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Theresa Sladek: Well, good afternoon, everyone. It's nice to see you. I am Theresa Sladek. I'm with Literacy Minnesota, and we are going to talk about Northstar today. I just want you to know that I'm going to give you actually a lot of information. I'm going to tell you everything that's available in Northstar.

If you have a subscription, if you're participating in the pilot, you will have access to all of this. What I sometimes find is that organizations-- it's great because there's so much in here, but sometimes organizations will think there's so much I can't possibly do it all and I don't know where to start. Don't feel that way. You don't have to do everything all at once. You and we'll talk a little bit about some common ways that people start that organizations start. If you feel like you just want to tackle a little bit at a time and then and grow from there, that is definitely doable.

As Anthony said, I love to hear your questions and you can either as we go along, unmute and ask them or put them in the chat and I can, see it and monitor it pretty well. Usually, it's best to try and answer the question as we're talking about the material because it's usually pretty relevant to what we're talking about. Today, I'll tell you a little bit about my agency literacy Minnesota, and then how Northstar got started and why we do things the way we do them.

We'll focus most of our time, though, on what is in Northstars. And so that would include all the assessments, the two types of educational materials, which are the instructor-led curriculum and the self-directed online learning practice lessons, and then kind of encompassing all of that or tying it all together is the Learner Management System and the reports that you can see. If you already have Northstar and you're here for a refresher, this is great for you too, because honestly, I feel like I'm always updating my slides with new things that the Northstar team is developing. And that seems like it's every week sometimes. So there's probably something new here for you that you may not know about.

Literacy Minnesota, we are adult basic education agency. We've been around for over 50 years. We have our own schools. We have of our own schools here in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. I'm in Minnesota. If you didn't guess. And you know that is looking at helping people learn English, Adults learn English with literacy and also teaching them high school equivalency. And then of course, digital literacy.

If you don't know about literacy in Minnesota, we also do statewide training for volunteers and teachers, working with adults on literacy and have for years. And so there are we have a ton of free resources at our web page that is looked at by people all over the world. Things like curriculum, working with people on phonics, working with people on math, there's little videos, there's tool kits. I will put this in the chat. But just quickly want to show you-- excuse me, I'm just getting over a cold.

This is the Literacy Minnesota web page. I went to their Educator Resources here. If you look under where it says find Free Adult Classes in blue. Then there's Educator Resources. And if you go to the Educator Resources Library, that's where I'm at right now. Like I said here, they show some featured things, but you can look by a variety of different topics, different audiences, format, what you're looking for and the level.

And 95% of what's on here is free and you'll know if something's not. I will put this in the chat just in case. Well, it looks like Anthony did. Thank you. So it's a great resource for you to use. But today, we are here to-- Literacy Minnesota also does advocacy around adult basic education on a statewide and national level. And of course, digital literacy through Northstar and that's what we're here to talk about today.

Northstar is a platform. It's a web-based platform, and its focus is on foundational digital skills. And this it starts with basic things like how to turn out a computer, how to search on the internet, how to send an email up through, I'd say, mid-level skills. So kind of your basic office Excel PowerPoint word programs that your generic office worker would need to use, and then some specialized things that will show they'll show you in just a second.

It's used around the country and around the world. It was initially created in English and now almost all of it is also in Spanish. All of the assessments and all of the practice lessons are in Spanish. And the instructor-led curriculum, I think is about half of it's in Spanish and we are working on translating the other half. And so I would assume they do probably one every three weeks. So probably in the next, five months, all of the instructor-led curriculum will be in Spanish, too.

Northstar is fully compatible with desktops, laptops, and Chromebooks. You can use it on a tablet. There are a few questions that are drag and drop that don't work very well. But sometimes people just skip those. You technically can use it on a cell phone, but it's really not a great user experience at the moment, especially for someone who has low digital literacy skills. We are changing that because we know that a lot of times learners, that's what they have our phones.

We are going through all of Northstar, making the assessments and the practice lessons mobile compatible where it makes sense. We wouldn't do that for Excel because most people aren't doing Excel on their phone anyway. But for especially for the kind of basic things, we're making it all mobile compatible on phones and tablets.

And as we do that, we're also working with an organization that works solely with vision impaired individuals and they're helping, they're going line by line through everything in Northstar and testing it on screen readers. And so giving us suggestions on how to make it even more compatible with screen readers. And then we're just updating it to as we do that. So that's probably a year-long project and they're done a few topics which I'll show you. And they're working on right now on internet basics assessment, I believe.

Northstar was started now it's probably 13 or 14 years ago when the country was in the last, big recession. And our local library here in Saint Paul was getting in a lot of displaced workers who wanted to take their computer classes in order to show prospective employers that they had these skills. And the library was having a hard time because they were getting people who had such a wide range of different skills that the classes weren't very effective for anyone.

They came to us and they said could you create some kind of an assessment that will let us place people in various classes. And we thought this was a great idea. First, we looked out to see if there was anything already developed, but we couldn't find anything. So we got together a group of national experts, and they started looking at, well, what would we consider to be foundational digital literacy.

And once they developed those topics, like using email, then for each topic, they started creating standards. And as you know, standards are the skills that we feel are what is needed to be competent in each of these topic areas. And the standards are always very testable concrete standards. For example, in using email that topic, one of the standards is how to attach a file to an email. You can tell if someone knows how to do that or not.

Because we work with adults ourselves on literacy, we wanted to make this as accessible to the people that we work with as we could and we felt that we could write it all at a grade 4 reading level and still kind of maintain the digital literacy integrity of the assessments. And we also decided to make it web-based. So as long as someone has a device and reliable internet, you can access this from anywhere in the world.

We initially thought it would just be used by Saint Paul public libraries and were amazed at how quickly it gained national attention. And that's really because there was nothing else and there still isn't anything else out there that assesses these skills, and then provides some of the training materials and especially at a low cost because we are a nonprofit. What we do charge organizations helps us pay for staffing so that we can maintain digital literacy. You know that digital landscape is constantly changing. We want to make sure we're up to date and then adding new features that we hear from our subscribers like you.

And I think that's all I wanted to say on that. We currently have 16 different assessments. Excuse me. And you can see that they're arranged in these three different groups, mostly for convenience for you. I know what I was going to say.

Northstar is always free to any individual. Only organizations are subscribers, and then they provide it free to those that they work with. Here are the 16 different assessments. No one has to take all 16. It really depends on their goals, your organization's goals, and the needs.

It could be that someone-- in fact, I encountered a person a couple months ago who had a job and he wanted a promotion. And he knew that to get the promotion, he needed to know how to use Excel, but he didn't feel that confident in his Excel skills. He went to his local library and there they had Northstar and he took the Excel assessment, figured out what he knew and what he still had to learn, learned it, and then passed the assessment and showed his supervisor the certificate that he had passed. And the supervisor was very impressed by his dedication and promised him that he would move up in the promotion. So he got the promotion.

That's an example where this person just used one of the assessments. Sometimes there are people who want to do all the assessments. It really depends. I would say that mostly organizations will use the first three and individuals, the first three. Basic computer, internet basics, and using email are the most frequently used, because if you can't pass those assessments, you really can't do much else in digital literacy in Northstar.

You see that we have these three different areas. Essential computer skills these are those foundational skills. The first three are the most common. And then Windows 10 or Windows 11 really depends on what operating system you might have at your organization. Windows 11 would is more used in a business setting. If you have people who are looking to get a job, that might be more helpful. And then Mac OS and/or Mac OS, so depending on what operating system someone's going to be using.

The essential software, these are workplace skills and/or educational skills. Then using technology in daily life. Most of these you know what they are. Information literacy is the not the ability to just search, but the ability to use critical thinking when searching so that you're putting in search terms that will get you relevant results and you're understanding what websites might be reliable. And what might not be. Again, that next step in searching.

Most of these then, career search skills, you know what that is. Accessing telehealth appointments. Your digital footprint is helping keep you safe online. When you do things online, you are often making it public without your knowledge. This helps a learner understand how to make things private. And also the awareness of just what they're putting online might be viewed by other people.

And then supporting K-12 distance learning. This was made during the pandemic for parents to help their students. But I'm finding in talking to community colleges that many, many community colleges are using this particular assessment because they're finding that students are coming into the community colleges without knowing how to use the distance learning platform. And that's kind of setting them back right from the start. This can be used by adults to just to learn how to use those distance learning platforms.

Northstar is always planning on new things and we're planning on adding a specific cybersecurity assessment by the end of this year, by the end of December. We do have a lot of cybersecurity embedded in several of the assessments like internet basics and using email and your digital footprint. But we hear that people would like, just one assessment on that topic. That is the plan. And then as I mentioned, we're making internet basics more mobile-friendly, mobile compatible.

The assessments themselves-- as you can see, here's an example of a question from the accessing telehealth appointments. The assessments themselves they're not theoretical. They actually have you show that you can perform the skill. And then they're typically, except for some at the very beginning ones, typically kind of in a real world scenario, so something that an adult might encounter.

I don't know how many of you have taken the assessments, but I would like to give you maybe seven minutes to try them. I'm going to show you where to find them. We're going to do-- Northstar has free assessments and then the subscription assessments are actually the same assessments. The main difference is that there's no tracking or reporting on the free version. And in fact, in the free version, unless you yourself write down your score or take a screenshot, even Northstar doesn't keep that information.

I'm going to just take you to that, those free assessments for right now. And I'll put it in the chat as well. But I would like to give you about seven minutes. I want you to all try taking an assessment. If you don't finish, that's completely fine. I just I mostly want you to see what it's like and what the experience is like, what the students you would be working with would experience.

And also, I will say that I talk to groups all the time and have for years and have yet to meet anyone who has passed all 16 assessments with 100% on the first time, even those in IT. And that just goes to show that, this is digital literacy is lifelong learning. And that's a good thing for us to remember and to be able to tell the students that we're working with. And you might learn something new.

The assessments are here on the Northstar home page, which is digitalliteracyassessment.org. And I'm going to put this in the chat, and then when I let you on explain where to go, then you can go ahead and choose your assessment. So you're going to scroll down just a little bit and you'll see a green oval that says Try An Assessment Now. You're going to click on that.

And then if you scroll down a bit, you'll see all 16 assessments here. Please take whatever assessment you want. What happens when you click on one of them is you'll get asked if you want to test your audio, you can or you don't have to. Then there'll be a short-- there'll be an option to watch an orientation video and you can skip that if you'd like. And then you'd start the assessment.

Again, don't worry if you don't finish. I'm going to give us until 27 after the hour. And so go ahead, get started. Make sure you're muted. If you have any questions, please, put it in the chat or just unmute and let me know. And then once you're finished, if you can put in the chat, you don't have to put your score. But if you could just put what assessment you took because it's kind of fun for me just to see the different choices people make.

So go ahead, go to that link I put in the chat, scroll down, pick an assessment, and get started. And you could see that, when you took them that there was audio. There's words written on the page. Again, you have to show you can do the skill in order to go on to the question. And then of course, there's the I Don't Know button, which is great if you don't know because that allows instructors like you to know what people need help with.

For those of you who were able to finish and some of the I'll also say some of the assessments are longer than others. If you're feeling-- don't feel bad if you didn't finish because sometimes some are longer than others. But if you did finish, you saw that you got this results page here or something like this and it shows your percentage. And Northstar says you have to have 85% or higher to pass.

What's more important, I think, is in these two different columns. You'll see in the green column on the left. This shows you which of those skills or standards that the person knew. And then in the gray column on the right, this shows me all those standards that did not pass. It can really help focus down where I need to learn.

And now, like in this case, what you didn't see on the free version but which is in the subscription version is you can see that I missed standard 5 here. Just demonstrate understanding of how to use browser tools. And to the right of that, there's a barbell that says practice. If I clicked on that right from this screen, I could go to the practice lessons, right to that standard.

I passed I don't need to do the whole lesson. I can really focus just on that area that I still have an opportunity to learned something. It really is very tailored to each person's learning needs. If my score had been much lower, I could start at the very beginning of the practice lessons if I wanted to from this page. Under this plum colored bar, you see it says Go to NSOL. And NSOL is Northstar's acronym for Northstar Online Learning, which are the practice lessons.

Now you definitely don't have to go to the practice lessons from the results page. I find that many people really want to learn. It's kind of gamified in a way because you get your score. And so people are kind of like, oh, I want to get 100% or whatever it is. They can if they want to. But again, we'll talk about the various educational models that we have to use once you've given the assessment.

I said the passing score was 85%. Whenever you give an assessment, you can decide if you want to Proctor it or not Proctor it, and proctoring will get into it much more in detail tomorrow. But proctoring really just means that you're there watching the person take the assessment, so they're not getting help or using notes or whatever it might be. If an assessment is unproctored and someone passes, they'll get that results page that says they pass and they can also get a digital badge, which is like a micro credential that some organizations use and some don't.

And it would say they had passed and what the assessment was and that it was on proctored. If the assessment was proctored and someone passed, they of course, would still get a digital badge. It would say this time that their proctored and they could also get a certificate that you either print out and give to them or you could email it to them as a PDF attachment, assuming they have the digital skills to open a PDF on an email. You would know that you and they would know that the best.

We initially created these the certificates to show potential employers the digital skills that people had. And this has proven to be very effective. I've heard many, many people who've gotten jobs because they were able to show or talk about these certificates and that they have these digital skills, especially if your resume doesn't really indicate that you might have them. Especially for people who, let's say they've been incarcerated for a while or staying at home, taking care of family or this might be their first job in this country or their first job ever, or maybe they're wanting to move from a more of a physical labor type job to more of a desk type labor type job and their work history doesn't suggest that they have these skills, showing that they have these certificates by listing them on their resume or talking about them in an interview can be really helpful in getting a job.

What we did not anticipate, and which we should have, but which is far more important is how much confidence getting these certificates gives people. For the most part, many people who have low digital literacy or no digital literacy are actually pretty afraid of computers. They're afraid they're going to break it, they're going to mess things up. And even more I think, they're afraid that they are never going to be able to learn the material.

And so by getting the certificate, this objective certificate that says they know this information, it is amazing to see. I've had people start crying when they get them. People give you high fives. Many learners I know have purchased frames and hung them, hung the certificates up in their homes. And so it can be really powerful.

It also helps in persisting in other educational goals. You know that trying to learn English or getting your GED or whatever it might be, those are long term educational goals. And adults tend to be hard on themselves. They often don't see the progress they're making. Northstar is a much quicker win. You don't have to spend as much time to see the results. You can see the change in your score.

And we have heard from many organizations that it actually helps learners understand that by putting the time and energy into studying, they do see results and that helps them in their other educational endeavors as well. That's always very exciting for us. And there's a good question in the chat about how does Northstar verify that something was proctored versus unproctored?

And if you are going to Proctor an assessment prior to proctoring the assessment, you enter in-- you would have a Proctor code that you would enter so that would let the system know that you're actually actively proctoring. And we'll go over that in more detail tomorrow how to do that. But that's how the system recognizes something's proctored or not.

This is a picture of one of the students that we had at one of our schools. And you can see that he's holding several of the certificates in his hand. You can actually print out just one certificate that lists everything that someone passed. But people are so proud of getting these certificates that they want a separate one for every assessment. And this man was typical a lot of the students that are seen at this particular school in that he had been an auto mechanic for his entire career and just got to a point where he physically just couldn't do the job anymore. But he wanted to stay in the field but didn't have the computer skills necessary to get the job he wanted.

So he came to our school. He ended up passing all the Northstar assessments and getting his dream job at Napa Auto Parts helping behind the counter. It was really exciting for us to be part of his journey. How do organizations use the assessments in conjunction with the educational materials? Ideally, in an ideal world, if you could assess every-- if you could Proctor every assessment, that'd be great in case someone does pass, then you could give them the certificate.

But sometimes, you know you don't have the staff capacity to do that or the space or whatever it might be. If that is the case, I always recommend giving an assessment as a pre-assessment. You're giving it first to see what someone knows and choosing to do that on proctored and then providing whatever relevant instruction is needed and then give the assessment again and Proctor it that time and the post assessment in hopes that the person would pass.

There are times-- and we'll talk about this later, but there are times when an assessment just might be too much if someone who really has no computer skills or maybe their English or Spanish language levels are really low. The assessment might just be too daunting. But in general, it's helpful to have someone take the assessment initially so you can see where there's the opportunity to learn more and what they already know, so you're not wasting their time on learning things they already know.

A lot of programs, we talked about-- I'm going to tell you a lot about Northstar and there's many places to start, but a lot of programs will start by having their staff take the assessments and then beefing themselves up on whatever they don't know. Most of us have taught ourselves digital literacy, so we all have gaps. And if you're a teacher and you've never taught digital literacy and you're faced with now teaching digital literacy, many people get kind of nervous.

So by going through the assessments and the relevant training materials themselves, instructors feel a lot more confident. And that really comes through when they're talking to the students. You can also just use it for professional development, even if it's something you're not going to teach. Again, I've learned a lot from taking the assessments and then the related learning materials.

And then finally, I'll say that proctoring can be done in person or it can be done remotely. Both are really easy. We'll look at both tomorrow how to do them. But they're both really easy to do. I'm going to just pause for a second and see if anyone has any questions related to the assessments before we move on to the educational material.

I see something in the chat. OK, all right. Well, let's go on then. Next, we're going to talk about the two types of educational material. And the first one I'm going to talk about is the instructor-led curriculum. This is more like what you'd see in a traditional classroom. You can also use it for one-on-one tutoring or if you have digital navigators, they can use this one-on-one.

We have all of the topics that we have assessments for. We also have the instructor led curriculum for. You can see that we've translated about half of them into Spanish and the team is now working on social media at the moment. And instructor-led curricula, like everything in Northstar, is aligned with those Northstar standards. It's also very easy to use.

We, at Literacy Minnesota, we have many volunteers who also teach Northstar and they may not have any teaching background, so it's easy to use the lessons. All look the same, they have the same format, the same components. The curriculum gives you instructions on how to use it. It gives you the words to say. It gives you the worksheets and the answers. So it's kind of a complete package.

And it's also very learner centered. We wrote this with adults in mind in terms of what they might find interesting. And we also created a lot of practice. Our philosophy is that you really can't learn digital literacy through lecture alone. You really have to get in there and actually practice the skills.

And there's a ton of repetition, so much so that the first time I taught it, I thought the students aren't going to get kind of bored. But they actually loved it because it helped them feel very confident and competent in the skill. And if you have people who are moving really quickly through it, you can always jump ahead. Obviously, the curriculum is a guidelines and you know the students that you're working with the best, so you know where you need to slow down, speed up.

The lessons themselves are independent of one another. If you have a class taking the assessment, an assessment, and you see that they all standards 1 through 5, you can skip ahead to standard six. If you just wanting to teach how to recognize spam, let's say you can just pull out that lesson and only teach that lesson. Very adaptable to what you would need and what the learners are needing.

Each unit topic, so unit topic again would be like using email, each unit topic has about eight lesson plans on average. And the curriculum writers felt that it would take about two hours to complete each lesson. If you did everything from start to finish, you're looking at about 16 hours. It will depend on the size of your class, the language level of your class, the digital literacy level of your class, whether you're remote or in person. And also, frankly, how much time you have.

I have talked to programs who have three-week courses where they meet three times a week and that's it. And they cover the topic. Sorry. I'm just going to mute myself for a second. And they'll cover those aspects that are the hardest for students to learn on their own. And then they'll have people work on the practice lessons on their own time. It really depends on-- you can make it work for whatever situation you have.

We also have each topic has a final unit project that's-- so Northstar will show you how it's aligned with the college and career readiness standards. But there is a final unit project that's directly aligned with them. And this takes all the skills that were learned in a unit and then a couple of paragraphs of reading, maybe two or three. And if you want to use it academically, it talks about looking at the main topics in a paragraph, looking for supporting evidence, really delving into that literacy piece of the reading piece.

But then, ultimately, you take what you learn from the reading and the skills you've learned and you create a project that is given to you. So it's a great way, especially for those learners who really want something more or who want to put what they've learned to use in a practical sense, it's a great-- the unit projects are really fun. Totally optional. You can decide if you want to use them or not.

We do also, on the other end of it, and I don't list this here, but we have made kind of PowerPoint slides that you can use with low level English language learners to help introduce digital literacy into your ELL classes. So looking at some basic slides with pictures and really simple wording to start teaching that vocabulary because digital literacy is just like any other topic. It's a topic. And so there are words that you need to learn. There are not only how to do things, but just the vocabulary of it. That's also part of Northstar.

And so the curriculum, you can use it one-on-one, you can do it in-person, you can do it remote. And actually in our training on Friday or maybe it's next week. Sorry, it must be next week. I'm going to go through some of it so you can see what it's like for me to teach remotely as well as you get the student experience of that. Our curriculum was written by people who have taught adult education, and they looked to best practices in adult learning to create the lessons and the lessons then include that.

All the lessons start out with a warm up. We know that adults come with a lot of wisdom and we want to tap into that. This helps not only get people talking, but it also lets the instructors see where the knowledge is and where there might be gaps and then allows you to connect to what they know to what they're going to learn.

The next piece of the lesson is called We will learn. And these are really the objectives written in student-friendly language. I felt when I first taught this that I would just write these on the board and we'd go through it really quickly. I was really wrong. The students wanted to write this all down in their notebooks. They were English language learners. They wanted to read it out loud. They wanted to ask about any words they didn't understand.

Even though it was a digital literacy class, it became kind of a mini English language learning lesson at the beginning. And people were really, really invested. I will say, as kind of a best practice, I've found that adults really like to have a notebook or some kind of paper to write down digital literacy, certain terms or whatever it might be. And also they like to keep the handouts and refer back to them and maybe even write or draw pictures on them or something. Just so you know that's something that I found learners really like.

The next piece is where the instructor will model the skill and explain what they're doing, and we give you instructions on how to do that. And then the class performs the skill together. As an instructor, then, you can make sure that everyone's following along and see if someone is not understanding it. And if that's the case, which often is. There's something called pair Explorer where you can pair up people who are understanding the skill and know how to do it and people who haven't yet learned it. And that gives the person who already knows it another chance to teach it and the other person gets another chance to practice it.

Ultimately, everyone does their own kind of worksheet and/or practice, and then you come together as a class and you go over that. And then there will always be digital literacy vocabulary work specifically built into the curriculum. And you've kind of close it up with checking those objectives and doing a little just test, not test, but asking questions to see if people comprehended the topic. That's how the lessons go.

And this is what the first page of every lesson would look like. And you can see that in the upper left-hand corner, it will list the standards that are in each lesson. If there are specific standards you want to teach, we do have a every topic list out all the standards and which lesson you can find them in so you can quickly find them. Then on the upper right, this shows you what vocabulary lessons will be explicitly taught in this lesson. Sorry, what vocabulary words will be explicitly taught in this lesson.

And technology concepts, this is really the objectives of the lesson written in instructor language, along with any teaching tips that we feel like it would be helpful for you to know. And then at the bottom, this is the prep guide, so it's telling you what you're going to need to do before the class starts. What you're going to need to make copies of, what you're going to need to project. And if you're doing this remotely, you can just click on those blue links and it will bring up those handouts.

I will say that, typically , when I was getting ready for a class, the first time I ever taught this, it only really took me 20 minutes to go through the material and make the most of the time was spent making copies. It's very intuitive for instructors to use. Kind of delving into the curriculum, this is what that warm up looks like. You can see it's getting people to think about these topics and letting you see if they're answering this in something where they're keeping their financial information safe by hiding it under the mattress.

That's different than if they're talking about doing it online, so you kind of know where they're at. And then We will learn. These are those objectives I was telling you about that you go over with your class. And here's an example of the model and explain. So you can see we actually give you the words to say, which is great because it can maintain consistency across your classes.

And a lot of times all of us, we know how to do things, but we may not know the correct terminology. And when you're teaching it to someone who doesn't have digital literacy, it's much more confusing if you don't use the same words all the time. So by having it written out, it kind of helps you maintain that integrity of vocabulary, I guess. I would say that the most helpful or the best thing about this is that it's been a long time, I'm sure, since any of us did not know how to turn on a computer or send an email or search the internet.

And because of that, we forget all the steps that actually are involved in doing what to us now seems very simple. And so sometimes when we're trying to teach people, we'll use jargon or we'll assume that they know things that they don't. And for people who already may be fearful or anxious about their ability to learn digital literacy, if they run into that, they're going to be convinced that they really can't do this. We want to meet students as much as possible where they're at. And so the Northstar curriculum writers have attempted to do that by giving you language to meet students where they might be at this level.

And of course, again, you can change the words or say things in a way that you would say it to make it your own as long as you're using the correct terminology. That's just fine. The last thing I want to show you as far as the instructor-led curriculum goes, this is an example of a handout, and so a couple of things to notice.

You can use this if you want to for reading instruction as well or for writing. You have to write out a sentence. The other thing is that if you look at the first names in these questions, you can see that they come from a variety of different cultures. And so in all that Northstar does, we try to in all the videos and all the pictures and the names, we do try and show people of different cultures in the hopes that people who are using Northstar identify with the people in Northstar. Are there any questions at the moment about the instructor-led curriculum?

Then I'm going to go on to the practice lesson. So these are the kind of self-directed practice lessons, also called Northstar Online Learning that people can do more or less on their own. And you can see that we have 15 of the 16 completed. The only one we haven't created is the K-12 distance learning. We haven't created yet is the K-12 distance learning. And I want to show you what this looks like.

I'm going to go ahead and click on this link. You'll see a picture. You should see a picture of a laptop. There should be some words written above it, and then you should hear audio reading those words. So I won't talk until she's done reading so you don't have to hear me talking over her. So let's go take a look. It takes just a moment.

[video playback]

Instructor: If you look closely at the outside of a computer, you will see buttons and many small holes. These holes are usually called ports. Each port has a specific shape for different uses and different types of plugs.

[end playback]

Theresa Sladek: So you could hear that she reads very slowly and clearly. You can speed up the audio. You can slow down the audio. You can turn off the audio. There is also closed captioning for any embedded videos that we have. And you can listen to it either in-- listen and read it in either English and/or Spanish.

And so this is an example of this slide is an example of being taught something, so educational material. Instructional material. But like I said, at Northstar, we believe that you can't really learn through instruction alone. You actually have to get in there and practice the skill. So I'm going to click on the Next button at the bottom below the laptop there and I'll show you an example of one of the practice pages in the practice lessons.

[video playback]

Instructor: Here is a flash Drive that you can plug into a computer. Click on the port that matches it.

[end playback]

Theresa Sladek: So then if I click here, I'm told, yes, this is the USB port. If I clicked on the headphone Jack, I would be told no, this is the headphone Jack. Look for something that matches the shape of the flash Drive. And so again, the philosophy here is that you're going to have some of this practice or some of the instructional materials, some of the practice material, instructional material practice material for several of the standards in the topic.

And then there'll be a little quiz. It'll be like a three-question quiz. And once you take it, it will say you're ready to go on to the next section or go back and review what you just saw. And if you should take the quiz twice and not be able to pass it, then it will give you help with the answers. This is practice, not the assessment. It'll give learners help with answering those questions are really teach them what they didn't understand.

And I would say each topic has three or four sections that have that little quiz. And then the last section after the quiz, it will say you're ready to go take the assessment again or go back and review x, y, and z. So, again, very tailored to each person's individual learning needs.

If someone was to do one of these unit topics, one of these lessons from start to finish, it would typically take 90 minutes. However, they don't have to do it all at once. If they have 10 minutes to work on it and then they can't come back for another couple of days-- sorry. Then they will save their place and get back to where they were.

The way they do this is on their Learner Management System. This is a good question in the chat, though. Which is more popular or more widely used, instructor-led or self-directed? It kind of depends on who you're working with. With people who are working with lower-level English language learners, typically, it's instructor-led.

If people are native English speakers or native Spanish speakers, or if they're looking at a little bit higher level skills, I would say it's usually self-directed, often self-directed, but you can also do a combo. They're all connected by those standards. So a lot of times instructors will teach something and then they might give the practice lessons as homework. Or for people who missed a class, they'll say, OK, we covered these standards, so if you could do those to catch up with the rest of the group.

They'll sometimes talk about one topic that they find is more difficult for their students and then they'll have them do some of the more easy things on their own. So it can be a mix. The instructor-led are probably better really for people who don't know anything about computers initially to do that first and then do the practice lessons again, repeat that same information. And then the practice lessons will be better for someone who's got a little bit of understanding. Great question.

I want to show you what the learners see. We have a learner dashboard so they can see the progress they've made, their scores on assessments, where they are in the practice lessons. And the learner dashboard looks like this. Well, not like this. Let me log in and get there. Looks like this. So you can see that they can see all the different topics.

You can hide topics if you want to but you hide it for everyone. If you're saying at our school, we're never going to do MacOS, you could hide that if you wanted to. I personally feel like letting people explore is great. But up to you. So now let's look at internet basics here in the purple in the middle.

And so what this is showing the learner is these two rings are kind of a graphic representation of what they've been doing. The outer ring, this dark purple ring is showing someone how well they've done on the assessment. So if it's a full circle, they got 100% The inner ring is showing how much of the practice lessons they've completed. So in this case, it's about half.

The icon in the Middle, If you see a hexagon with an icon, that means that someone has passed this assessment. And we'll go into we'll go over this more in later trainings. But if we now go to the lessons button you see on the bottom right. And if I go to the Standards tab, if I've taken the assessment, it will tell me what standards I've missed. And then I could go over to the far right and practice them. If I hadn't done it, it would look like that barbell there.

If I have just a few standards to work on, I can pick and choose just to go to those standards. If I wanted to do the whole lesson next to the right of the rings, it says Start Practice. And that would start at the beginning or wherever I left off. And then if we go to the Practice tab, what we were talking about just a second ago, well, here these upper case bolded words, these are those sections that I told you each has its own little quiz.

And then the bulleted points, these are the standards. So, again, if you said, OK, you missed a class and we talked about fill out an online form. So if you could go over that on your own time before the next class to catch up, that'd be great. Or if last week you talked about identifying top-level domains and you wanted everyone to just review on their own time for five minutes at the beginning of the class this week, you could have them do that. There's a lot of ways that you can use this in conjunction with the instructor-led curriculum if you choose.