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OTAN-- Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

Archana Nekkar: Good afternoon, everyone. We are a team CACE And we are presenting our final report of DLAC 2020-2022 cohort 3, Campbell Adult and Community Education join the DLAC community like in all the others in August 2020. We are a team consisting of two ESL teachers, Jill, who is physically there at the venue, and Lars Gundvedt. Lars, can you like-- yes, and they are both ESL teachers. And I am Archana Nekkar, an ASE teacher-- thank you, Jill-- ASE teacher, and I teach a HiSET class.

We started our two-year DLAC journey not knowing where we were headed with the pandemic and are not so familiar digital and online learning. I still remember the first course that we took in IDL 101 with Destiny, and it was a video lesson, interactive lesson on blended learning. I have not shared this so far. I got a whole lot of questions wrong in that video, interactive quiz about blended learning. But from there, here we are today with our final presentation, looking back at our learnings, experiences, and experiments.

Next slide, please. CACE serves West San Jose and areas of South Bay community. Pre-pandemic, CACE had multiple locations, but now we are offering classes in two locations in the San Jose Bay Area. Next slide, please. Our population consists of English learners who make up 65% of the enrollment.

And 20% of the student populations enrolled are for adult basic and secondary education classes. The ethnicity mix of the student population includes 56% Hispanic, about 25% Asian, which is not that common for all adult schools. 13% white, 4% African-American students.

Next slide, please. Our mission statement focuses on advancing our communities workforce, raising all forms of literacy and preparing learners for careers all of this using current technology. Also, as a school, we commit to the equity approach by inclusion, providing a lot of support services for our students and differentiation of instructions in the classroom. Participating in DLAC has helped us adhere to our SLOs. We have acquired skills and tools to meet students at their level and help them continue to grow and advance even during these challenging times.

My teammates will be talking in detail the next few minutes about our DLAC training and projects. On a personal front, it has been a huge growth for all of us. The last two years, we have all had to handle things as they have been thrown at us. And for all of us, our administrators, OTAN, and other DLAC'ers, we're someone we turn to for help and support. We shifted classes from fully online model in the year 2021 to hybrid this school year. My colleague, Lars, will take over and talk more about our journey. Over to you, Lars.

Lars Gundvedt: OK, thank you very much, Archana. Next slide, please. Our challenge. So as Archana had mentioned, the CACE mission statement speaks to raising all forms of literacy and preparing learners for careers, college, and civic responsibilities. One of the school's student learning outcomes, one of our SLOs is to quote, utilize current technology in daily life for a student outcome. These two guiding principles helped us to form a plan for our DLAC participation.

Two years ago, we knew that the CACE administrative team had been exploring the idea of using Canvas in the classroom. Well, now we had a chance to get the ball rolling. Our solution that we came up with was to help the school move students and teachers towards accepting Canvas as our schoolwide learning management system.

Next slide, please. But we didn't do it alone. The DLAC program provided us with a full on village of support. Penny and Neda led our teams through the maze of OTAN requirements and deadlines, always with remarkable chipper attitudes that defied the stress that we all felt.

Dr. Potter enriched us with leadership skill development well beyond what we felt we were capable of. And Destiny's amazing workshops gave us the substance to fill out the spindly frames that we had begun to construct. Francisca, our coach, she held our hand, told us everything was going to be OK. You're on the right track, keep going. You're doing great. And the CACE administration team, Leslie and Usha.

Initially, we on the team were concerned with doing everything right, what an overwhelming upsome lift. But Leslie and Usha reminded us that we were building the plane as it was in air. We could make changes. We could make mistakes. We could experiment. Honestly, that acceptance strangely actually gave us a superpower. Their confidence gave us the confidence to reach further than we had planned. We cannot thank them enough for that support.

Next slide, please. The ideal course. The ideal course built up our confidence by showing us the reality of what the real world looked like. We could see the panorama of existing distance learning efforts. What works, what has been tried, and what are the challenges. We were barraged with resources. You need a student technology survey? Boom, here's five. What about orientation programs? Here, take a look at how these schools around the country are running their programs. It was practical, real world, and it helped.

Finally, the ideal courses gave us a safe forum to practice on our own and experiment. As other folks have mentioned, we were building rubrics, surveys, orientation outlines, and student assessments, all of this with the safe supports that Destiny gave us. And the best thing, she always asked us how we were feeling. Right, guys? How are you feeling? Let's put a little emoji on the screen to show this how we're feeling.

Next slide, please Dr. Porter, strengths are good. Dr. Porter showed us our strengths and told us to befriend our strengths. We learned to read our teammates and to see what they were good at. We built a team that had confidence because we could look to each other. We knew we had to foster a culture of change in our school, and Dr. Porter showed us how we could sell an idea.

We've been planting seeds of positive change all year long. Conflict? Yeah, groups, we had to deal with conflict. Our team handled conflict through mutual respect; a trait that Dr. Porter showed us how to build. We could count on each other because we could see where each of us were and what needed to be done. Next slide, please.

Finally, our coach, Francesca Wentworth. We were the Guinea pigs, and we didn't even know it. She was secretly experimenting on us. You put three type A leadership teams into one Zoom meeting every single week. What could possibly go wrong? Next slide, please. Oh, my goodness, there we were. And there's Patricia going crazy. Next slide, please.

Actually, it was a great idea. We all looked forward to those weekly meetings. We were all trying to solve problems and together, the three agency teams, pooled resources, knowledge, research, and skills to solve our collective problems. The group dynamic was supportive, positive and encouraging. With that encouragement, all three teams began to forge ahead with their projects with greater confidence and the willingness to take risks. Taking our plans beyond our own expectations. Jill, over to you.

Jill Moreci: OK, next slide. All right so the cornerstone of our participation in DLAC was the planning, research, and development of our agency's tech plan. The very first year of DLAC prepared our team for project number 1. And that would be, next slide, the Canvas LMS. So our team implemented Canvas into our individual online classrooms, and the transition went very well. However, the HiSET and the ASE programs found it difficult to integrate their curriculum into Canvas. So we will continue to work on this challenge. Overall, progress has been made.

Let's go ahead to the next slide. Three other teachers joined the pilot and they transitioned from Google Classroom over to the Canvas LMS, and they really enjoy it and so do the students. And this is my Canvas classroom. And I went with the Bitmoji banner and these buttons that are like a choice board so the students can go directly to today's lesson and so on and so forth. And more of that to come later in comments.

Then we went on to project number 2. When we transitioned into a hybrid learning program over the past school year-- let's go ahead to the next slide-- our team was challenged to establish an online tech plan that would ensure that our students would have equitable access and connection to the hybrid learning environment. And as a bonus, our administration gave Lars and me-- surprise-- new positions at CACE. We were now called the Digital Literacy Support Teachers, and we conducted orientations and we helped our students by training them in technology and we helped ensure that they were connected to our hybrid program.

So next slide. Our new roles helped us on our second project, and this project is an online orientation course that we named CACE Connect. So hello, CACE Connect. CACE Connect is a four-day orientation program designed to introduce our students to school and also train them with their digital literacy skills necessary to participate in our program.

CACE Connect, let's go on to the next one, please. CACE Connect, up close here, it's organized into several modules that house all of the presentation materials that take place over four days. So for example, these presentations a teacher can just log in and give the orientation herself or the orientation team can present these materials. They're always accessible in the Canvas module.

So as you can see, we have a welcome and introduction module. The students also are trained on their Google accounts, that's a different module. The boot camp is the overall agenda. So at a snapshot, you can see the four-day course. The coaches can be contacted on this button. Students will learn how to email their teachers and about their laptops, as well as Zoom conferencing. So this has worked well this past year.

Next slide, please. So our next module, the teachers one, back there, is actually the home of our teacher's toolbox. This was our third project where we designed a teacher's Resource Center. So that's in Canvas as well. OK, let's go on. I was going to share, but we're just about out of time. This is a resource that we have. It's animated. It's through canva.com. If many of you are using that, it's wonderful. So that was a fun resource.

But just to wrap it up, I just want to say, over the past two years, we've done a lot of growing, a lot of learning, and we really appreciate the time that we've been together as a group online and today in person. So thank you very much, everyone, for being with us today. And next slide. As we look to the future, we will continue to work on our projects, improving them, developing them and we will continue to take what we've learned from DLAC along with us. Take care, everyone. And thank you very much.