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OTAN. Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

Theresa Sladek: Nice to see you all again. I'm Theresa Sladek from Literacy Minnesota. And I have the pleasure of working with all of our larger partners like OTAN and telling you about how you can more effectively use Northstar. So if you weren't here yesterday, please know that I really love your questions. And you can feel free to either unmute and ask them or put them in the chat. And I like to answer them as we go because it usually is pertinent to what we're talking about.

So today, we are going to talk about how to do some of the tasks that are in Northstar, like how you create a learner account and why you would do that, how to do tagging and, again, why you would want to tag something, how to do proctoring both in person and remotely, and where to find the instructor-led curricula and a little bit more about how to use it. We'll focus much more time next week on that.

And then the main message I want you to take away is, I'm going to give you a lot of details today. There's a lot to remember. You don't have to write it all down. You don't have to memorize everything I tell you. And I would be amazed if you do remember everything.

But what I want to tell you at the end of this is I'll show you all the resources in Northstar and where you can find all the details of what I've just told you today. So really, my point today is to let you see why you would do these things. And we'll go through how to do them mostly so you can see how easy they actually are. But you don't have to worry about, you're not going to be doing this for a couple of weeks. You probably won't remember all the steps and that's OK. So don't worry about that.

All right. So let's get started. So if you were here yesterday, you remember this. And if not, I'll just refresh your memory. Northstar has 16 different assessments. And those assessments, once you take them, they'll give you a results page that will tell you what standards you know and what standards you have yet to learn.

And then on the learning end, there are two types of educational materials. There's the instructor-led curriculum where that's more of a classroom teaching situation or a digital navigator, one on one teaching. And there's also the practice lessons. So these are self-directed. The students do them online mostly by themselves.

You can use-- you don't have to use any of the education materials, but you can also just use the instructor-led curricula. You can only use the practice lessons, or you can use them both in combination with one another, depending on really your setup and your staffing and how you want to work this.

Tie everything together then is the learner management system. So learners can see their progress and see what they have available to them and then reports so that you can see how individuals are doing, as well as how your agency is using Northstar.

Northstar is in English. Also most of it is in Spanish. All the assessments, all the practice lessons are in Spanish. And half of the instructor-led curriculum is in Spanish. And then, as we said yesterday, it's compatible with desktops, laptops, and Chromebooks. And we are in the process of making it mobile compatible.

So all of those of you in the pilot should have access to Northstar is my understanding. If you don't, I'm guessing Anthony is a person you can talk to, or the person at your agency who's the Northstar administrator would probably be the first person you talk to. And if don't know who that is or if you are the Northstar administrator, you have questions, Anthony is a good person to start with.

So the way you get access to the admin portal is your Northstar administrator would have added you as staff or a proctor to the Northstar admin portal. You would get an email from Northstar. And it would say, so-and-so has invited you to the Northstar admin portal. You are then given instructions on how to create a password and some links to starting learning material.

And you're given a link to your admin portal page. It's really handy to bookmark that page so that you can find it easily and log into your portal. However, you can always log in at the Northstar home page, and it will go to your portal.

And let me back up and say that all of your agencies have your own unique URL so that by going in through, by using the email and the password to go through your unique URL, that means that you'll only be seeing your agencies, students, and data. And that's how we separate it out for different agencies. And so that's why the password is important.

So if you want to log in, I'm going to show you what it would look like. And again, you can always go to the Northstar home page. If you're not at a computer where yours is bookmarked or if you don't want a bookmark, our website is digitalliteracyassessment.org. But if you typed in North Digital Literacy, you would find it.

So what it looks like, what our website looks like is this. And then you see at the top, this black navigation bar. And on the far right, there's a gray oval that says login. So that's where you're going to log in. And you're just going to put in your email and your password and then click on the aqua login button.

Mine's going to look a little different than yours just because I have greater capacity and can see more things. What yours will look like-- well, you probably won't have this page at all. It will probably just go right to your landing page. So this is the landing page. And what we're looking at here and what we're going to talk about today are some of these different tabs that you see in the blue navigation bar here and what they do and what you can do on each tab.

So where we are now, where the landing page is in the blue navigation bar on top, we are where you see the Northstar logo on the left. And on mine, it says demo. I would like you all to log into your Northstar admin account now and tell me in the chat what yours says, because it's going to be a much more exciting name than demo.

And that will let me make sure that you all know how to log in. So if you don't yet have Northstar, if your agency doesn't have Northstar, that's OK. But if you do and you are able to log in, please do that and let me know what it says. And if you're not, that is good for us to too. If you can't log in or you don't know how to log in, but you should be able to log in, let us know.

All right. So we have El Dorado County Office of Education, Tustin Adult School, TUSD, great. See, much better than demo. Sweetwater UHSD, Roland Adult and probably family. It didn't show up in my chat.

So let's look at this blue navigation bar. So now you know that you're in the right place. And there's a couple different tabs that we're going to talk about today. And so we have mine that says demo and yours says the name of your school. And to the right of that, you'll see a Learners tab.

And so I always think of Learners, this is where you add the new learners to set up the learner management system. So that's what this is mostly about, this tab, and we'll look at it in more detail, trying to get this off my screen.

Next to the right of that, it says assessments. So this will be all about proctoring and running reports on assessments. To the right of that, it says Reports. We looked at these yesterday, those big picture reports. We're not going to talk any more about them today.

To the right of that says Curriculum. So this will be the instructor-led curriculum. And we'll look more into that. Then you see Location Information. And that is only something that Northstar administrators can access. And that's where you would add or delete staff. And there's a few other things you can do there. We're not going to talk about that much today. But just know that if you're not a Northstar administrator, it will say Location Information, but if you try to click on it, it would say, you don't have access.

And then the last one there is Resources. And we'll look at those. And if we go over to the very far right, you'll see my name here with the dropdown arrow, and we'll talk about that a little bit. So we're going to first talk about-- we're going to talk about how to add a learner and why you would want to do that. And we're going to start, though, by talking about how to do a tag, how to create a tag.

So the reason that you would want to add a learner, there's a couple. The main reason is that if you want people to use those practice lessons, those self-directed practice lessons, they can only do that, they can only access them if you've added them to the Northstar Learner Management System. So unless you've added them, they cannot access the practice lessons.

The other reason you might consider adding people to the Learner Management system is it's fairly easy, but also you can have people take assessments without being added into the Learner Management System. But your records won't be quite as clean. And by that I mean, if someone takes an assessment. And they have not been added to the Learner Management System, it requires them to type in their name.

So let's say their name is William Jones. And the first time they take an assessment, they type in William Jones. And the next time they take an assessment, they type in Bill Jones. Northstar will not be able to tell that that's the same person. So those records won't be connected. So you won't see the progress. So it's often better to actually have people entered into the Learner Management System and then using their email and password to log in so that Northstar can accurately track it.

And the other situation where this would be helpful is if you have someone who has the same name. So here in Minnesota, we have a lot of people from Somalia and oftentimes their first name and last name is spelled Muhammad Muhammad, many people. And so the system, if they're not actually logged in, won't know that those are separate people. So by having a unique email and password, it really makes your data really clean.

So that's why I would advocate for adding people to the Learner Management System. However, there's other reasons why you wouldn't. Maybe it's difficult for your learners to type in their name or their email and password. Maybe you don't have staff capacity to add those people. You are going to have to do what's best for your agency with all those things to consider.

All right. Great. I'm glad you got in. All right. So now that's why you'd want to add people to the Learner Management System. And let's talk about tags a little bit. So yesterday, I mentioned that the reports-- there's a lot of reports in Northstar. All the reports default to everyone you have added in your system, everyone that's using Northstar in your system. And sometimes you want to see agency-wide that information and that's great information.

But sometimes you want to see a subset of people. So if I'm a teacher, maybe I just want to see those people that are in my class. I want to see how they've done on the assessment. And I don't want to weed through three pages of people on my screen. I just want to see those 10 people in my class.

So in order to do that, I can run a sub report if I have tagged people to run this so that I'm able to run that sub report. So creating a tag is really easy. And the reason I talk about it first is because I find that is very helpful for agency that's going to be using Northstar to talk about it with your fellow employees what you're tagging nomenclature is going to be.

Now, you might not use tags, you might not use tags right away, but it's really good if you are, a really good conversation to have so that you're all on the same page and you're calling things the same name, so that your data is clean and that there's not a lot of confusion at the agency and everyone knows how they're going to tag things.

You can always change tags. You can always add new tags. You can always stop using tags that you've created. So you don't have to figure all of this out beginning, but it's really just a good conversation to start having before you start adding in a lot of learners.

So the way to create a tag is really easy. We're going to go into the admin portal. And we're going to go to that Learner tab that was to the right of where we were. And I'm just going to go here. And if you look-- I'm just trying to close some of my open tabs here. All right. So if you look to the right of where mine says demo and yours says the name of your school, here's the Learners tab. We're going to click on that.

And this is what we see. So as you are looking at my screen and it looks like I don't have the ability to let people or to let myself annotate on here. So I'm just going to tell you where to look. If you look at the top third of my screen roughly where you see all the above where it says Status, Name, Activity, where do you think without me telling-- and up through the blue navigation bar. Where do you think you might go?

I haven't told you. But just as a guess, where do you think you might go to create a tag? And the key word is tags. Any guesses of where I might click and this upper portion of my screen to create a tag, keyword tags? Let's see what we have in the chat.

Manage tags. Yes. Thank you. Very good. So I'm going to go-- you can see the sub tab I'm on right now is View Learners. I'm going to go over to the right to manage tags and click on that. And this is where we're going to be able to enter the tag names.

Northstar doesn't have any set names. You can choose whatever tags you want. The only thing that you can't do is personally identifiable information. So no credit-- well, credit card numbers, but no Social Security numbers, driver's licenses, birth dates, anything like that. But otherwise, you can choose whatever tag you want.

And the way to add a new tag is if you click in the box where it says Enter Tag Name on the upper left and then just type in your tag, anyone have a name that they might want to use as a tag, just as a more fun way or otherwise I can make something up, but any thing you can think you can think of.

It's all right. I'll make something up. Let's see.

Speaker 1: Excuse me. Wouldn't it be someone's last name, like a teacher's last name or--

Theresa Sladek: We could use that--

Speaker 1: For the school site.

Theresa Sladek: You wouldn't need the school site probably because that's already delineated in your admin portal.

Speaker 1: No. Our situation is different, sorry, because we have four sites.

Theresa Sladek: Yeah, if you have more than one. Well, each site is probably a location, but if it's different than that, if you have different schools within one location, then yes. And teacher name is often what people use definitely or maybe it's a program name or a class name. And so we're going to do home care aide number one in ours. Thank you for that suggestion.

But you can see-- well, let me just back up. So I've typed in Homecare Aide number 1. That's going to be the name of the tag. And I'm going to click on the green Create Tag. And then it's been added to the list alphabetically. So if we go down to H, here it is. And you can have as many tags as you want, as you can see by mine.

And like you're saying, they could be the name of a class, they could be the name of a teacher, they could be the name of a grant, whatever you might want that makes sense to you. And yes, good question in the chat. Is the tag a label where students can have more than one?

Definitely, yes. So it could be that someone's in my class and I teach several classes, so they're in my Word class. They're in the Tuesday morning class. And maybe I'm tracking zip codes. So they could have all those tags associated with them. So you can run-- it's really nice how you can slice and dice the data.

Yes. When you import-- when you run the reports-- I think I see what you're saying. The question in the chat is when we do an import of student usernames and passwords, can we have tags via column? Actually, unfortunately, no, if you do a bulk import. That's the one time you can't. But I'll show you how to add tags after the fact. And it's pretty quick and easy.

So the other thing I want to show you on this page, we've created our tag. And you can see we're Homecare Aide number 1. It has a little pencil by it. And so that would be if I had mistyped something, I could always edit it. And then to the far right, you can see that there's a trash can. So if I saw that, whoops, someone already created this, I could delete it.

Everything else in the middle here was actually something created for the state of Hawaii. So it's nothing that you will ever be using. So the only things that you really have to know about on this page is where to type the name, how to click on the green box-- I'll go up there in a second-- the edit pencil, and then the trash can.

These other icons will show that if I hid some of these tags because we have so many, but if you have data in there, the data doesn't go away. So you can actually always reactivate them and run those sub reports at any point. If you want to make your tag list not so long when you go to the Learner page, you can do that. And so there's a bunch of different options.

So also if you want to see, OK, do we have-- well, so we have all our tags here now. Now we're going to go back to add a learner. So we're going to go back where we started, the default sub tab, which is the View Learners on the left right under where it says demo on mine.

And looking at this page, again, in that upper third part, we're going to add our new learner. And so looking again at the screen, may not, I haven't told you yet, but knowing that the key words are new learner, where do you think you would click?

Speaker 2: Invite New Learner.

Theresa Sladek: Exactly. So we're going to go to this green button that says Invite New Learner and click on that. And then all you need to do is you'll click in the box, and you'll enter the first name, last name, and email.

And remember, I said, a lot of times people who have lower or no digital literacy skills don't have an email or don't know how to use an email. You can create a fake email for them or you create a real Gmail account. They don't have to yet know how to use it. It's just a way for them to log in.

So I'm going to make up a name. And I'll make a fake email if I haven't used this, I don't [audio out] already used it, it won't let me create the account, but that's all right. And then I'm going to enter my tags. So you see the box that says Tags, I'm going to click on it. And once I do, all the tags that we have entered in our admin portal will show up.

Now, I don't have to scroll all the way to the bottom if I want to, let's say, do my-- this person's my class. I can just start typing my name, and then it will show up. And then to your point, you can add as many tags as you want. So I could click in the box again. And let's say their in my Friday morning class and I'm teaching intro to Word or something like that. So you can have as many tags per person as you would like. And then you see the--

Speaker 3: May I interrupt, asking about tags and processing that. Is that really for filtering purposes to pull information in different ways is creating the tags really?

Theresa Sladek: Exactly, right. So when you're looking at your data and you want that sliced and diced, either if a teacher wants just to see their classroom or if it's for a bigger reason, a different project, different projects you have or different programs maybe you're doing, it would allow you to just see the people involved in those programs or the teachers those classes. Yeah.

Speaker 3: Thank you.

Theresa Sladek: Yes. Yeah. Good clarification. So then the other thing on this page is you can see that there's a language preference. And mine is set to English. But if the person you're working with, if they would prefer Spanish to be their language that they're looking at, you can set that here. Just click on the Latin American Spanish toggle. And then that will be their default language. They can always change it. You or they can always change it back to English at multiple points. So it's really up to you if you think what language you think they prefer.

Once you are done with that-- and you don't have to have a tag also, I should say. If you don't want to put a tag on here, you can leave the box empty. And then we're going to click on Invite Learner and we'll see if I've ever used this email or not. If I have, it will tell me I can't use it, but otherwise, it should be all right.

And so it looks like you see in the upper right hand corner, I got this green check mark that, hey, this user has been created. And then the learners are alphabetical by last name. So we would find-- I forgot to change my status here.

See, if it will come up. I think I did last name Brown. Well, OK, I lost my person because I forgot their name. But anyway, it will come up as alphabetical by last name. And so you can see here Rob As Student. The last name was S. So this is why it's showing up as an A.

And when I want to find myself, I think it's because-- here we go, Big Brown. So you can see that if you do the status sorting like I just did, it's putting all these that have this yellow clock at the top under Status. And what the yellow clock stands for is it's pending.

So once you create a learner account, what happens is that email that you put in there, an email is sent to that email address and what it looks like is this. So if this person can read this email, either in English or Spanish, and they have the digital skills to go on to email and use email, they can click on this big blue bar and create a password.

Now many of your students may not be able to do that, and that's all right. You can create a password for the students yourselves. So when you see that little yellow pending clock and you either know that they can't do this or you suspect that they aren't able to do it, you can manually activate their account by creating a password.

And so you'll see on the left was the little clock, the yellow clock, and their name. And on the right, I'll show you this in a second, but there's four little boxes. And then one of the boxes, there's a lightning bolt. And that stands for activation, so think energy activation. And that's where you're going to click to create the password.

If you are creating passwords for people, we all know that all of us forget passwords all the time. And for someone who is new to digital literacy, it's even harder to remember your password. So I would recommend if you are going to set-- if you're going to be creating people's passwords, that you have some kind of consistent system so that when they invariably ask you, what's my password, I forgot it, you have a quick way to remember it.

You can always change someone's password too. But just to save yourself the hassle, it's easier if you have a quick way of remembering what it is. So you can see here the Friday student has the yellow pending clock. And then over on the far right, this is the lightning bolt. And I would click on that.

And when I do, it says, are you sure you want to activate the learner membership? And I say, yes, I am. I press OK. And then the names and the email addresses will already be in here. And where it says Set New Password, that's where you actually would type in the new password.

Here you can also choose the language preference, and then you click on Update. And that person then would have access to the learner management system, the learner dashboard. And of course, you would want to share with them the email you used and the password so they know how to get in. And you probably may have to just might even be part of their first digital literacy lesson is logging in. That is a skill.

And even typing in a password, not so much with Northstar, but with other systems, sometimes you have to have uppercase letter, sometimes lowercase, numbers, symbols. To people who are not used to the English alphabet or to typewriters, that's a great place to start their digital literacy learning.

So you're are actually teaching digital literacy when you're teaching how to log in to a system. And my point here is, don't be frustrated that it's taking people time to learn that. And you might think they're not getting to the lesson. They are actually learning digital literacy. And it is a critical step and you're teaching it. So just give yourself a little bit of a break and remember that this is a very important component of digital literacy that you're teaching.

Passwords cannot be a mass import. Well, yes, passwords can't. You would have to create a unique-- you'd have to create a password for each person as you want. But let me show you the bulk import page. So you can add people in bulk. So if you have a class or a new program or whatever, there will only be three columns.

We do give you the spreadsheet. And it would be first column, first name, second column, last name, and third column, email address. And then you would fill out that spreadsheet, save it to your computer, and then upload it. And so where it happens and what it looks like is on this Learner tab.

Next to where we want to, Invite New Learner, you see, in that green box, there's one person. And if we go next to it where it says Import, you see there are two people. So that stands for bulk import. And if we click on that, here in the blue box rectangle in bold, it says CSV Template, that's where you would get that spreadsheet, you'd fill it out, save it to your computer, then Choose File to upload it.

So then all those accounts would be created at once. All those emails would go out at once. You would have to your point, if there were people that you wanted to create a password for, you'd have to go through and create the password, unfortunately, one by one.

But you can tag in bulk. So if you want to tag a bunch of people after the fact or maybe you have a new tag that you want to add to people, that's relatively easy. Yeah, I know, that's-- it will be a little bit of time on-- a little bit of admin time on your part to start.

Unfortunately, being a nonprofit, we can't make upgrades as quickly as we would like. But I will suggest it to the team and see what they-- they'll definitely put it on their spreadsheet as something to look into. So in order to tag people after the fact, you can see to the left of every one, there's this square.

And if we click on those people that we want to add the tag to, we're going to go here. I'm going to do-- you can see that it says on the right that I've assigned the tags or I'm going to assign the tag to three people. So when I know how many people I want to assign, I'm going to click on Assign tags in green. And then all again, all my tags will come up again.

And so I can search again for what I might want. See, and then click on it, and then click Apply. And then all those people I check-marked will have that tag assigned to them. So you can see they all have the Excel tag assigned to them. So that's pretty quick when you want to bulk assign tags at least.

Any questions about any of that? OK. Let me make sure I told you everything. I do want to show you that why you're doing the tags, so you can see when we go into my admin portal, that I have-- I'll show you my deactivated. I have multiple pages of learners here. You can see I have 11 pages. That's a lot of people to look through. If I'm a teacher and I only have 10 students.

So if I want to run that sub report so I'm just seeing my students, I'm going to go to where it says in the middle in the green Filter Results. And this is on every report except for one, I think, that lets you do filtering results. And here you can either filter by someone's name on this particular report or by the tag.

So if I only want to see the people that are in my Friday morning class, I just clicked in the tag box. I chose the tag I want and I'm going to apply the filter. And then I see that instead of 11 pages of people, I have three and most are deactivated. So I really only have a few people.

If I want to see everyone who's in my Friday morning class and who's in cohort 10. I'm going to Click cohort 10. So I clicked in the box. I clicked two tags. That means that the people who show up, I don't know if there'll be any, but the people who show up on here would be in both. So they'd be in Friday morning and in cohort 10 Let's see if there's anybody. So you can see there's one person. So that really narrows it down, which is what we would expect.

If I wanted to see who was in cohort 10 or something else, so maybe cohort 10 or my advanced ESL Class, I would click on where it says plus Or Other Tags. And then again, look for my advanced ESL class. So now the list that comes up should be bigger because it's all the people that are either in cohort 10 or they're in advanced ESL class. So it's a bigger group.

And I'd apply filter. And then we see that it's a much better, bigger group. So that's how you would use the Boolean searching basically to run these sub reports. And again, there's multiple reports that you can do this with.

So if there are questions, please ask them. If there are no questions, I'd like to take a moment to have you all go into your own admin portal, not my screen, and create a tag. It can be a fake tag because remember, you can always delete it, and then create a fake learner or real learner if you know someone.

Just don't use your own name because that will confuse the system because you're already in there. And again, we can get rid of this learner after you-- you don't have to activate it, but just want you to practice doing that and see if you have any questions when you're doing that. So go ahead, create a tag, create a learner, and tag that learner.

The other thing I want to mention, and this might help you, Matt. If you have a lot of learners and you don't have a lot of staff time and you feel that the learners could sign themselves up, you can enable that, can create an account for themselves. You can enable that. Your Northstar administrator can enable that in Northstar.

So as you're looking at my screen, you see that-- the person is looking at demo. And it says, at the bottom, if you have a learner account, log in. Now that's where they'd enter their username and sorry, their email and password. And you see I've circled in red. We've enabled the fact that if they need a learner account, they can sign up.

So if someone has the digital skills to actually go online and create their own learner account by entering password, you can allow that. If that does help with the number of people you, you could even that. You could even do that in a classroom setting where the teacher is directing people on how to do it. And that would make the process a little faster. You would still have to tag them after the fact, but at least they'd be sitting in their own creating their own password.

The last thing I want to talk to you about this is that if you remember the main reason we're adding learners into the learner management system is so that they have access to those practice lessons. I want you to know that you also have access to your own practice lessons, to your own learner dashboard.

And we did that because we want to make sure that you what it looks like. So you can talk about it to your two learners so that you can use it yourself for your own professional development. And so what you can determine if you want to use it for teaching purposes.

And it's really easy. There's an easy way to switch between the admin portal view and the learner dashboard view, and I want to show you how to do that. So if you're in your admin portal, your Northstar admin portal, you are-- let's go back to our landing page. Actually, we're on learners, I guess. You're adding learners or whatever, and you're like, oh, I want to see what something looks like in the monitor dashboard.

You can go over to where you see in the far right my name, and on yours, it would say your name, and go to the dropdown arrow and choose Northstar Online Learning. So these are the practice lessons. Click on that and you're going to come to your own learner dashboard. So this is for you and reflects what you have done in the system.

So if you've taken an assessment, your scores would be here. If you've done any of the practice lessons, you could see that. But it allows you access to those practice lessons in that learner dashboard so you know what's going on and what the learners are seeing.

If you want to then jump back to your admin portal, you go again to the upper right, you'll see my name. And you'll see your name on yours. You click on the dropdown arrow and then you're just going to go back to where it says Admin Portal. Mine probably will ask me which one I want to look at, but yours would go right back to the landing page. Yeah, yours will go right back here. So that's how you can switch between the two of them.

So that's the piece about adding learners and doing tagging. So just to recap, you'd want to add learners to the learner management system. That's the only way they get access to the practice lessons. And it really does make your data cleaner. But you got to weigh in the other factors, of course. But it does make the data cleaner.

And then tagging allows you to run smaller sub reports. Rather than looking at everyone in your organization, all the learners in your organization, you might want to just look at a few and that makes it much easier if you're using the tagging.

So we're next going to talk about assessments and proctoring. But if you have any questions about adding the learners, let me know. So we're going to talk about assessments. Oftentimes, ideally, you would want a proctor every assessment. In case someone passes, you could give them the certificate. Not everyone has that staff capacity.

So if you don't, I always would recommend that when you do the pretest, you do it on proctor. But make sure you're seeing what the person already knows and where there's an opportunity to learn more. And then when you do the post-test after they've done the education, then if possible, do the proctoring. If you can't proctor either one because of your situation, that's all right too. But when in doubt and you have some resources, I do the proctoring on the post-test.

The assessments, of course, help us determine what the instruction will be. They also certify achievements, and people love seeing that they pass these assessments and especially getting the certificates. And they can help prepare your teaching staff. So many times I've encountered organizations where teachers really did not feel comfortable teaching digital literacy because they just had never taught it before. And it was new to them.

And if your teacher is feeling uncomfortable, the class is going to pick up on that. And if they're uncomfortable, it's not going to work. So it's really helpful for your teachers or any of you who are teachers to go through and take the assessments yourself, see where you might have gaps in your knowledge and fill in those gaps using the educational material before you teach the class. It's going to make it much more fun.

In order to-- let's say you have a person that you want to give an assessment to, a learner, you have to know how you can get them to your site specific URL so that they are logged into your agency. So first, you have to know where your site specific URL is. And you'll get that in the email that you get from Northstar. We'll have it there. But you might forget or you might not realize that you should be remembering that.

So when you log into your admin portal, you'll find again, I'm on the landing page under where it says demo on mine and the Northstar logo. And you'll find that you see this teal colored square that says location pin. And if you look to the right of it, the second bullet point says, bookmark the page it takes you to. This is your site specific URL.

And you can see why they recommend that you bookmark it because you don't want learners typing in this huge long URL. So I would either bookmark it and have it on the computers that are at your agency or you can put it on your website so that people can log into it from there if only your learners are actually logging into your web or seeing your website. That's more often than libraries where it's behind a library card that they have to enter, but just as a quick way for people to get there.

If people are taking it remotely, you can always send this to them in the chat if you're on a Zoom call or something. But when someone clicks on this, it goes to my organization. So you can see this is demo. You see the address. And you see that it says no Proctor available. And this warning disregard that. That's just because I'm playing dual roles here.

So you'll always want when someone's taking an assessment, whether it's proctored or not, you'll always want them to go through this site specific URL, your own, not mine, but your own. So that it's recorded to your location, to your organization.

Let's say they're working on the practice lessons and they've done some learning and they want to take the assessment, they can also go from that learner dashboard. And so let's take a look at that. If they're in their learner dashboard and let's say they've been working on, I don't Windows 11, and they want to take the assessment, they're going to just click on the Take Assessment in the lower left hand corner of that square.

And then, in this case, we're at a different location called Open Door Learning Center-Midway. And it gives the information. And then they can take the assessment. So those are the two ways that the learners can get into your site specific URL, either from their learner dashboard or if you're giving them the URL, then they can go there and log in.

I see something in the chat. The validate computer via pin. We will talk about that in a second, but I'm glad you noticed it because we're going to be using it. All right. So you're sitting with someone. They're going to take an assessment. They clicked on. You have it bookmarked that site specific URL. They've clicked on it, or you've clicked on it for them, and here they are at this page with the name of your organization, your address, and this gray hash bar that says, No Proctor Available.

Backing up a bit-- we talked about this already-- but if someone is going to be taking a Northstar assessment at your location, what are some of the really basic things that you're going to need to have in order for them to take this online assessment? Really, really basic thing digital equity do.

Let's see. Computers. Yes. You're going to need some kind of a device. Exactly. What else? So that's one leg of the stool. What else will they need? It's internet based. Internet. Yes. You're going to need a stable internet connection.

The other thing I would highly advocate for would be headphones. There is an audio component to Northstar that's often very helpful for people. But unless someone's in a room all by themselves, it will just be distracting to those sitting around them. So I do highly recommend headphones if that's possible.

So you're sitting with this person and you're going to proctor their assessment, just one person at this point, and you're going to proctor their assessment. The reason we proctor is to get that if someone passes, they can get that certificate. So what does it mean to proctor? Really just that you're sitting next to them watching them take the assessment to make sure they're not using notes or their phone or someone's helping them. And you just watch the whole assessment, and that's what proctoring is.

So you're going to help the people log in. Then you're going to check their ID. Now, if this is someone that you've been working with a long time and you know who they are, you don't have to do this step. This would be more for agencies that see a lot of people coming in on a daily basis that maybe they don't know.

And the reason we check for ID really is because there are many programs throughout the US, training programs, that require a person to pass a certain Northstar assessments before they can start the program. And that's really so that they're ready, and they're going to be successful.

But if person A is applying for that program and they have person B take the test for them, that's not going to show that-- I mean, they may not be ready to take the program and they won't succeed. So that's mainly the reason that we check IDs to make sure the person is who they say they are.

We also have a testing code of conduct, which is written out. It's very straightforward. Things like don't eat or drink by the computer. Ask for any questions you have about the actual assessment before you start it. Don't be rude. Basic things. So you're going to either read that to the test-takers, or give them a copy, or paraphrase it however you want to do it.

And then you're going to start the proctoring. So in order to proctor, you have had to go through this video on proctor training that Northstar would-- if you're going to become a proctor, your Northstar administrator would sign you up to be a proctor when they add your name in. And you'll get an email from Northstar saying, watch this video. And so it's a 15-minute video. You learn how to do proctoring and you take a little three or four question quiz.