[MUSIC PLAYING] SPEAKER: OTAN-- Outreach and Technical Assistance Network. FRANCES TOURNABENE DE SOUSA: OK. So I'm Frances. This is Mansoora. We are from Pittsburg Adult Education Center. Our students are a community of learners, recent immigrants, and local residents aged 18 to 80 from the San Francisco East Bay communities of Pittsburg, Antioch, Bay Point, Brentwood, and Concord. Our CTE programs, Allied Health Academy, offer training in certified nursing assistant, medical assistant, and we also have floral design. We have day and evening classes for ABE, high school diploma, CTE-- excuse me, some CTE, GED, HiSET, and five ESL levels. There is a distance learning option for ESL students and an independent study option for high school diploma. We are proud testing site for Pearson VUE testing. Two academic counselors and a career transition counselor who offers job search assistance support our students. We have approximately 35 teachers in all departments. Our DLAC team began with myself, France Tournabene De Sousa, as the team leader and Mansoora Shah-Zaeem as our sole member tech guru and administrator. And our administrator, Dr. Danny Lockwood. Our DLAC coach, Francisca Wentworth, expertly led our cohort of three agencies through weekly meetings where our collaboration was so-- this collaboration was so instrumental in our progress that post-DLAC, we will continue to meet to discuss our challenges. We worked with our department chairs, Liliya in ESL, Judy in CTE, and David in high school diploma and GED. We also worked with our registration and testing staff, John MacDonald and Pamela Spindel, and IT tech Johnny Vigil. We recently lost our CTE head, Judy. She was really adored by her students. And by describing her own life, she was always telling them to be ready to change and to take on new jobs. And she was a big proponent of our campus LMS, and she was always an innovator. So she held her celebration of life before she died. And we all participated on Zoom from all over the country and Hawaii and also in person at her church. Everybody wore Hawaiian shirts because that's where she's from and the brightest clothes they had. And everyone was giving-- telling their stories about Judy. And finally at one point, she said, all right. Tell some funny stories about me. [LAUGHTER] And so we'll miss her a lot, but just calm down. Don't worry. She did not die of DLAC. [LAUGHTER] OK. Is that you? MANSOORA SHAH-ZAEEM: Nope, that's you. FRANCES TOURNABENE DE SOUSA: Where? MANSOORA SHAH-ZAEEM: Participation. FRANCES TOURNABENE DE SOUSA: So participation in DLAC was instrumental in advancing our continuous improvement plan, which-- our goals were to implement Canvas as our school-wide LMS. Ready? MANSOORA SHAH-ZAEEM: OK. As you can see, we revamped our registration process, which was paper to pencil, of course, before. So we went online, working with John, Pam, and Cheech. Those are their nicknames. I can't say the others. So working with them so that all students have access to that. And yes, we did run into the problem that some other people had mentioned, that people had registered and not heard back. But we took care of that as well. The development of our implementation plan quantified the tasks to be done in order in which they had to be executed. So we had to figure out the plan. Our priority has been to implement the dynamic features of Canvas efficiently to create as little work as possible for staff and teachers. Because staff and teachers don't need any more work, right? As a small team and with very little IT support, we spent most of the first year working on technical infrastructure and organization. I took on a role as PAEC tech support for department heads and course instructors. We offered a professional development on Canvas in person hands on. Our district IT set up an automated scheduled migration from ASAP into Canvas, which gets done four times a day, and it has to be monitored. And that means we have to talk to the three people we mentioned before with the assistant from our Canvas adoption. And we developed everything the first time on our free one, and then we moved it over to the new one. So definitely a lot more bells and whistles. You'll love that. This year we are able to hand over our maintenance task to the registration test center. And our Canvas trainer hours were leveraged to meet training webinars and best practices for department heads in OTAN, who provided, of course, three hands-on customized professional development webinars for our teachers. And it wasn't just ESL. All of our teachers from CTE, high school diploma also attended. A teacher training course in Canvas was created to house all three resources and course shells. We piloted online student orientation basics, which we practice Zoom, Canvas, Gmail, and of course, we had to figure out which devices and how they work, so on the Mac, a PC, a tablet, a smartphone. And then we had to get eTextbook skills. People have to know how to access them to participate in class. In the second year, we had one-to-one training, which we provided to teachers. And our administration went ahead and paid those trainings and allowed the teachers to be paid for those trainings, so there was a benefit there. Provided to move the teachers so they can put all their courses on Canvas as you can see. Canvas allowed us to make online materials available on smartphones. For high school diploma I believe it was the best because high school diploma was paper-to-pencil, making copies, textbooks, and now all of their curriculum is on Canvas. CTE students on Canvas have access to their books like we were talking about earlier. We have different programs that we can go into CK-12 and go to August Learning. That's a CTE program. And we bring everything into Canvas so no one has to go away from Canvas to get the resources. CTE students on Canvas have access to their ebooks, links to supplement or teacher videos, and testing. So I was able to bring those tests and videos into Canvas. ESL use of Canvas-- we have ebooks and online resources on their smartphones. This is for our ESL. You can tell we use Future, News for You, Burlington. And I'll show you some numbers from all of this later on. A lot of our teachers have already gone ahead and started using WhatsApp to communicate with their students so they're not waiting to come to campus and find out if a class is canceled. And this is how Canvas looks on your phone. So Canvas is a free app to the students on your phone, on a Mac, on a laptop. I have all that ability. I can tell you what it looks like. And then truly what I was really passionate about was taking France's distance learning, which was students coming in once a week, working with her, getting homework, and leaving. Well, because of COVID and because of Canvas, it went to truly online, where they're able to meet online. She has one student or she has multiple students, but they get that one-to-one from the teacher, and they're able to do it at their pace. They don't have childcare. Don't have driving. As we know, a lot of immigrants don't have those resources. So for them to be able to continue their education, this was truly distance learning. OK. [INTERPOSING VOICES] FRANCES TOURNABENE DE SOUSA: OK. So we were taught-- the digital reader participant course and the DL 101 102 courses gave us the training to build a realistic project to roll out to meet our school's needs. The DLAC virtual communication training with Dr. Porter gave us the skills to help others become more involved and support their efforts. We were taught how to use our strengths in their appropriate areas, such as Mansoora's achiever and connectedness and multilingual skills for training teachers and students in online skills. And these were supported by my analytic organizational and arranger skills. I was willing to take charge and initiate. Mansoora was willing to get it done. And from DLAC, we got the support we needed to build our digital networks. MANSOORA SHAH-ZAEEM: OK. We have faced, as you can see, challenges and barriers that we counted. Dr. Porter guided us. Because we face challenges in getting information to all teachers and barriers in technical equity for both teachers and students. Our principal, Dr. Lockwood, labored to provide teachers with laptops and paid professional development in Canvas. For all the teachers, he outfitted the ESL department classroom with Chromebooks and equipped pilot classrooms with cameras and microphones for HyFlex teaching. He has requested additional hours for a computer aid, Cheech, to assume some Canvas responsibilities in registration and testing and the creation of a classified IT position to support Canvas. The growth of our agency infrastructure for Canvas is the foundation that puts us well on the way to bring our teaching into 21st century and give our students the practice and the digital skills they need to succeed. Accomplishments-- go ahead. FRANCES TOURNABENE DE SOUSA: Accomplishments? MANSOORA SHAH-ZAEEM: Mm-hmm. FRANCES TOURNABENE DE SOUSA: We don't have time. So you can see we made a great deal of accomplishments in just a very short time, two years. And we began with very little expertise in online teaching. And now we have teachers who embrace what they can do and demand more training. And our students also have multiplied their skills and want more access to digital education. OTAN office hours and everything they provided us with were pivotal in making this possible to happen. And now we feel like we are on firm ground to move our school into the 21st century and for our students to have the skills they need when they leave school. MANSOORA SHAH-ZAEEM: OK. This is the hybrid HyFlex learning model, as you can see. I do have a laptop, which is my gaming laptop, because I need it to be really quick. And behind me-- I'm also on Zoom behind me so the students in the classroom can see the students online and they can communicate with each other. And then, as you can see, I have my laptop here so that I can immediately see if my students need help online. So really managing the classroom became a great way for me to figure out how to reach every single student. Here is some research that I did. I'm constantly seeing my students on their cell phones, internet devices, contributing, sharing videos. So why not use that time that they're using watching cat videos to learning to use it on Canvas. And then this is the hybrid model. Before in the pandemic we had 20%. I was using 20% of Future and 10% of Burlington. It was there. Kind of used it. But during the pandemic, we started increasing. Now I'm up to about 90. My students are on Burlington on their own. We have the laptops in the classroom. They have access to Future. They can do extra activities. So we're taking that pen-to-paper and moving it to the next level. So in summary, our teachers feel they're more confident. They have the resources. They have the logins. They're able to use Canvas because we spent the time and trained them. Students-- there's more participation because they don't spend that time driving. They don't spend that time worrying about gas prices. They can just do it from home. And our administration has gotten a better understanding of the needs of the students and the teachers. And time is managed more effectively because that is the greatest necessity. Next. Go ahead. FRANCES TOURNABENE DE SOUSA: OK. So our next steps are full use of Canvas and more training for our teachers. And hopefully we'll get staff to do ongoing student digital orientation for our students. We want them to have knowledge of their strengths and their career goals and to do an equity check-in to see that our students have what they need to succeed. We hope to create a classified tech support position to manage Canvas. And we want to say thank you to everyone, especially Penny, Neda, Marjorie, Melinda, Anthony, The Diva, Francisca, Destiny, and Dr. Porter. And we're letting-- here we come to CDLC, which is hosted by OTAN and is the California Distance Learning Cooperative. We hope to see you there. MANSOORA SHAH-ZAEEM: Yes.