[audio logo]

Announcer: OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

Prishay Wilson: Thank you, everyone, for coming. Welcome to LAUSD'S Adult Education Virtual Academy, the AEVA. This is our presentation on Unite, Inspire, Achieve, and it's on creating an adult education virtual school fair.

So a little icebreaker before we start. Discuss this with the people around you. Zoom participants, type your ideas in the chat. How do students in your class or school program or district know what other students are doing? How do you know? How do you know? How do you know?

Audience: Know what other students are doing outside the class, right?

Audience: Are we supposed to talk to our partners?

Prishay Wilson: Yes, talk to your partner just for a second. How do you know--

[interposing voices]

Audience: I know at times, at LAUSD, a lot of the schools have job-- not job fairs. Just fairs where students are able to present what they've been doing. Alright - when I was there, there was a once a year fair, and students were able to showcase some of the projects they were working on. But in a class that, I don't know how--

Audience: They have something with hours where that they go and look at the other class they're going to move into.

Audience: Yeah. They call it-- they have a name for it.

Audience: Is there a class or a program?

Audience: They go to the level they're going to move on.

Audience: OK. I can see the student. I happen to be in one of the classes they were making websites and the student came in and they saw what the other students are doing.

Prishay Wilson: OK. How awesome. What about word of mouth?

Audience: Sharing.

Audience: Yeah.

Prishay Wilson: Yeah.

Audience: Sharing.

Prishay Wilson: So they're sharing with other students.

Audience: Yeah. Yeah. Word of mouth examples that the number one thing to promote a school or class.

Prishay Wilson: There you go. Word of mouth.

Audience: I post stuff on Facebook.

Prishay Wilson: On Facebook?

Audience: Yeah. I'm a developer.

Prishay Wilson: Right.

Audience: [muffled voice]

Prishay Wilson: All right. So I'd like to present my name is Prishay Wilson. I'm a CTE instructor at AEVA for AEVA. And we have--

Susan Gaer: Josh, would you like to introduce yourself?

Josh Eick: Hi, everybody. Josh Eick. I'm an ESL teacher at AEVA, and our principal is trying to get into the meeting right now. So hopefully, she'll be here in a couple seconds.

Prishay Wilson: That's Bernadine Gonzalez. All right. So this is our agenda for today. You can take a few minutes just to look at it, what we're going to be talking about for this session. I'm sorry. Let me go back. I looked, but I. Just take a moment to see what-- we just did our icebreaker, introductions.

We'll talk about the background history of AEVA, why a virtual fair, how we put this project together. And we have a website demo that's ready that's live, the Google Sites tools. We'll have a Q&A session. And we will explore the website.

Bernadine Gonzalez: My name is Bernadine Gonzalez. I am the principal of AEVA. I work for LAUSD's Division of Adult and Career Education. I have been with the division for 34 years, principal for something like 15, and it is my pleasure and privilege to work with my two-- I wouldn't say friends. They tolerate me-- Josh Eick, ESL instructor extraordinaire, and Prishay Wilson, who I really got to know as she was my SAA at Harbor Occupational Center.

And she had some very amazing teacher skills as an SAA and encouraged her to become a teacher and then I swiped her from Harbor. What a good principal does. So having said that, I think the Division of Adult and Career Education in 2019-- I think you could probably change the slide whoever is-- doesn't that look like The Jetsons? OK.

So the welcome to the school of the future. That's us at AEVA. I just checked in with the WASC chairperson who is working with us. And it looks like AEVA is the only 100% virtual online school for adults in the state of California. So once we get accredited, we're going to be the unicorn. We're almost a unicorn. Our horn is growing. So we're working on it. So OK. Next slide.

OK. So this has been in the works since before the pandemic. And Ruben Rodriguez has been around with the start of this since-- I want to say it was 2019 when LAUSD and DACE partnered up to work with strategies to accelerate learning for K-12 students. There was a contract between K12 and DACE and there were classes that were offered online.

And so as a result of that contract and the work that was done online for these k-12 students, things were starting to roll out. And then 2020 happened and COVID-19 came along. And everybody across the country went online in various forms. And after that-- I'm going to say ended for lack of a better word-- our superintendent really required everybody to come back in person as quickly as possible.

And in our division, what we see are many schools still have online programs or classes here and there, but not all of them have quite the number of students that AEVA has. We see some schools that have online classes with a handful of students.

So the thinking was way back when in 2019, what if we opened up an strictly online campus? And back then it was going to be called OVA, the Online Virtual Academy. And they changed the name to the Adult Education Virtual Academy. So next slide. OK.

So in 2022, I joined central office at Beaudry. And it was just me in August. There were two teachers at it, one distance learning ESL teacher and one independent study teacher. And that was our first back to school meeting. It was three of us. And we were online, and we had a jolly old time.

So for our first year, the goal was 1,000 students. And you can see there we definitely did hit that goal. And this year, our goal is 2,000, which actually we accomplished in the middle of January. We are closer to 2,500 now. And I'm not competitive in any way. I'm always looking for the next target and always something to shoot for. And it's fun. It makes it fun for me. I make my teachers crazy.

So our programs consist mainly-- we do offer classes day, night, and Saturday. And we have the run of the mill program. The one thing that is really exciting for us is that we offer every level of ESL. And they're all teacher-directed.

We have a conversation cafe, which is very popular on Saturdays. And we have waiting lists for just about every class we have. 8:00 o'clock in the morning, very popular. And our night program, we have about 200 people on the waiting list at this time. Next slide.

Our ABE and academic program. We've grown our ESL program the fastest. We did add under our ABE program, the reading program, language, arts. And you can see our STEP program is what we use to onboard students. And we've had some interesting developments. Let's see. Is it on here?

We do have teacher-directed geometry, which our first go round was only six students. And now this go round, we're up to 20. We do have our HiSET prep on Saturdays, English and Spanish, very popular. Next. So the ones that I think are going to be-- CTE, our hotshot teacher, Ms. Prishay Wilson there in the house.

And we do have one class at night. And that instructor does the QuickBooks and does also the-- I hate to say it like that-- the usual classes and CTE. Next one. So the partnership courses are very interesting. OK. One more, Josh. The youngest learners is also one of the equity pathways courses.

So the equity pathways courses, we work with the family academy-- and I've been saying it all day and it just went. It's family academy program. And we work with the parents. Last year, we completed more than 200 parents. And the courses are designed to work with parents to help them engage with their children in their learning.

We had a program last year in East La, WHERE the superintendent came. We gave out medals to all of the parents who completed programs. It was quite a day, and there's big video, lots of photos, and very interesting. The proficiency test prep class is in conjunction with our personnel commission. And that is for people who are interested in getting hired on with LAUSD or people who may be interested in taking--

We have people interested in taking military exams, people who are interested in brushing up their basic skills for other like even college exams. You'll be surprised how many people don't know their timetables anymore, not like back in the olden days like when I was-- OK, way back when the day when we had dirt roads, let's just say, and timetables was a must. So the partnership courses, those are them.

And there's one more interesting class. Please don't tell me I forgot it. Go ahead, next one. Did I blow it? I did. We have a sign language class that we've offered. And when we put up sign language, in two days we had over 300 people apply for the class. And we had to close it immediately. Ruben can remember that I panicked.

And we can only accommodate 15 people at a time because when you're working online and you're working with something like sign language, it's how many people can the teacher see on the screen? So he has to actually watch the students to make sure their finger spelling is correct, their expressions are correct. So that's been a real interesting thing.

And we just sent out over 100 invitations for only 20 slots in the next class. It's going to be quite exciting times. So to expand our program going forward, we are looking for a dedicated HiSET prep class. In the academic program, almost everybody is interested in HiSET prep and. Our CTE program, we're looking at classes that are more test prep classes.

So when I left Harbor, one of my teachers said, you guys should do plumbing prep of the-- let me rephrase that-- the test prep for plumbing. So there's a lot of courses out there that we can do online that's not-- like a student call the other day and said, do you have mechanics online?

No, we don't do those kind of classes online. But there are some courses that lend themselves to that, and Ruben and I have talked a lot about that around the table when we meet every couple of weeks. And we will be looking at doing some more of these parenting type courses, the equity pathways.

So that's what's coming our way. And go ahead and roll those out. And I'm just going to let everybody look at that because I feel like I'm talking hundreds miles an hour. OK. Josh, this is yours. What are the electronic tools that streamline learning? I was thinking about that.

Josh Eick: Well, things like the LMSs can help, things like Barrington Online. Things that just really allow teachers to streamline learning without an actual physical book. So it makes online teaching very easy and effective.

Bernadine Gonzalez: So all of this is true. And one of the things that I have shared is that AEVA remains 80% female. Out of 2,300 students, 80% female. So the idea that there aren't childcare issues. There is also a lot of females taking care of elder family members. So there's a lot to be said for who's benefiting and what the circumstances are. Next slide, please.

And I think when I look at this particular slide, onboarding is the biggest challenge here. And something that we're talking about, especially with hundreds of people on the waiting list-- one of the things that we're talking about as-- I actually have an administrator helping me now-- is that sometimes there is actually sense to the idea that students maybe need to have computer skills before they come to AEVA.

Not always, but there can be onboarding students with no skills is really a huge challenge. We spend a lot of time doing simple things like changing a password. And I do mean a long time. I spent about 30 minutes the other night with our advisor with a lady who was speaking Russian.

And my advisor was translating her instructions into Russian. The lady was listening and then translating her answers into English. It's very time-intensive. So when we finally get something done, everybody celebrates. So a lot to be said about the challenges. Next slide.

We've had hosted a couple of, I call them assemblies, where we've done some things like talked about cyber security, we celebrated the students who have completed ESL courses. And we really do have a lot of fun, and the students enjoy it. And it's the closest thing to school spirit that we have, but we we're going to do some more of that.

We really enjoy it. The teachers enjoy it. Maybe we enjoy it more than the students. I'm not sure. But I think that's a good part of school life for us. So looking to do more of that. Next one, Josh. Yay! Now it's Prishay's turn.

Prishay Wilson: So you may ask why a virtual affair. Why? The reason we came up with the idea for a virtual affair addresses the last item on our vision list, building school spirit and camaraderie, AEVA is different from in-person schools.

Most of our students don't interact with other students outside of their class or with students in other classes. And we don't have social functions like dances or end of term parties. And we currently do not have fundraisers, health fairs, or job fairs. The why again. One solution, virtual recognition ceremonies. So why a virtual fair?

Josh Eick: Sorry, Prishay, to interrupt. Could you go back to the slide just before that? Could you describe what our recognition-- or would you like me to-- I don't know if you've attended our recognition ceremonies. Can I just take one minute to just explain what the recognition ceremonies are?

Prishay Wilson: OK.

Josh Eick: Sorry about that. So we decided that one thing we could do is we could have recognition ceremonies. Basically, they're graduation ceremonies. So for the last two semesters, we've done it for the ESL department where we've had all of our ESL classes attend a Zoom meeting, for lack of a better term.

And basically, it was just sort of like a graduation. We had all the teachers from all the classes recognize the students who had finished, past the classes. And then we had the level six ESL students give speeches. And it was really a great occasion both times and really worked to give us a sense of that we are a school and we're not just a collection of random classes. And it was very effective. Thank you.

Prishay Wilson: So why is virtual fair? Virtual fairs serves multiple simultaneous purposes by increasing growth mindset amongst students, teaching real-world community, academic, and work skills, encouraging project-based learning into classes, focusing on the 21st century skills that matter, and promoting school spirit and camaraderie, and promoting the school's programs, as well as recruiting visitors and acting as a word-of-mouth.

Virtual fair, the idea. Every year, AEVA students will choose a virtual fair theme. Class will decide on a project that reflects that theme. The project may be a collaborative class project, a collection of individual student projects, or anything in between.

The execution of the prayer is practice will be collected and curated on the AEVA website. Anyone with the link can attend the fair, including students, family, friends, et cetera. And there will be an opening night Zoom gala, but the fair could run as long as AEVA wants.

Josh Eick: So I thought it might be a good idea to talk about how we planned it as a school because this is not just a one person show. We have to get a lot of people involved. And first of all, before I go to the next slide, I'll just mention that, of course, we did have to get approval and work with the district to do this. So that's really the first thing that has to happen. And next slide, please.

So once we got the thumbs up, we had a staff meeting with as many teachers as we could at our school so that I could pitch this idea to everybody because we wanted buy-in from the teachers. The idea is not just to get the ESL classes doing this or just getting the ABE classes, but all of our classes in the school. The idea is to have everybody sort of pitching in, all students contributing work.

So we had a staff meeting. Next slide, please. And in the staff meeting, I sort of presented the idea of, how do we become a school like I just mentioned? When we started, for lack of a better term, it just felt like we were just a collection of online classes and it didn't really feel like we were a school. So we kind of went over some of the ideas of how we become a school. Next slide. Just to get people kind of enthusiastic about this.

And then the idea is that the students are going to pick a theme. We're really interested in the idea of student agency here. We want the students to be involved in this as much as possible. So every year starting probably next year, we'll have the students vote on the theme. And then every class will try to contribute some kind of project that sort of adheres somewhat to the theme.

The analogy I used was the Rose Parade on New Year's. Every year, the Rose Parade has a theme. But then you look at all the floats and you're like, wait a minute. How does that float fit in? That's kind of the idea. So the themes will be very generic. But hopefully, there'll be some kind of fit into that theme.

And another thing I'm interested in talking in terms of student agency is I would like some day for the students really to take control of this virtual fair. And maybe start a student committee who would collect all the projects and actually build the website themselves. I would like to take our hands off as much as possible. Next slide, please.

So some examples of projects that we talked about was whole class projects where the whole class could sort of create something and then just post it onto their page, group projects where the class could split up and groups can sort of create a project, or if the class wants to, they could do individual projects. Every student in the class can have their own project. And you'll see examples of all three of these when you go to the website a little bit later. Next slide, please.

And then I created a shared Google Drive so that all of the teachers could upload projects from the students into one place, so that we could link everything if necessary to the website if we were going to embed something, for example. It would all be in one central Google Drive folder, which you see on the screen. Next slide, please.

And then finally, we wanted to do this on a professional, quote, unquote, "website." AEVA the or didn't have its own website, which we were-- of course, we're a virtual school, so that's very important to us. We did get approved finally by the district to have our own website, and it's a professional grade one.

But like all of you out there know, especially when you're in a large school district, there's a lot of strings and red tape you got to go through. So we're waiting for that to get approved. We're hoping by the end of this spring, we'll have our website up and ready to go.

So in the meantime, I sort of needed a beta site for our virtual fair because I knew we were going to present it here at TDLS. So I used Google Sites to build our site. And I'll show you in about five minutes or so some of the tools that Google Sites offer. It's very, very user-friendly and very easy to use. Next slide, please.

Prishay Wilson: So let's check it out. So this is my student work for computer decision.

Susan Gaer: Prishay, maybe you can tell us about how you got them to do this.

Prishay Wilson: So I asked the students to do a project of something that they learned or something that they learned and they did it together. All I did was oversee it. This is everything that they learned how to do in computers and decisions.

Everything from job prep to Word to Excel to PowerPoint to learning the computer. So they decided that this is what they wanted to put together for this presentation. So you'll be able to see more of it when you go into the website.

Josh Eick: So I think it's me. Is that right? OK. So I'm going to share my screen. All right. So like I said, we used Google Sites. Can you see my screen.

Prishay Wilson: Yep. Yep.

Josh Eick: So we used Google Sites to create the website. It's a very user-friendly website as I said. And basically, if you click on Insert, it's just got lots of different types of tools that you can use to create the site. So the first thing you want to do is right here, you want to create a new page. Let me just create a new page just so I can show you what that looks like. And I'll just call this Extra Page.

And you'll see it appears right here. And also, you'll notice that it automatically sets up a button on the top menu. You can drag to move the order of any page that you want. And let me go to the extra page here. I'm on it right now. And let me just show you some of the things that you could do.

So it automatically creates a banner with the-- if you have an image on your Home Page, it'll automatically bring that image over, but you can change that image out if you'd like. You've got an option of headers. You can have a large banner like it is now, a medium one, or you could just have the title only if that's what you want.

And then you could really add anything you want. There's really nothing that you can't put on to a Google Site. Any type of file, any type of app, any type of link. So the first thing that I was going to do when I sort of started making the website a few months ago was I was going to-- my students had done Jamboards, but Jamboard board is ending, so we changed our minds about that.

So I was going to do is I was going to put thumbnails or a screenshot of each person's Jamboard. And then I was going to insert a link with a button. You can use a button to put a link so people can just click on the button, and it'll take them to an outside website. But then I thought, well, if people are clicking and going to other websites, maybe they won't come back.

So probably the best tool here, the best two tools that they have are you can embed things, which is how we embedded Prishay's PowerPoint program. Or you can also just insert things directly from your Google Drive, which is why I had everybody upload all their projects to our Google Drive website.

So just to show you a quick example, I'll click on Drive. And if my computer will work, let me just go into our virtual affair. Here it is. So there's my folder. And let's say I just wanted to put that in. So I just click it. It's a Google Slide app. Insert, and there it is. You have the option here to change the style of background. You can make it darker you can even upload an image to have as a background, which is what I did on my page.

So I mean it's really flexible. It's really easy to use. And then the person who visits the website-- and there's a preview button here. So the person who would visit this would be able to scroll through at their own pace. But what I found more interesting was I thought, well, why ask the visitor to scroll through? Why not just have it play by itself.

So they do have an embed option here, which will enable you to embed any kind of PowerPoint program, Google Slide program, Google Form, Google Sheet, any kind of app. And it will enable it to play itself on a loop so that people don't have to touch anything, which I will show you an example of that on my page here.

So when you come and you look at my page, it's just going to play itself. I'm not touching anything. And I timed it to go about three seconds before it goes to the next slide. And it'll play animations automatically. And it looks great.

Susan Gaer: Can I ask a question?

Josh Eick: Of course.

Susan Gaer: How did you get the-- did the teachers make these websites or did you make them all?

Josh Eick: So that is an excellent question. I tried to get the teachers to make their own pages. I got one teacher who was interested. So Ms. Mengel who was the ESL-3 teacher, she made her own page. But I actually did it for the other teachers, which is why I mentioned earlier that I want a student committee in the future, if possible, to create the websites themselves. So I would love to have the students do that in the future.

Anyway, one thing I did want to mention before we give you time to explore on your own is that-- and also, I don't know if I mentioned it, but you can also insert links to a Google Doc or Slides directly. But those will take you out of the website. So they will link to your Google Drive, but then it'll open it in a new tab. So it will take you outside the website. So you'll have to come back if you want to look at other things, which is why I'm a big proponent of embedding things so that they don't have to leave.

The last thing is I wanted to have a Comments page. And originally, I set it up-- I think I deleted that. The old version of Google Sites allowed you to have a comments page or put comments in on the website. They updated the app in around 2017, I think it was, and they took off comments. So it's a little difficult to have comments enabled onto a Google Site.

There are a couple sites Discuss-- and I can't remember what the other website is, but you can create an account, and then you can embed the discussion site or the comment site into the Google Site. But the problem is there has to be some coding done on Google Sites because Google Sites doesn't support it in its original form. So it's very frustrating.

But one thing I found that worked was I created a Google form where a person can just put their name and then they can write their comment and they can submit it. And then I created a Google Sheet with all of the responses from the Google form right down here. So anytime anybody goes on and submits a comment, you'll see their name and you'll see their comment here. So you can just scroll through the comments.

And it's not the greatest thing, but it's sort of the best that anybody out there in the internet world has sort of figured out that works consistently. But I'm sure when we get our professional site up, we'll be able to fix that and have just a regular Comments page. Unless there are any other questions, we were going to give you some time to explore the site on your own. And maybe while you're doing that, you could ask questions if you have any.

Bernadine Gonzalez: I have a comment that I wanted to share. I have been very fortunate with the people that have helped. Ruben Rodriguez has been with our team from the very start when it was just me by myself. Ruben and I would sit across the table and talk. And as the team grew, Ruben has always been there from the start, as I said.

And one of the things that I'm really grateful for with Josh Eick on the team is that he has a lot of vision about things that he would like to see for the students. And this idea of the virtual fair is his idea. And what happens when the teacher has that kind of vision is they inspire others.

Like project-based learning that Josh has been doing for years, that method of instruction is moving through moving out through the ranks in AEVA. And it's really catching on. The students are loving it. And I'm letting the teachers know, hey, if you want to come and work for us, this is where you're going to have to go. And so it's really catching on, and it's teacher-inspired. It's not administrator-inspired.

So I know that when we've talked at different conferences and things about, well, how do you make this work? I'm not making it work. The teachers are inspiring each other. And it's their passion to, number one, support their students, but number two, to inspire each other and to support each other because what we're doing is so unique. So think about that as a motivation going forward.

Josh Eick: And I'll just add to that, if I may. We had six teachers participate this time. And really, one of the reasons is because we had such a short window. We only had about two months from start to finish to get this done. the hope is that we're going to share this website with all of our teachers on Monday. And once they see it and once they get their students to take a look, I am almost positive that next time we do this. We're going to have a lot more people involved.

Bernadine Gonzalez: And if you get a chance to see Prishay students take off. They're excited with their videos. And she's excited as a brand new teacher about the things that the students were inspired by. So I hate to sound corny, but I love my school.

Josh Eick: So I put the link in the chat. There's also the QR code. I'm not even sure how many people are actually here.

Susan Gaer: Not too many. Not too many. But if you are here and you want to check out the website, please check it out. We're here if you have any questions or comments. And please do leave a comment on the Comments page. We would appreciate that.