[music playing]

Speaker: OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

Maricel Manglicmot: Good morning, everyone.

[cheering]

Woo! Happy Friday, East Side! So I'll try and keep my part short. I just wanted to share our DLAC experience. And if you remember from the last year, this time last year we were superheroes. We had the superhero masks. And it was a fun time.

Audience: You still are.

Maricel Manglicmot: Thank you! It's invisible. One day I'll just find my Wonder Woman mask and bring it back. But I just wanted to show how much of a camaraderie we've built together as a culmination of our project, coming here to Sacramento. And it was just, you know-- it was as Ryan said, the support from all of you guys was the best support we've had as adult ed teachers.

And it's just one of those things where you feel like you're on an island until you discover that there are other islands, and then you help each other out. And that's why we love DLAC so much is because we realize we're not alone. We're not alone in this world, in this universe. And you like us. You really like us!

[laughter]

Because we listen to each other. And we genuinely care about what we're all doing as part of our projects. And having that opportunity through DLAC allowed us to share. And we just wanted to thank the DLAC team, and our coaches for making it possible for us to see that we can do what we did. And we're going to share that for you today.

So as you probably already know, if you were here in person with us since 2023-- '22? '22! It's been that short. The three of us have separate projects all within a bigger umbrella. And so one of them-- awesome. I wanted to honor-- or actually, this is the pictures I took from TDLS, which we presented. The first three pictures are our first TDLS, and the last picture is the only one we were able to take and had time to take for this year.

So of course, Melinda is there. And that's how I saw her most of the time, which was fixing things, and working things out. And Susan is on the second picture, who's also doing the same thing.

[laughter]

I just wanted to share that these experiences are ingrained, at least in me, into my memory. And then this is what I've done for my portion of the project. My portion of the project for digital literacy for our school was to build a professional development course in Canvas for our teachers, because one of the things that we noticed was that sometimes our teachers couldn't come to our professional development. So one of the things that we kind of piloted and tested was to add professional development in Canvas for teachers to access on their own time and still get paid for it.

And I just wanted to thank our supervisors and our director, our supervisor Jorge Silva, Sean Tran, and our director Tracy Williams for supporting us in the development of our digital literacy at our site. So this was the email I sent out that mentioned there's professional development online. It's ready for you. If you want to take it, take it. If you've already been there in person, you can use it as reference.

And so the response was great. Not to mention the in-person requests that I received to view the modules as reference. So I said, OK, let's do it. And this is a very small version of the sections for the professional development. And one of them was gamification.

And you know, it was mostly interactive. It acted like a game. And I received good, positive feedback from those who took it. And hopefully, they'll be able to spread out the word that there are professional development modules online. You should try them and get paid for it, if you haven't taken them already.

So what's next for us as digital leaders? We do have a plan. And come fall 2025, we're hoping to have digital leaders available at our school site who will spread the word on digital literacy. And next up is Michael.

Michael Delaney: So just a quick introduction to East Side-- I think she already gave it a little bit-- but East Side is in San Jose, California-- a fairly big school, copious funding. By that I mean within our consortium, we're in the South Bay Consortium for adult education, and we get the largest share of the funding there.

So if there's anyone from Cape here, we like the current funding model. I know at times funding is-- we took a big hit in adult ed, 2008, 2009, 2010, back there. But right now, things are going pretty good. And so that puts East Side in a really good position to bring digital tools in.

But piles of hardware, in the past-- recently, we got some new Chromebooks, but before that we had Chromebooks. And so these days, I think just about every class on campus has a Chrome cart, sometimes with more Chromebooks in the cart than are contractually allowed for the number of students.

But anyways, strong history-- yeah, it's a positive problem. Exactly. And that's what I'm trying to get at is at East Side, we do have some struggles. And we'll get to that. But hardware certainly is not one of them.

Also, a strong history of digital PD. I've been in adult education since about 1999, but I first came to East Side in 2016. And one of the things I really liked was right from the beginning, we were getting training. Back then, it was a lot of Google Suite, and then other things. But there's been a consistent effort, I think, to train people.

So we have the hardware. We've got the fancy projectors. You name it. For the most part, we've got it. So it's just on the teacher, really, to put it to use. And that's where the problem comes in is a bit of a recalcitrant faculty. It's not that people don't want to teach, or that they're lazy in general, but sometimes with the digital tools, there's been a fair bit of resistance. We've been doing it this way for a long time. And so it's been a bit of a struggle to get everyone on board.

There's certainly people that are moving, people that are willing to put their feet in the water. But that's really been one of the big struggles I've faced. Particularly, I'm the Canvas administrator. So sometimes when people see me coming at this point, they're like-- they start to hide. But basically, a rising tide-- I'm going to talk a little bit about Canvas, North Star, and then some-- we're going to start to play around with an owl.

So of course, with Dr. Porter, I mean-- when I first signed up for this program, I thought I was just going to learn a lot of cool digital tools. But obviously, the focus has been a lot on leadership, and trying to get a whole program on board, not just me learning to use new things.

But for the-- I mean, I think everyone in this room is familiar with the Clifton model. Yesterday was, I thought, a really interesting day. I made this slide just on my own, putting up my own scores up there. As you can see, I'm completely lopsided to the green side in strategic thinking.

Adaptability is the blue in mine, and that's really what I've tried to lean into to try to be more tolerable and to actually work effectively with my colleagues. Yeah, so then Maricel also kind of lopsided, but in her own way, down all through the blue. And then Michelle over in the executive in purple.

But what we noticed yesterday was that we don't have anyone in the influencer column, or we don't have any skill set in the influencer column. And so it seems like maybe what we need in our team is one more person who can actually influence the faculty, and get them on board with our plan. But thanks to Dr. Porter for all the-- for opening that side of digital leadership.

And then just a quick nod to Destiny, the classes we took Idea 101, Idea 102. A couple of small things really that I learned, onboarding and intake. I also teach a distance learning class. And often, you bring people in. They're there for a few days. And then you lose them. And so I've been really trying to focus on working on that with my students. But then also with the teachers, just trying to get them up to speed as slowly as possible with things like Canvas.

And then at the bottom, adult education peers. It's great to be in a community of people that are all in adult ed. We're kind of a small niche. You've got the K-12 world, the community college world. So it's nice to hear other people's experience. Even if you're struggling, it's good to hear that we're struggling, too. And then the positive models you had.

So this shows some of the growth. We've been in Canvas for a while now, again, thanks to OTAN, and Karen in the back for all the trainings that she offers. But this is our growth-- not too bad. It gets up over 17.

We do have many more than 30 teachers on board. So it's actually a relatively small percentage. At this point, we don't make people do it. It's largely by choice. But it is positive growth. This is growth in students using the-- who are registered and enrolled in a class. And again, that's growing even better.

And that's really-- ultimately, our DLAC program ended up focusing a lot on the teachers, and trying to train the teachers. But I think-- and certainly, that's going to help student outcome. But I think one thing that I'm trying to focus on as we go forward is helping the students to navigate Canvas. And so maybe it'll be a little more effective and teachers will be a little more excited about using it.

So this slide is a little small. But 182, I think, students without activity in the last 30 days, which makes for 44% of the students who are enrolled. So it's one thing to open a Canvas shell and say to your administrator, yeah, I'm using Canvas. It's another thing to really integrate it. And I think there's good reasons for why you don't need to run everything through Canvas every single day, especially in adult ed.

A lot of our students-- I'm largely in ESL these days. Often, they just want to talk with each other. They want to work with pencil and paper at times. But still, I think there's room for improvement in how much we're using it-- the teachers are using it.

Again, same kind of idea-- 32 days. Average number of days, so this is not-- this is overall average, and this was for the spring 2024 term. I don't know if any of you are Canvas admins. There's all sorts of analytics you can get, but it's really important to filter it through in order to really understand what's going on, because you can see some numbers that look really bad, or others that look pretty good, but you may not really know entirely what you're looking at.

Activity by category-- the other one you can kind of exclude. Our coach, Susan Gaer, had me look it up yesterday. It just means it's a page view that Canvas didn't recognize. But if you exclude that, the thing I found most interesting is that way off to the side is announcements, collaborations, even discussions, pretty low.

When we do Canvas trainings these days, I try to push a relatively easy model. You don't have to use all of the coolest tools. You don't have to create your own quizzes necessarily. Someone who's familiar with Google Classroom, they can just use it to post announcements to start out, or just post a little discussion question. So we're trying to find ways to simplify it. It can become a relatively complex program, because there's a million ways to do different things.

So another thing in Canvas-- Canvas is owned by Instructure. They bought Badger. They've also bought Parchment. And so now they're integrating badges. Badger's now Canvas Badges. And so this is one idea that I had to try to get a badge going for the ESL program completers. And we still need to work on the aesthetics and everything.

But the cool thing is it's a live badge. You click on it. It's a link. And so this says, what did they have to do to earn it. When was it issued? Issued to who? Who was the issuer? East Side Adult Education. And all of these are live links.

So the discussion came up yesterday morning. Netta was talking about it. And I think Karen was pushing it. It's very easy for us to earn a lot of little badges, but for an adult ed student to get something other than just a piece of paper to put into a resume that links out like this, hopefully it can lead to a job, or the outcomes that they're looking for.

We also piloted North Star-- again, thanks to Anthony, and OTAN, and everyone else. A little bit smaller-- three teachers in ESL, intermediate low, intermediate high, and adult advanced low. I'm the advanced low teacher.

Some of the data-- unique users, we had 99 students use it; learning hours, 228; assessments taken, 841; assessments passed, 319. So the students at Torrance are doing a little bit better than us, it looks like.

But we haven't really used it completely. We haven't been going through the curriculum first. I mean, I think North Star is really designed you just dive right into the assessment and see where you're at, and then it's very easy to work on the skills that you're weak in.

I think as Torrance was saying, student ease of navigation, also teacher ease of use. It's nothing like Canvas. It's much more of a plug and play kind of program. And I've had-- even students who struggle and don't pass the tests really don't have that much problem using North Star. So that's been a real plus. And the teachers like it much more than Canvas.

A little bit of EL civics integration. We did a co-app where they had to write an email to a doctor. So there's a Google Doc, or a using email lesson in there. So I use that in advance with that. And then before our writing tests, I had them doing the Google Docs. So there's-- it can be tightly linked to the rest of your curriculum.

And then we're going to continue to use that. We had a pilot for one year, and our administrators agreed to stick with it. It's only $500 for 500 licenses. So it's a pretty good deal for what you get.

So kind of looking forward now, I think Michelle will address we've been doing a lot of hybrid teaching in the ESL department. And one thing that we're going to try to use is the owl. To go back to my first slide with the piles of hardware that we have, we actually have quite a few owls. And so next year, we're going to start to try to put them more into use-- maybe just one day a week in a kind of a student drop in, tutoring. We'll see. But not full HyFlex, but that's kind of in our future-- so a quick run through. Michelle.

Michelle Chuang: Hi. Good morning, everyone. I'm Michelle. I am ESL curriculum chair from East Side Adult Education. So you can see from our previous two speakers that we are a big program, and we have a lot of equipment. And we have all the advanced technology for students to use. But the point for us is that our teachers are not really ready to use these technologies. So using owls is one of our future plan.

So I'm going to tell you some exciting news happened in the last year. So last year, one of the greatest things happened at East Side is OTAN coming to our school. And so we have four sessions of training about blended learning from OTAN trainers. So I hope Anthony-- I hope you don't mind that I put the pictures here.

[laughter]

Maricel Manglicmot: I took that picture.

Michelle Chuang: Yeah. So we had five teachers receive trainings from Anthony and Christine Rias. So they learned about different models, about blended learning. And they learned about formative online assessment tools. And they learned about designing a Canvas course. And also, they learned about how to create online content and the techniques to teach students online-- so great training.

And we also got full support from administrators. So our teachers receive 20 hours of paid training, which is great. And then so our teachers used the training they got, and then applied what they learned in creating their course.

So my project is to use one of the blended learning models, and then create a hybrid class in our ESL department. So this is the pilot. So this semester, spring semester, we started piloting five ESL classes. So we're moving from traditional learning to blended learning. So we started with just one day of online first for this semester. And then we're hoping that if it works, then we can create more days of online learning.

So the model that we're using is called flipped classroom model. I learned this from Destiny. And I feel it's great that I really want to try it. And so I was inspired. So DLAC gave me the opportunity to try new things, and to innovate. And then I got full support from OTAN. I got full support from administrators. So this semester, we finally made it happen.

So I want to talk briefly about the hybrid class for this semester. So from Monday to Thursday, we're still having the traditional way of in-person learning. But our teachers also use some online instruction in the classroom. And on Friday, the teachers created an asynchronous Canvas course for the students.

So the students stay home. They don't come to school. So they go to Canvas. And they take the lessons on Canvas. And then they finish their homework. And then when they return to the classroom on Monday, the teacher can give the student more in-depth activity based on what they learned on Friday.

So this is the flipped way of learning. So they no longer come to school, and then listen to the lecture, and go home to do their homework. So it's flipped. So they study at home, and then when they come back to school, they can do more interactive activities with the teacher and with their peers. And we found that it's a more effective way of learning.

And the next one, in April of this year, so just a month ago, we did a survey. So we'd like to know from our students what they feel about these hybrid classes. So here are the survey results. So we surveyed 91 students.

And then I hope you can see it. It's not very big. 43% of students think hybrid classes work better for them, 43-- 49% is not-- sorry, 43 is not a very beautiful number. But for hybrid, for the first time that we try, I think, it's exciting for us. And 57 of them need help to do the online homework. So this gives our teachers something to work on for the next semester.

44% of them need to learn typing. So even our highest level students, they need to learn typing. So this is a skill that they really need. And then 50%, half the students are very comfortable using Canvas. So thanks to our teachers, they did a great job.

57 of the students think their computer skills have improved since the online classes started. So this is exciting. This is very exciting. And 48% of the students want to continue to take hybrid classes in fall. So they are positive they want to take the hybrid class. So almost half of them want to continue. So these are-- I think these are the indicators for us to work on for next semester.

So sorry. I think time is up. So I'm going to go quickly what we have done in the past three years. So after we came back to campus after the pandemic, the first year, '21 to '22, we have Canvas train-- we started our Canvas training three years ago. And then we have Burlington English Workshop for teachers. And then we created a tech support position to support the teachers and the students.

And '22 and '23, this is the year we joined DLAC. So we started to do more. So we continued our Canvas training for our teachers. And then we have PDs.

And then for this year, this school year, so this is when we started implementing what we have learned from DLAC. So we continue-- this is the third year we offer training to our Canvas-- to our teacher to learn Canvas.

And then we have a new projector. And then we create one more tech support position in our school. So now we have two tech supports. And then this semester, we started-- we had the blended learning teacher training from OTAN. That was last semester. And then this semester, we started piloting the ESL hybrid classes. So we have five classes this semester. And then earlier this semester, we have a program wide technology PD.

Maricel Manglicmot: We have to go.

Michelle Chuang: Yes. OK. Sorry. Time's up.