OTAN. Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

Cindy Knoble: Welcome from the mighty Folsom Cordova Adult School, located in Rancho Cordova, Sacramento County, where our motto is Strive. Persist. Succeed. My name is Cindy Knoble, and I am the administrative assistant to our wonderful principal, Rhonda Balmain. I have been the administrative assistant at our school since 2017.

Also on our team, we are lucky to have our super hero ESL teacher, Avi Jones, a.k.a. Hybrid Man. Avi is the master of juggling many roles. He is not only Folsom Cordova's lead ESL teacher, but he is an outstanding instructor for our ESL beginning high in-person students and our beginning high intermediate low online classes. He is the curriculum developer, the main instructor for our paraeducator training program.

When not teaching at UC Davis, Sacramento State University, Avi uses his expertise to develop curriculum and EL Civics assignments for our data-collecting systems. Avi is the Jedi of Canvas system, where he creates engaging curriculum.

Our digital leadership academy coach and reputed cousins to Wonder Woman. I couldn't find you because you're masked. Our reputed cousin to Wonder Woman is Cindy Wislofsky, who is spreading her knowledge and superpowers not only with our school, but she is also mentoring Grossmont Adult School.

Cindy was an ESL instructor for 40 years with the San Diego Community College District before she retired five years ago. She served as ESL department chair for 15 years and as ESL technology coordinator for 12 years. Cindy has worked on different projects with OTAN since 2012.

Join us for a brief overview of our Marvelous agency and our progression through DLAC, exploring our achievements and goals. Folsom Cordova has been providing excellent education and services since 1949. We are a part of Folsom Cordova Unified School District, and we are fully WASC-accredited. In fact, we just had our walk in March.

Our school's mission is to prepare and empower adult learners by providing quality academic programs, transition services, and career pathways necessary for higher learning, employment, and civic responsibility. Folsom Cordova Adult School is small but mighty. We have seven staff members in our office, including the principal, registrar, data analyst, budget tech, clerk typist, two refugee support services.

And housed on our campus, we have an independent study high school and an adolescent parent program. A K through 12 distant learning school. And we are partnered with the Folsom Cordova Job Center. Off site, we offer parent co-op preschool programs at three different elementary schools.

Our school currently has 10 ESL teachers, four ASE. And as of April, we have had 705 ESL students, 218 unduplicated ASE students. We offer in-person online courses for both ESL and ASE for the students that qualify.

Folsom Cordova has a fantastic CTE and workforce prep offerings, which include phlebotomy, Microsoft Office, QuickBooks, free online paraeducator training, free computer classes, free citizen class. Also new this year, we have a six-week electrical training program, which is with Northern California Construction Training, sponsored by SMUD.

During our pandemic, our staff, teachers, and students very quickly learned how to use technology to communicate and continue with classes. We were obligated to learn how to hold Zoom meetings and remote testing. So many of us were hesitant, reluctant, and unable to learn the new ways of connecting. We learn quickly how important technology is and what a wonderful tool.

So what is our vision? Our vision is to improve equity and accommodate students who do not have access to computer or internet at home. We want to improve our teachers' and students' knowledge of Canvas and other web-based learning tools. We want to improve the technology skills of teachers and students. We want to offer HyFlex classes to accommodate students who have barriers to attending school.

So being accepted at the Digital Leadership Academy was very exciting, and we knew we were on the right path to meeting our goals and guidance with our guidance of OTAN, our superheroes. We have talked about offering the HyFlex classes at our school in the past but needed guidance and planning. So now, we know we're finally on our way.

Our team quickly dove into DLAC's schedule and calendared our year. At first, we're meeting. We were introduced to our mentor, wonderful Cynthia, Wonder Woman, and are partnered with Grossmont. We dove right into exploring our strengths and our basements on Gallup's CliftonStrengths presented by our hero and defender, Dr. Porter.

We learned what each member contributes to the team and how different we all are. We continued by examining our communication skills and how to handle conflicts. The knowledge of these skills will be helpful when working with the staff who are reluctant and resistant to going paperless. This is where Hybrid Man, a.k.a. Avi, steps in to save the day. He will help us with campus training, as well as our HyFlex classes.

Abram Jones: Thank you, Cindy. Folks, Cindy talked me up a lot. So I need to say that I cannot overstate her value to our team. Like she said, we're a really small school. This is like one third of the whole school, OK? And with the numbers that you've seen in terms of the students going through our programs and everything, she does a heck of a lot of work. And I want to say really thanks a lot to her. She's also responsible for most of the presentation that you're seeing today.

What are Hybrid Man's powers? Actually none. Except to empower other people to do these things. So that's why Cindy wanted to pass out all of these masks to you all, so that we would all share in the spirit of empowerment. We were introduced to our ideal one on one DLAC activities and course assignments by Destiny. We love seeing her face up there and all of our meetings. She shared her knowledge of Canvas and sent us additional resources needed to implement our site plan.

We learned what an amazing tool the Canvas learning management system is and how important it is to get our staff accepting, trained, and ready to use the system. That's an ongoing process. Our ideal one on one DLAC assignments got us thinking about who would benefit, this is the big question we often get from management, who would benefit from HyFlex classes, how to recruit students into the HyFlex classes, and how to qualify those students. We decided that HyFlex classes could help with our students' persistence.

As many have said today, this is a big deal for all of our data people, including administrators, as well as our enrollment rates. We really conceived of it as a way to break down education barriers to participation. I might talk about a couple of those in a minute. Students who have barriers like child care, work schedules, or illness can still join classes online from their homes, as you all know.

But with HyFlex, we can offer, as the name implies, the maximum flexibility. So the model that we're following is that students are going to be able to come to class in person or join online up to their decision on that day. So thinking about all the variables that are in adult people's lives. You know, something might happen, where they would need to do one thing or the other.

Also, not all students as have the same learning techniques. So giving them the choice to be in person or online or a combination of them is another offering that our school wants to provide. And we think this will go a long way toward improving equity. And we want to think about equity as being where appropriate resources are given to those who need them, as opposed to equality, which is something all of us have striven for a long time, which is just providing everyone the same resources and hoping they all get themselves sorted out, right? We want to move to more equity-based model.

OK. Recruiting and qualifying students to join a new HyFlex classes will mostly be done in our orientation. Cindy does a whole lot of orientations, and I do the orientations for the paraeducator training program. New students attending orientations will begin by taking a survey on a computer that includes questions like these. Do you own a computer, laptop, iPad, or Chromebook at home? As you know, many times, the answer is no. No to all the above. Do you have reliable Wi-Fi at home? Who does?

What level would you rate your computer skills? No skills, beginner, average, good. These kinds of things. And of course, when I write the surveys, this one is always the number one question. Would you prefer an in-person online or a choice of online or in-person. These survey questions can be translated into multiple languages. You know how we do with Google Translate. And we also have multilingual staff, I count myself among them, who can translate things in a more personal way.

The students always watch a slide show of some kind to learn more about the school, our class offerings, our rules. Don't drive faster than 5 miles per hour in the parking lot, things like that. Our superhuman team, will CASAS test the new students. And really, their effort is incredible, the number of folks that they test and how often they test them.

Students will meet one on one with an advisor to go over class offerings. CASAS scores need to be high enough for a student to qualify for HyFlex class. So right now, our ASE students need to score a 239 or higher to attend an online class. And as far as the ESL HyFlex class goes, it's only going to be offered in our first iteration. It's only going to be offered in the advanced ESL level.

Recently, we got the great news that we were approved for a Measure H grant funded by our city of Rancho Cordova. With these funds, we'll be purchasing a whole bunch of Chromebooks, looks like about 50 we're hoping for, which we'll be able to loan out to our students. We haven't had loaners for a long time. And so this is going to be really nice.

In addition, we have some polycameras, as Cindy has shown on the screen right here, that were sort of donated to us from our IT department. And there you see some wingnut in a mask teaching a class using it. So you can't see the polycamera, but it's right there. And we hope to buy three or four Owl meeting cameras for the new HyFlex classrooms. So really looking forward to having 360-degree camera. And you can see, if I were to be teaching in this classroom, I'd probably like to put it right there something like that, so that everybody can see what's going online and off.

So far in our school site plan, we've implemented how to qualify a student for these classes, how to outfit students with technology where we can, and we've tested the cameras for the classroom. So what are we going to do next? Our next steps will be preparing and training the teachers with best practices on how to teach a HyFlex class. We'll be relying on OTAN for help with that.

Training of our two pilot teachers will include a series of sessions with OTAN folks in August. And we've been working with the OTAN team to plan and schedule both advanced trainings on Canvas and on HyFlex in terms of best practices. We've found, I'm sure lots of folks have, that when we bring someone in from the outside, it's helpful. It's helpful for the teachers to get a different perspective. So it's not just, oh, he's talking about Canvas again.

We plan to regularly gather data from students and teachers on their experience with the HyFlex course in the upcoming semester, and we really hope to pilot these classes in the fall. So if at all possible, that's what we're going to do. And then we'll be able to, because we survey students a lot, and we gather just data, testing data, standardized data, we'll be able to examine that process from qualitative and quantitative perspectives.

Really looking forward to the next chapter of our DLAC training, working with the amazing OTAN staff. Thanks, guys. And learning from the other superheroes from other agencies. Thank you very much.