wasn't going to be behind my desk, which I didn't really take a good picture of it. But it's right here. My teacher desk is here. And I have a desktop computer on there. But I knew I didn't want to be stuck behind my desk because then I wouldn't really be able to engage well with the in-class students. So I moved my workstation to the front of the class. And so then at the time, we really did have restrictions about how many students can be-- we can only have 18 students in the classroom which was not a problem.

And I'll tell you about it in a minute. But we had the Plexiglas. I had to wear the double masks. This was at the very beginning of opening things back up. And then as you can see in the picture, I have my Zoom students. So I was still teaching my class in my classroom with my Zoom students when we were preparing to open the doors. And that was going to happen in April.

So here's another viewpoint of my teacher workstation. I had my laptop on a podium at the time because I needed my computer to be up high because I was going to be standing or at least sitting in a high chair because on the desk it was too low. So I had this podium in my classroom from before. And so I was just using that. Sometimes I would put it on the table on a stack of books. So again, I really wanted my computer to be up higher. And so I would just put it on a pile of books.

And this is another. Now you can see that I have my laptop computer. And then in the back, you can also see that I have an electronic whiteboard with a projector. And that we had prior to the pandemic. We had just upgraded. And we had smart boards. But they were antiquated. And so we had actually just started the process of getting the classrooms upgraded. And my classroom just happened to be one of them. And then schools shut down and we didn't use them for over a year, so.

This was my Zoom class. And I was all excited. We knew in March-- I mean in April we were going to be open. And I said, OK, who wants to come back to class? I had four students who raised their hand. And so looking back, we didn't force anybody. There was no question. If they wanted to stay online, that was great. If they wanted to come to school, that was great too.

The four that are circled, I'm actually really glad that they actually chose to come back to class because they were kind of the ones that were struggling online. They were very consistent and very loyal. And they came to school all the time. But it wasn't easy for them, whether they had distractions at home or their internet was not so good or-- they still struggled with their devices. So I was actually kind of glad that they chose to come back to school. And I think they were, too. They were very happy when they found out that school was going to reopen.

So April 3 we opened up our doors. Welcome, welcome, welcome. We had to do a whole orientation. We had two different orientations. We had an in-class orientation and then we had online orientation as well. So the in-class orientation was for all of these students who were going to be leaving Zoom and coming into the class because we had so many health restrictions.

I didn't add any of those slides as I had before in previous presentations because that stuff is over now. Most of you who are going to open your schools up again probably won't have to go through the same structures that we had to go through at that time. So I didn't include those slides in there. But we did do a whole orientation on what was expected of the students.

So here is my new classroom now. I have my four students that said that they wanted to come back, as you can see. I have my workstation and then on the far right, on my electronic whiteboard, you'll see that those are my Zoom students. So my in-class students could see my Zoom students. But my Zoom students couldn't see my in-class students unless I physically took my laptop and I flipped it around and showed the camera to them.

And I did that every once in a while so that they could wave hi. Because they really missed each other. For a whole year they were in class together on Zoom. And they really formed this bond. And now some of them have separated from that. And so the Zoom students missed them. So at the beginning of class, I would turn my laptop sometimes.

Now, as my progress is moving along and I did this presentation, I had a lot of teachers go, oh, you could put an external camera on your laptop facing toward the students. And I went, genius! At the time, I was just surviving. I was just trying to figure out how I could do this. And I didn't have a lot of ideas in front of me to take from. But as time has gone by, I had gotten a lot of suggestions. And I thought, oh man, I wish I would have known this three months ago.

So here comes curriculum. So we at Garden Grove, for the ESL department, we all use Ventures from beginning literacy all the way through academic. And so Ventures is from Cambridge. They have the whole book. Everything is digital. I have access to the digital textbook and things like that-- resources, worksheets, everything we had that was available digitally, which really helped during the remote sessions because we were able to get all those resources and put them in Google Classrooms.

So now that I'm in the class and teaching online at the same time, I could just project anything that I was teaching and in particular unit on the whiteboard, share my screen. So now both the in-class students and the online students could see it at the same time. I also use Oxford. I usually use Oxford Picture Dictionary, OPD. And so again, I use the old version because we hadn't adopted the new edition. So I've been using the second edition for a long time.

And so I still had the presentation tools. And so even though it's kind of a little bit on the older side and stuff, it really helped. And again, I was able to project it onto my whiteboard. And I shared my screen. And everybody could see it at the same time. My in-class students had access to the books as well because we still had classroom sets of books that students could use that hadn't been touched for a year. They had access to that.

And then the online students, a lot of them they bought the book-- both of the books. They thought that it was a good investment for them to actually have the book with them. We did do a little check out. If some of my students couldn't afford it or they really just didn't want to buy it, they could come to-- I checked some of the textbooks out to them so that they could have that book. But of course they couldn't write and use it like that.

For EL Civics, we had to really kind of upgrade our EL Civics in that we took all of the tasks and things like that. As much as we could, we made them digital, whether it was a Google form, or a doc, or some sort of digital tool for the materials and for the tasks. And so like with CASAS tests, we had to do everything online remotely.

And it was a big learning curve. It was really difficult when we were remote only. As we were opening up the doors, then we were doing both at the same time. So my in-class students were doing it on paper. And my online students were doing it online.

So when I was in the classroom full time, we used the little mini whiteboards for formative assessment. I would prompt something. I would ask them a question. They would write furiously on their whiteboards. They would show it to me. And I could tell real quick who got it and who didn't. And I could do some feedback right away. When we went remote, I used the chat for this. And so we used a Zoom. But almost every virtual meeting platform has some sort of chat.

And we did this every single day. So one of the benefits of the online instruction is that the students' typing skills, whether it was texting or typing, man, it increased exponentially. Of course at first it was awful. And it was suffering. And they were so slow. Not a problem. We just kept doing it every day, every day, every day. And they just took off with it. It was incredible how fast they became in a very short amount of time.

So as you can see on the left, I use the chat for everything. So this was particularly-- it was dictation. So I would say the word and the online student would type the word. And then in this particular unit, we also learned about proper nouns. So as you see at the bottom of that left chat, now we're going from the regular library. And we're going on to the names of places. So, Main Street, Costco Gas Station-- so again, these are typing skills now.

I'm having to teach them Shift and whatever letter it is. Shift, whatever letter, to make it a capital. I really was emphatic about not having them use Cap Locks. Because a lot of times it was Cap Locks, type one letter, Uncap Lock. And so I wanted to teach them the proper way of typing. Even if they were still doing one finger typing or texting, it was still important to me to show them how to do it properly.

Up at the top, you can see that we practiced our alphabet. And so this was really good. Chat was really good because I was still getting new students. It wasn't like my same set of students all the time. So I always continually had to go back and teach the alphabet. And we went over the alphabet many, many times. So I thought those new students could get those skills that they had missed when they weren't in class.

And so as you can see on the second line, Rokia, she wrote the alphabet. But she was missing one letter. And I tell her. I said, oh, Rokia, you have 25. We need 26. I wouldn't tell her what letter was missing. So she had to go back and look and see. And then you could see that she retyped it with the missing letter.

Also in the bottom, for the chat we did sentences. We have now grown. And we've done some dictation sentences. So I would say the sentence. My teacher is Alisa. And I would repeat that and repeat that repeat that. And then the in-class students are typing in chat. And again, you can see Rokia. I said, oh Rokia, we're missing our-- remember, a period. Remember, period. And so then she went back. And she corrected herself.

And I could see the chat right away. I could give her some feedback right away. And then she can correct herself right away. So if you haven't been using- if you're still online or you still have online students, I highly, highly recommend that you start using that chat all the time. And it's for any level. You can do it for anything for any level.

So here are my four wonderful students in class. And again, like I said, they were doing the exact same instruction. But they are now showing me their little white boards. And I can go back and I can see who's got it and who doesn't. So I'm engaging both the in-class students and the online students at the exact same time.

All right, so for about a week I just had my laptop. In my home office when I was doing the remote things, I had a second monitor, an external monitor. And when I came back into the classroom, for whatever reason-- I don't know. I didn't bring it or I didn't think about it. And after about a week of just having my laptop, I said nope. And I brought my external monitor from home into the classroom. Again, fortunately because there was kind of a need for it, our director, she actually was able to order more external monitors for anybody who wanted them.

So I really enjoy using the external monitor. There is a little learning curve on that as well. You have to navigate between two screens. It's like having two separate computers. What you can do on your computer, you can also do on your second monitor. So as you can see, I have my Zoom students on my laptop. I have my Google Doc on the external monitor. And then if you look in the very back, it has a mirror of what it is on the monitor.

So my external monitor, my monitor number two, is extended. And then from number two to my projector it's mirrored. So everything that I want to showcase, whether it's a Google presentation or Ventures or Google Docs, whatever it is I put it on my big monitor. And then that mirrors onto the electronic whiteboard. And I share my screen so everybody can see it at the same time.

All right, so here's another interactive portion. How comfortable are you currently with a second monitor? Are you like, huh? What's that? Are you like, oh I've used it once and I didn't like it. Or hey, no problem. I'm good. Audrey needs a third monitor. OK, let's just not get crazy here. I remember that Anthony Burick-- one time I did this presentation and he offered that, too.

Patricia never used it. Yeah, again, it's one of those things where if you feel very comfortable with your laptop only, that's great. But if you're able to really kind of vision that you can extend this now to another monitor, I think it's going to be very, very helpful for you. I'm just going to go up real fast because I did see a question. But it went too-- you guys are chatting so-- I mean, you're typing so fast I couldn't see it.

Yeah, no problem, David.

Speaker 2: Hi, did you get Claire's question? I'm pretty comfortable with it. So when you went to group activities, did you show the other students then to each other?

Alisa Takeuchi: So when you went to group activities, did you show the-- did you show the other students then to each other? I'm not sure if I'm understanding the question. But with my second monitor, yeah, a lot of times-- OK, so I think I'm going to answer it. But I'm not sure. So Claire, if you want to re-- if I don't answer it, come back into the chat.

So single morning before we start class, I put the Zoom students on my big monitor which projects to the electronic board. And every morning my in-class students and my Zoom students, they say hi to each other. So they're having a little morning conversation with each other. And the reason I can do this now is because I have the Owl.

Before I had an Owl, I would, again, have to turn my laptop around so that the camera was facing the students. But again, I could do that. I could have this little morning meet and greet type thing so that the students could see each other before I had the other technology Oh right, yeah. So Ryan brings up a really good point about losing stuff. That's what was happening with me that first week when I had only my laptop is that I lost everything.

My Zoom was here. But then my presentation was back here. And then where is this? And I was searching around. I was wasting a lot of time just looking for stuff because they were buried in these layers. Now that I can separate it, I can keep certain things on one monitor and other things on the other monitor.

So when we first opened the school, I always kept my Zoom students on my laptop because I wanted to face the camera. I wanted to face them and the camera so they can see me. If I put it on my other monitor, like now you can notice I'm looking away. So it was kind of dis-engaging. Once I got the Owl that solved a lot of problems. But I will get to that later. Woopsie, sorry. See, even now with the second monitor.

All right, so we did it! We finished the first kind of school year. It was only a few months. So it was April through June of 2021. We were in school. We were open. We were accepting new students in class or online. And we really worked out some of the kinks that were happening. Now, I will just kind of give you a disclaimer. In my beginning literacy class, you saw I had those four in-class students that transferred over from Zoom.

I ended up reaching out to some of my students that had been in my class pre-pandemic. And I gave it one last go. I'm like, hey, school is open again. I really want you to come back to class. I got two more students. So now I had six students in my class. And I had 24 online. And that's pretty much how I ended the school year. And so I wanted to just let you know that-- I kind of lost my train of thought.

But I did want to let you know that. Yeah, I did not have very-- oh, so that's what it was. I had six in-class class students. And I was the highest attending in-class class at our school. So a lot of teachers had zero students in class. We offered it. But nobody took it. So we had a lot of classes, a lot of teachers who had zero in-class students and still remained only teaching online in their classroom.

So they had not experienced the HyFlex yet. So for three months, there were only a few of us that had actual in-class. Some of them had one. Some had two. I had six. And the other beginning literacy teacher at night had four. And he was also the highest attending in-class class at night.

So the two beginning literacy classes had the most in-class attendance. And I did read in the comments earlier about how the beginning level students tended to kind of want to come back into the classroom. And I agree with that.

So now what? We did three months experimentation. What worked? What didn't? And so now in June before we started the next school year, we really sat down. There was a group of us that sat down and said, let's think about what we want our next school year to look like. We knew we were going to do HyFlex. That was very emphatic on our director's view. And we knew that it wasn't going to go just in class or just online. We were going to offer both.

And there was a little push back from the district. But we explained to them about how adults are different than K through 12 because K through 12 are solely in class. There was no more virtual learning. And so we just said the needs of our adult students were different than the K through 12. And they agreed. So then we said, OK, now that we know we're going to be HyFlex still, what are our goals? And so we created some SMART goals.

We needed to decide which personnel, which office staff, or which teachers, or which whomever's were going to be kind of delegated these tasks or in charge of certain things. And that was a big deal for us because we really used the strengths of our support staff to further broaden their job skills and really had them help us with some of the other tasks that needed to get done. And that was really great for everybody.

Our director had to decide, take inventory of everything. What do we have already that we can still use? What do we need? How much is it going to cost? And when's it going to come? So she had to go through all of that with, of course, our budget and things like that. That was when she and our counselor went to a presentation at Huntington Beach Adult School who's our Adult Ed cohort in our consortium.

And they introduced us to the Owl. And my director was blown away. She was like, we need those. And so she realized that, with the Owls-- that we're already doing HyFlex in a way-- that this was only going to make our experiences better for everybody. So she purchased the Owls. And we ended up getting eight right away. I think she purchased maybe 16. And the other ones were out in a cargo ship in the shore of Long Beach for months and months and months.

So we only got eight at the initial run through. And it was a really good thing that we did because she was actually able to get him at a cheaper price than they are now. And I'm going to talk a little bit about Owl later. But I mean, they are expensive. They are about $1,000 apiece. So I mean, admins are like, ugh. And I understand that. So that's why I'm saying it's not equitable for everybody. But it does work if you can work it into your budget.

And then we rolled it out. So come August, now our new school year, the school year that we're starting right now is starting. Then all the teachers that have an Owl are now going to start to use it. And we're starting to play with it. We had Tosis from our K through 12 come and help us. The custodians were an integral part of installation.

The Owls themselves, easy installation. It's two plugs. One to my computer. And then one to the outlet. That's it. So in its basic form, the Owls are very, very user friendly as far as setup goes.

Speaker 2: Alisa?

Alisa Takeuchi: Yes?

Speaker 2: We have a question about your SMART goals. Audrey wants to know, will you please share what your SMART goals were?

Alisa Takeuchi: Oh, OK. Let me finish this thought. And then I'll go back to it. What was my thought? Oh, because we have our interactive whiteboard, we did have to get some connections-- some HDMIs. So for admins who are thinking about purchases, HDMI cables are going to be probably on your list and also maybe some hubs or some ports because you're going to use up a lot.

With more stuff, you're going to use up more ports. And so our USB ports are starting to get filled up. We have the outlet on my wall to connect to our electronic whiteboard. That was starting to get plugged up. The outlets, we only have two here and maybe to someplace else. So I had to get a power strip. So those are kind of the things that we had to think about as far as purchases go to really kind of make everything work.

Now, to go back to the SMART goals, one of the SMART goals was that we would-- it was about the pilot. Teachers will pilot the Owl and report on its findings by the end of the semester or something like that.

Another goal was to redevelop our orientations, our in-class orientation or our online orientation. We had a makeshift one because we were desperate. And we had to make it out real fast. But then from the experience and the time, we revamped that. So that was another one of our goals.

And then the third one I think was in regards to getting everybody a Google Classroom. All the teachers were going to develop a Google Classroom in every department, not just ESL.

Every department was going to create a Google Classroom and that we were going to become a Google School. And in addition to that was that our students were now going to start using our school email address. That wasn't available to us earlier.

And so the school district actually gave all of our students a .net, a ggusd.net account. And so one of our goals was to start incorporating that. And it's still an ongoing process. We don't have everybody on board just yet. But come the next school year, our goal is to get all the teachers on board with that. So thank you for that question.

All right, so that was in June. We did the planning. One of the things that we did change was marketing. And we went to postcards. And in July we sent out postcards. And it was a big money saver. And if you go to the session at 2:00, the next session, Meliss, my director and myself, we're going to be with Marjorie and the IT directors and stuff from Acalanas, they're also going to be talking about-- we're going to talk about equipment and money.

And so we sent out postcards to three years worth of students, anybody who was enrolled in our class, in our school for the past three years got mailed this postcard. And the postcard referred them to our website. So that was another thing that we did. We really updated our website. We were able to gain control of it because it used to be somebody from our district office. And so we gained control of our website. So that was a big help.

So that was another free resource that we could use. So instead of students coming into the office to get all the information to register, we referred everybody to the website. And they could do the registration. They could get information. They learned about our course catalog, things like that. Within two weeks of sending those postcards we got 720 new student registrations. No joke, 720. We were blown away.

And the biggest blow away was 80% of those students wanted to be in class. So if you can remember, I had four. From transitioning from online to in-class, I had four. And then I gained two more. I had six. All of a sudden now, every new student, 80% of the new students that wanted to start learning at our school, wanted to be in class. So we were just like, what happened? Where did this come from?

So restrictions were starting to be more lax. The COVID was kind of going down. This was before Omicron, pre-Omicron. And so people were becoming more-- they felt safer to come back to class. And we really, really showcased, displayed all of our health safety issues. We really showed students this is what we are doing to make sure that you feel safe at our school.

Everything from all the cleaners-- just the normal things that schools were going through and that we were doing health screenings. We were doing temperature checks. We were doing all of that stuff. And so I think the students felt more comfortable about being in class again.

Speaker 2: Can you go over the online registration process?

Alisa Takeuchi: Yes. I might have a slide. I don't know if I have a slide on it. Anyways, yes. So the students go on to our website. And then we have a big banner saying, Register Here. Look at our course catalog. Register here. And so then the students fill out their information with their name, their normal personal information. And then again, that the little indentation about whether they want to be in-class or online. And then they had the WIOA information.

And everything was translated into Vietnamese and Spanish because those are two highest languages that we have, that we serve. And then once they click on Submit, it goes to our clerk. And then he has the Google Sheet that aggregates all that information. And then from there, he schedules. He tells them when our orientation is. So we scheduled our orientations once a week every Thursday, in the morning and at night.

And at the very beginning when you saw those 720, we were actually doing it four days a week, three times a day. So we wanted to get all those students pushed in. And then as it was getting lower and lower, then we made it one day a week. And so then that's when they got all of the information about being an in-class student or being an online student and what that means.

And then once they finished the orientation, then he was able to-- and so then we also incorporated the CASAS test. So the students had to come to school. They had to do the orientation.

And right away they did the CASAS test. So when got to pre-test, all of the students right away-- which is a big, big thing for us because it was very difficult during the online part of it that whole year we were off campus to get the students pre-tested and post-tested because the remote testing was not working on our campus.

I was able to do it one-on-one. But of course I can't-- it takes a long time. And I can only do one student at a time. So that was another whole issue. So we were able to incorporate the e-test at the same time. So that really helped us a lot.

All right, so as you can see this is my-- this was in October. I took it a little bit late. But you can see the tides have turned. So if you notice or what do you notice? I have far more in-class students. And then if you look on the computer, I have two. I had two Zoom students. So except for those six that carried over from the other semester, everybody else is new. They're all new students that are in my in-class.

And then I still had my two Zoom students on my Zoom. The other students-- like you said, oh, Alisa, you had 24 Zoom students. What happened to them? I promoted them. They had been in my class for over a year. Some of them had been already been in my class a year before the pandemic. We didn't promote anybody during the pandemic because we really needed students to kind of learn how to be online students.

And so we didn't really feel-- we felt like they could be OK staying in the same level. So some of them were in my class for two years. And so now it was finally time for them to promote. So they went onto the next level, Beginning Low, as online students. So that's why my Zoom student ratio went down quite a bit.

So I just want to let you know. So some of the things I was thinking about-- this was this morning, about what really worked. So I think all of you have this maybe. I'm hoping, fingers crossed. The last two years are kind of a blur. I kind of get things kind of mixed up between what happened in 2020 versus 2021. And so some of my information might be overlapping or in the wrong order.

But from what I can recall, the things that worked for us for the year that we came back is that on the top for sure, number one, we had a supportive administrator. She was brand new. She wasn't brand new to Adult Ed. She was one of our ESL teachers at first. And then she became a principal throughout our district in the K through 12. And she was still a night administrator once a week.

And so she knew our program. She knew it from the teacher's point of view. And she knew it from a somewhat pseudo administrative view. And then when our oldest administrator changed positions, she took over. And so this was her first year. So congratulations to her. She started a whole new program under pandemic. And she was nothing but supportive for us the whole time. She was learning while we were learning. And she understood.

And she provided so much professional development for us that I can't emphasize enough to you, administrators, is key. It takes a lot for the teachers to really learn how to be teachers again. We all knew how to do it in class. And then we really had to learn how to do it online in a very short amount of time.

And OTAN was a big part of that. And now it's like bringing the best of both worlds together. And teachers are feeling like they're rocking on the boat a little bit. They're not steady yet.

Our online orientation really provided a lot of support for our students who were going to be online students. Again, that second monitor really helped. And some of our teachers are not on board with it yet. They're kind of interested. But it's just too much. Just knowing what they on the laptop is fine for them. And we're fine with that. But anybody who was interested in getting a second monitor, we provide that for them.

The digital textbooks, like I said. Luckily-- because we had just adopted Ventures two years prior to the pandemic. And so we were getting used to the textbook and all of the components and how to use it all. And luckily for us, we were at that point where we weren't new with it anymore. So when we went to remote, it was a somewhat easier transition.

And then the flexibility on our administrators, on our support staff, on the teachers, on the students. Everybody was very flexible. We didn't know what was going to happen. Week by week we were getting health updates. Are we going to close? Can we still stay open? Masks, no masks, temperature checks, blah, blah, blah. So everybody was very understanding about all the different changes that were happening at very quick times.

Speaker 2: We have two questions.

Alisa Takeuchi: OK.

Speaker 2: The first one is more about those orientations, the online orientations. And how did those work? The question was, were orientations online or in-person? And then more about those. So let's do that question and then I'll ask the second.

Alisa Takeuchi: OK so I'm going to do it real quick because I've got to get stuff done. I really want to that Owl if I can. So the online orientation-- I developed this online orientation so that I met with-- the students made an appointment with me to come online. And I checked to make sure, did they have a Zoom account? Was their name on the bottom of the Zoom screen? Could they mute? Could they unmute? Stop video, start video, chat, using capital letters, periods, things like that-- just basic kind of chat.

I didn't go very much into it. So they had to type my name is and their name. They had to type, how are you? They had to type, I am fine or I'm fine-- things like that, so kind of basic things in chat. And then I evaluated them. I kind of vetted them to see how is their WiFi.

I asked them all, what devices are you on so that I could kind of troubleshoot. Again, not everybody can do this because if you are trying to troubleshoot, you need to know a lot of different devices. And that was really-- I had to do a lot of homework because I don't use Apple products.