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Speaker 1: OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

Martha Clayton: Welcome, everyone. So my name is Martha Clayton. I am the only full time ESL faculty person at my home college, which is Los Angeles City College, we are part of a nine college district called Los Angeles Community College District.

And what I'm going to talk to you about today is what we call liquid EL Civics. This is part of an evolution. This has been an ongoing project for several years this started way back before the pandemic. Actually, let me ask a question really quick, is everybody here an EL Civics participant? Do you or does your agency or school put your program participate in EL Civics? OK. I see a couple of thumbs up. All right. Excellent.

You can feel free to turn your cameras on and give me a real thumbs up if you want. Or if you're sneaking your lunch, that's fine too. OK. Hi, Laura. So when I started working at my-- hey, Karina. When I started working at my college, EL Civics was a new thing to me, Adult Ed was a new thing to me.

And when we started participating in EL Civics, it was like we were handed a stack of paper and told, jam this into your syllabus somehow. And I hated it. And I didn't. I was like why are we doing this? You're telling me two weeks into the semester. I now have to include 30 hours of instruction on the DMV. That's not in my syllabus. How am I supposed to do this? And you want the results in two weeks.

So we've been playing with a lot of different ideas. And to make EL Civics more truly integrated and more natural, because I think that the skills that we target in EL Civics are incredibly useful. These are real things we all need to be successful in Southern California, in Los Angeles, in California, in the United States.

So I've been working for a while with our EL Civics coordinator to find ways and techniques of making it a little bit smoother. And we started really simple. We started with doing things like having an EL Civics calendar that outlined what the co APS would be before the semester started, so we could actually build our syllabus around that important milestone and step in the process.

And so one of the big things we did, was a few years ago, we, myself, I and another faculty person from my college participated in DLAC for our district. And so what we did was we started a project called digital EL Civics, which I'm going to show you right now. I'm going to share my screen, which may take over your screen. You can minimize so that way you don't have to see a giant version.

So what we did was we created Canvas-ready shells that faculty could use. And we had a few reasons for this. One was my love-hate relationship with EL Civics tasks and assessments, but the other was that we were trying to increase digital literacy skills for in our curriculum overall.

And we kept it simple. We would start out with a little module so students could learn how to use the tools in Canvas. Let me actually put this in student view so you can see it from a student perspective. Oops, and so-- oh, I went too far.

So we started step by step. Here's a couple of different tools students need to be able to do in the class like a discussion, how to make a video, how to record your voice, how to take a quiz. So this would be like our introduction to the actual technology skills that we needed them to use. And then we worked out some really fantastic curriculum, and this was designed by me and a few other faculty members.

And we really wanted these lessons to be something that wasn't inserted in the middle of something else. We wanted faculty to say, oh, hey, I've got that health unit coming up, I can add this supplemental unit in Canvas. And so it follows a WIPPEA lesson plan format, with lots of opportunities for students to learn all four skills plus grammar and pronunciation. So it's not just limited to the final tasks they need to do, we wanted it to be a real ESL lesson.

And so for this one, this was for our health and nutrition or nutrition 46.4. We started with healthy food resources, this is where students learn how to search for healthy food resources in their neighborhood. We did comparing food prices, so we included vocabulary, reading, speaking, grammar, presentation, things like that.

So we didn't want students to feel like their course was disrupted or there was some strange hiccup in the flow of curriculum. And then there's always an in-class activity that you do with them to see if they're ready for the assessment. And we also put our assessments in into Canvas.

And this has been one of the things people ask me the most questions about. They'll say, well, how do you proctor this? We're in Zoom. I can see everything they're doing. I can have my entire class, record their voice while they're in Zoom and also using Canvas. So that's been a real lifesaver.

So basically, what I do is I have students mute their Zoom microphone but then use their Canvas microphone so they can do conversations-- role play conversations with me as an entire group. And so we were super proud of this, and we've used this for a few years now. I was in the DLAC cohort that graduated two days before we were put into lockdown. So we were actually flying home from Sacramento and got word that we weren't going to be able to go back to work in person.

So one thing I want to say is that DLAC made it possible for our program to really thrive during quarantine. So if any of you haven't participated in DLAC, I highly recommend that It really, really helped us a lot. So that was our original project.

And we're still working on improving integration. And one of the things that I've-- oh, Carmen Delgado is here. She's my DLAC partner. For me, she's down in the bottom there. So I'm just going to check the chat really quick to see if there's any--

OK. So I have a question here from Lori. How are the assessments kept secure if they're in Canvas? You put a date on them. You lock them. You can put a date so students can't open them without a password. So there's a bunch of features in Canvas where you can limit access to different parts. And that's what I do, is I give them-- I have a password, I have-- the assessments are password protected. And so they don't get the password until we're in class together that day and go into it at the same time.

OK. So next question is from Laura. She says, it looks amazing. Thank you. Did you make different shelves for different ESL levels or was it one size fits all? So the way that we created the shells, for example, for that nutrition co op, there are three parts. Beginner low, beginner high have to do the first two parts, and then intermediate has to do the third. So the first two and the third. So basically as they move through, it becomes increasingly more challenging.

So for students who are only beginner low, beginner high, they're just going to do the first two lessons and the first two task assessments. For intermediate students, they're going to do all three. And they're broken apart so that way faculty can use them in whatever order they want. Instead of having one giant module, they're broken up by topic.

To teach-- do teachers manipulate-- yeah. OK. So this is a question from Karina. Teachers can adjust these modules however they want. If they've already covered the grammar topic or maybe they don't want to cover that particular grammar topic, they can totally adjust it.

I'm in a community college, so we have academic freedom. We don't have a top down directive on what we have to teach, so faculty will adjust them the way they want to. They can just unpublish anything they don't want to use. And we tried to make it robust enough that there's a lot to choose from, or they can just start at the first one and work their way through it.

Did you do-- Carmen. OK. You don't have. It's all right. I think that's the last question. If you have questions, please you can put them in the chat or you can just politely interrupt or raise your hand or whatever. I'm totally open to an open forum. So that was the first phase of our digital EL Civics project.

And I'm still always trying to figure out ways that we can integrate EL Civics more. And so this is an example of what I did in the winter, our winter intersession. I was teaching a conversation class and it was a 54-hour class. But because it's the winter session, we met Monday through Thursday. And instead of once a week for 16 weeks.

And so what I did was I decided to use the EL Civics materials for my entire class. And this went in conjunction with us developing themes for EL Civics for our entire program. So this academic year, our theme is health and nutrition. And so what I did was I just used the materials. I mean, this is what we used. Went through the same process, this is the same module, and I would intersperse the EL Civics materials with other materials I use in conversation classes.

So in my conversation classes, we watch a lot of short films, and we have discussion topics and things like that. So that's how I introduced it. We started with one of our film analysis modules. I'm going to turn my blinky light on. And that led into the first EL Civics lesson of healthy food resources.

And, of course, the topics correspond, so they're paired together, and this worked really, really well students didn't feel any strange scheduling. It made sense the entire class. The topic of the entire course was health and nutrition. And they knew that when they started, so they were just like, OK, let's do this.

And so every other module in this class was an EL Civics module. And so by the time we got to the end, which was here, mini portfolio, they were ready for these assessments. One thing I did notice for kind of improved integration and better student engagement was I stopped calling the assessments assessments. I found that any time I said quiz or test or assessment or even like a little check in, students affective filter would go up and they would just be like I can't teach or I can't do it.

And so I changed the name of the assessments to mini portfolio, and it was all of a sudden the sun came up for everybody. The students were like, hey, when are we doing the portfolio? Do we get to see it after? Are you going to share it with the office? Like they had all these excited questions, and all I did was stop calling it assessments.

But I ended up having-- in this class, I actually did this with two classes during the winter, and I had almost 90% participation in the complete EL Civics materials and assessments for those classes, which was incredibly high because half the time students will try and dodge the assessment day and things like that. So I totally recommend teaching through trickery, if you need to. It really works.

And then I just closed out this whole topic with a final project. And what we did was we watched Super Size Me, the documentary about the guy that eats McDonald's for a month, and we did some writing about it. And so this was like a little bit more in-depth integration, which was really-- I felt really successful and pretty easily adaptable for any class format.

Do we have any chat questions? OK. Let me just check the chat.

Veronica Parker: No chat questions.

Martha Clayton: OK. Thanks. All right. But still this is preliminary experimentation with really trying to make it a more seamless process. And one of the things that faculty in our program shared with me was sometimes they didn't like the materials that were offered to them. And a lot of our books have correlative materials, but maybe it's not quite enough for what they need to do overall.

Oh, OK. Laura, great question. All of my EL Civics Canvas modules are available for free on Canvas Commons. If you type in my name, you will find them. They are editable. You can edit them however you want. I would love if you somewhere on there keep a little credit for a city college or something, but I am open to share always. So if you go to Canvas Commons, you can find all these materials.

Yeah. OK. So Lori, totally 30 hours. Sometimes I teach-- we have a lot of 54 hour classes at my location at my home college. So if you all of a sudden have to do 30 hours on the DMV, you don't have any time to actually adhere to your course outline. So this is absolutely part of my motivation. How can we truly integrate EL Civics where it's seamless and we're getting that 30 hours of exposure to a topic? And that brings us to where we are today.

So about a year ago, I guess now, our Voc Ed full timer Kimberly Guppy who is a fantastic instructor. She attended a workshop on something called liquid syllabus. And she sent me a link on my phone, and I clicked it, and this amazing, beautiful slightly animated dynamic completely accessible document opened that just blew my mind.

And I was like, what is this? And she's like, it's a liquid syllabus. And I was like, well, how did you do this? Where did you find this? What is this that you're showing me? And so I ended up doing a training, which took an hour or something, it was really short, to learn about this idea of a liquid syllabus, which means that it's highly mobile, highly accessible. That's all it means.

And so in the training, they had used a tool-- they'd use Google Sites. Now, at our college, we don't use Google products, we use Microsoft products. That's what we have that's protected by FERPA. So I try to avoid Google stuff, because I don't know if students' privacy is protected and whatnot.

So we have a product in Microsoft called Sway. And so I started thinking about it, and I was like, this would be really great for EL Civics. We could gather materials, authentic materials, not weird worksheets and strange like scripted interview style dialogues for students to use, but we could actually put together real materials which supports the entire principle of EL Civics and base it around our college and community and make something that's really useful for students that is accessible for all levels that we teach and also all disciplines in our program, because we have ESL VOC Ed, CTE, and basic skills.

And so I didn't want this to be limited to just ESL and EL Civics. So what we did was we created-- let me go back. I'm going to share my screen again. Get ready. What we did was we created the Let's Get to Work newsletter. And I'm going to send you the link to this. I'm going to put the link in the chat. And I recommend that you open it on your phone as well. Oops. Let me just double check that I typed it correctly. Hang on.

Veronica Parker: And Martha.

Martha Clayton: Yes.

Veronica Parker: One of your contract tickets your chat box. It was the black box on the picture. Yeah.

Martha Clayton: Yeah. I'm just going to-- I'm going to just double check this URL and then I'll share again in one sec. Oops. I know I hate those black boxes. You would think that Zoom would have figured something out for that.

Veronica Parker: Yeah.

Martha Clayton: By now. Hang on. I made a tiny URL for this so it would be a little bit easier than trying to do the generated. Yes, that's it. OK. So here's the link in your chat-- in the chat. You can look at it on your computer screen, but I would love for you to see it on your phone so you can see how gorgeous it is for all of our students, our non-credit students or our adult students who are mobile device only.

It's completely resizable, scalable. It works with screen readers. I can make it really small and it still looks good. Or I can make it really big and it still looks good. It has a table of contents button so you can use this as for reading skills, which is really fun with some of our lower level students, lower proficiency, and you get these gorgeous table of contents images that are based on the things that you put in your Sway.

Again, you can do this with Google Sites also. So if your agency relies on Google products, you can do it with Google. If you're using Microsoft, you can use Sway. Now, they don't need an app for this. They don't need to install anything on their phones or their computers. So it's really nice. They don't have to log in to an account. There's no sign up. Anybody who gets the link can look at this.

And so I'm going to make this just a little bit smaller and move it over. And so what we did was, just like a newsletter or a newspaper or a magazine, we started with information related to the program. So we start with an introduction. Oh, sorry. My mouse is acting up a little today. So I apologize.

We have lots of links embedded, so we're amping up the technology skills and digital literacy, at the same time, we're secretly giving them ESL lessons and EL Civics integration. So they can click on anything, any link, and open it to find out more. So this goes to our program website, so they can enroll in more classes.

We have a few events that we've tied into this. We're always trying to increase our persistence and increase our attendance. So last semester we started doing a family movie night. And we scheduled these for the Sunday after major holidays. So in the fall, it was the Sunday after Thanksgiving. For the spring, it's the Sunday after spring break, because we noticed the biggest dip in attendance after those big holidays.

The films that we watch are related to our theme. So in the fall, we watched East Side Sushi, which is a fantastic film starring only non-native English speakers in situations that are very similar to the life that many of our students have experienced being in the United States.

And we do that on Zoom. We share it on Zoom. We don't have people come to campus. We do the whole thing on Zoom, and we have the instructors share instructional materials. We have viewing questions. We have before viewing, during viewing, after viewing, because we want to make it instructional for multiple reasons, but especially so we don't get a copyright infringement against us for showing films without a license.

So that's one of our big ones that we've added in that goes with it. And then we also, for this spring, we've started we're starting next week what we call Walk and Talk Thursdays. Many of our ESL students have told us they have a hard time getting speaking practice outside of class, so we decided to have this Walk and Talk Thursday so that way students have an opportunity to speak with people and each other.

So it's very casual. We're just meeting at our office and then going up to our track. And we're going to try and trim some of the COVID-20 that we've all gotten in the last couple of years, and it goes again with our theme. And we're actually tying it into a little bit of a contest. Students can share their step count, and we're going to create a leaderboard that-- sorry my-- oh, there we go. Students can enter their step count so we can do a leaderboard and share our success.

Again, this gives them another technology skill. They're using a form, which is part of the ELC. Almost every EL Civics co op has some fill out the form task to it. So we figured we would make it an authentic one that we're using. Oh, Naomi, we have an idea for that. Remind me. Don't let me go before we talk about that.

Veronica Parker: Martha, there's another question from Kori. Our staff instructors pay to develop these materials.

Martha Clayton: Yeah. I develop these materials. I'm the full timer. Faculty is like this. Wait, are you talking about the Canvas shells? The original digital ESL?

Veronica Parker: I was talking-- either of them. But this especially seems like an extracurricular thing, so I was just wondering, do you feel like you're compensated for doing this? That's all I was asking.

Martha Clayton: Oh, yeah. Well, I'm full time. So yeah, so you know how that goes. Yeah. This actually is not-- this was actually pretty fast to make. And now that I've done it a few times, because I update these once a month. I change out some of the information, and I'm going to show you how Sway looks. So you can see it's really simple. There's templates and stuff.

So yeah, the form that students can use to share their step information for the walk and talk, again, that reinforces those EL Civics tasks that are benchmarks for us. So everything you'll see in here is part of an EL Civics task or assessment or some goal that we have related to whatever the co op is.

And then we also have a student writing showcase where students can submit their writing and it's tied-- they'll have some questions. We haven't published the questions yet. They have some writing prompts that are related to the theme, and then the last month of the semester, we showcase all their writing. That's what the entire issue is. It's all student writing.

And so with Sway, all of these images pop out. So even if you're working with very low proficiency students, there is material in this that students that you can use in your class and that students can engage with. Even our lowest proficiency students can click on an image or tap an image on their phones.

We went with the newsletter format so that way it supports all of the reading skills and academic skills as students transition between community English and academic professional English. So, of course, we have tables of contents, we always have hot skills, some things students need to know how to enroll in a class or how to use cleared for access, that's our op we need to get on to campus during COVID.

And then we just have a lot of material that's related to the co op. So again ours right now this year, our theme is health and nutrition. So we've got how to create a healthy plate from the USDA. We have an article about eating your way to a healthy life in 2020. Lots of stuff has links so you can learn-- students can learn more. If you want to go more advanced, you can click out to an article that's like at a higher lexical level and things like that. It's really your choice.

We always spotlight one of our certificates, and we just we have a lot of new medical certificates, and that goes with health and nutrition. So we highlighted the phlebotomy technician program that we just started so students can read about it, see if they want to do this, and then if they do, they can click the link to talk to a counselor.

We've got videos about some of our classes that we offer. And then we always highlight campus resources. A lot of our students come to campus, they go to class, and they never look in another building. And so they don't realize that they have a ton of community resources right there at the college.

And so because, again, health and health and nutrition. This month or this semester's campus resources are all centered on our wellness center, our health and wellness center. So again, there's all this is all authentic materials and students can do all of the things we are trying to help them do for EL Civics using real things they can interact with on campus instead of just like paper examples. So you've got phone numbers, schedules, what do they offer, what's the address, how do they fill out a patient registration and consent form?

This one's one of my favorites right now, because when you click on this, it goes to the forms page for the clinic. So you can actually use these real materials for students with students in class. There's a physical version that you can practice online. Like this one is actually a syllable form, but then there are also the English and Spanish forms that you could print out if you want, and students can see what a real form looks like, and they can practice in class.

And then if they want for us, they can actually pay a nominal fee to get health care on campus. So you can actually get them through that whole process as the EL Civics assessment. So that's what my class is doing. We're actually going to practice these forms, fill them out, go to the health center, make sure their fee is up to date. And I have a rubric and I'm just going to check it off and be like, OK, they really did this. Instead of pretending to do it in a classroom, they're going to really do it for their life.

So it just goes on we always. Have a people in places section and we highlight people from Los Angeles. Our college is practically in the heart of Koreatown, and so our people in places this month or actually probably for most of the semester is Chef Roy Choi, who's a local, and it's got biographies about him, it's got some videos so people can see the success that other folks who have moved to LA who they relate to, because they know them from their community or maybe they just look like them or they share some cultural practice. There are a lot of people that are successful in our area who have a similar story. So just to reinforce that community feeling.

And then we include job postings, workforce education and literacy. So we've got our job postings. I try to pick a job that's connected to the theme or to one of our certificate programs. This time it's a catering job, but students can also click to go to our job center on campus, and they can see all of the jobs that are available to them. And almost all of these jobs require a high school diplo-- some don't require a high school diploma, but they're all entry-level positions. So they're accessible for everyone. It's an opportunity for everyone.

And then, of course, we've got our contact information. And so I'm going to pause for a second and answer some questions, and then we'll look at a couple other things. Thank you, Lori. Lori said something. She said this is great. It looks good. Thank you. I appreciate that.

And then was it-- did anybody open it on their phone or click so you could kind of see how you can resize things? Yes, no, maybe so. Yes, no. It's just like a class. Oh, awesome, Barbara. Thank you.

OK. I've got a great question here from Maren. Maren says, how do students-- yeah. It does work great on the phones. It's gorgeous. Students can do it all from their phone, which is really nice. Maren asks, how do students get these newsletters each month? Do the teachers email this information? Do they need to teach it, break it down for students first, or is it posted on the school website? OK. This is a great question. I love this.

Yes to everything, except the last one about the website. I'm going to show you a couple of things here. So it's got a share button, and depending on-- I make the settings for the sharing settings are set up, so anyone with the link can share. They can't edit. I'm the only one who can edit, but anybody can share it, because I want students to also know how to share things.

So you can share it a couple of ways. Can you all see the little share dialog box that I just opened?

Speaker 3: Yes.

Martha Clayton: OK. So you can make it be for specific groups, people in your organization, or anyone with the link. If you choose anyone with the link, then it's really easy for students. They don't need an op, they don't need their login information, they can just look at it. So you can just send the link out, you can copy and paste this link, you can get embed code. If you're using social media tools, you can send it to those, but I love and there are also more options here like do you want them to have a share button or not or require a password? You can get really technical about it.

But this is one of my favorites here this get visual link. This is so good for sending out emails to your students. So when you click on it, it makes this gorgeous little graphic. And so you just copy this and then paste that into an email, and they get this picture right here that you're seeing, and they can click on it. So it makes a really beautiful graphic link instead of just like a text link.

And then the other thing we do-- oops. The other thing we do is we use Canvas at my college-- let me turn this off. I am in the wrong shell here. Is this the right one? Oops. Hang on. Let me get the right Cam to show.

So we use Canvas at our college and we use it for in-person, online, everything. And so we have a great tool in Canvas called redirect. And this allows you to put your own link in the navigation of your Canvas class.

So right here you'll notice it says, let's get to work. This is the link to the newsletter. So students can click on this, and it's going to open it for them right away. They don't have to click Play. Sway knows that I'm the author, so it shows it's me an edit form. So all I have to do is tell my students to go to that link. And then they can read it.

So the way that I use this is in some of my classes, it's just extra credit, extra practice. And I say, oh, go read it, and we'll talk about it in class next time we meet. For some of my classes, we go through and we analyze a text, especially for things like the any place where there's a form, if that's a task we're working on, completing forms and personal information, or if we are talking about how to enroll in classes, we'll watch the video together and then analyze the certificate requirement description so that way they can see the real materials and make choices. And then we can use all those real materials instead of an example one. I'm just going to hit the questions really quick.

Veronica Parker: Martha, there was a question above from Karina. She asked did you get reassigned time to develop shell, Sway, et cetera?

Martha Clayton: OK. So the Canvas shells are digital EL Civics Canvas shells. The team of us that did that, we got stipends. We got stipends for that. For the Sway, this is part of my full time job. My curriculum is part of my obligation. So it's actually really quick to make these. So it's not that much time. And it's just kind part of what I do.

It really depends on your situation for some agencies or programs. I would definitely. I'm always for getting us more money or release time. So it depends on what you have going on. Last semester when I did this, it was a little bit more of a pilot. So it took me longer. There were some mistakes made as far as like how much updating I could actually do with my workload is what my teaching load as well. And so this semester, I'm only updating it once a month. And I actually didn't do a different update between February and March. February and March are the same because February is so short. It really kind of depends on what works best for you.

And you could just have one newsletter that's not updated for the semester and you still have plenty of material to share with faculty and students. So it's really up to how you feel about it and how much time you have and what you want to accomplish or what you want to include. Did that answer your question?

Veronica Parker: Thumbs up. Yes.

Martha Clayton: OK. Awesome.

Veronica Parker: Your next question starts with Laura.

Martha Clayton: OK. So have you ever tried to embed the Sway newsletter into Canvas? Yes. I don't like it. It ends up like it doesn't look as good. I'm not really sure how it works with the screen readers. We have a lot of visually-impaired students, because my home college is right next door to the Braille Institute.

And so I try not to do too much embedding of apps within Canvas. Like if it's a document, it's OK, but I just didn't like the way it looked. So we discovered the redirect tool which I can show you guys-- I can show everybody how that works. And it just simplified it by having it in the course navigation instead of having it be embedded in the page.

Maren says, how do you decide the topics, themes of each month? Do students and teachers give you input as well? OK. So our Civics coordinator did the needs assessment, and our themes were picked from that. So we had-- it just kind of happened by happy accident that last semester and this semester we had nutrition and health.

So I was like, hey, that's easy. We'll do health and nutrition. That's our theme for the year. So somehow I'm actually going to squeeze in the DMV at the end. And I think I'm going to do that through the way I'm going to connect it is it's time to go on vacation. We need to get our licenses to go on that trip to the beach, because we need to relax from our hard work, which is healthy. So I mean, there's some room there.

You can play with it. You can make those connections however you need to. But, yeah, it seems that creating themes for EL Civics makes the integration a lot easier, because then you have everyone involved. Everyone knows, oh, this is our group theme for the semester or our group theme for the academic year, and it makes it a lot easier to find places where you can get that 30 hours of exposure to the topic or you can slip it into your class like, oh, we're going to work on this, which otherwise might seem like a strange shift in topic.

And it also helps with-- so I have this-- so my philosophy especially for non-credit adult education is that instruction starts at outreach. And so using the themes, we can have everybody in our program talking about these ideas, whether a student is coming in to the front desk to enroll in a class or pick up a textbook, there is material there on the topic, on the theme.

You can hear people talking about our Walk and Talk Thursdays, they can get access to the wellness center, like I'm trying I'm trying to improve that sort of full integration and almost like immersion in the theme for the semester. So that way, any place they go in our program, they're going to be exposed to this topic, which will add to their overall exposure to the co op information, if that wasn't like a super long explanation. Did that answer that question?

OK. So I want to go back to Laura's question about embedding the Sway. So I didn't really like the way it looked, and I'm going to show you. Let me just go to my-- I'm going to go to one of my development shells so you can see what this looks like.

All right. So this is just a development shell that I use. So it's got a whole bunch of mix and match, all kinds of weird stuff in here. And so I'm just going to go to Modules 52. And so if I want to embed this in a page, it's going to look like this. So got My Page, Create Page, and we'll say-- let's get to work, and I add my page.

And then I come in here and I'm clickety click Edit, and I want to embed-- where's my Sway? So I'm going to share. I'm going to get my embed code. And when I come back here, and I put it in-- I just didn't like how it looked like this. And it restricts it in the page in a way that I think is a waste, considering how dynamic Sway is.

So I just did not like this. And that was my-- other faculty do different things. I just personally didn't like the way it made it all blocked in like this. And so what I do instead is I go to Settings, and I go to this ops tab here, and I type in Redirects. I'm going a little bit faster than my internet is, so I apologize.

And so I click on this redirect tool, add the op, and I can make the name anything I want. So I say let's get to work. Do I spell everything right? No. And I put my link in the bottom here. And I'm going to tell it to show in course navigation. And I say Add op.

And now, when I go to my navigation is right here. This shows it at the bottom. I actually move it up to the top in my classes because I want students to click on it. But I just wanted to show you that it puts the navigation. It makes a unique navigation item for your class. And so I put this link into all my Canvas Shells. I'm going to leave this and I'll show you a live course. So you can see what it actually looks like.

So this is my ESL level 2, intro to academic skills class, and you can see it's right here. Students can click on it and go directly to it. I also send it out on Remind. So if any of you are using like other ops to communicate with your students like Remind or Google Voice or anything where you can send them a text message, I send it out on that a lot too. And I'll remind I will use Remind to remind them and say like, hey, don't forget to read that city spotlight that we talked about in class and put the link in there, and then they can read it on their phones. And yeah, that's the whole thing.

Let me see. I see a couple of questions. I'm just going to answer those. OK. Needs assessment. How much collaboration between you and the teachers to develop this or evaluation from teachers? So we have a really interesting situation in my program. I'm the only full time. There are two full time faculty people. One for ESL, that's me, and another for vocal Ed. And we have about 50 adjuncts who participate in administration style activities to varying degrees.

So it's a mix. Some people collaborate and some people don't. Some people offer feedback and some people don't. So it really kind of depends on who contributes and who doesn't.

I get a lot of feedback from our different discipline coordinators, and a lot of the materials I choose for the newsletter, it really has to do with what the topic is, and will that material-- will that item, whatever it be, whether it's a text or a video or a form or whatever, will that scaffold student's ability to complete the assessment in an authentic way? Will students be able to do that thing that we're trying to help them with? Whether it's filling out a medical application or calling in to their boss to tell them they're going to be absent from work.

I'm really, really into like authentic materials and authentic assessments I really do I cringe whenever I see an assessment that's like a fake version of a real thing. So I always try to find ways where students can really do the thing instead of just doing it in the classroom, because doing a dialogue in a classroom is not the same as calling someone on the phone. And so why waste their time having that be the assessment when I can have them actually call me and call in? And so it's a mix as far as like the collaboration. It's a mixed bag. Sometimes there's lots of collaboration sometimes there's not as much.

Yeah. I'm not-- yeah, I think that might be all-- so Laura asked a question about Canvas Commons. I'll double check on that, Laura, and make sure that everything's available. But it's not a huge-- we don't have Canvas shells for every COAP We've got Canvas shells for some. And then we have-- but I'll double check some of the settings later to make sure that there are public.

And just double checking. Oh, so the redirect link. Yes. So the question is from Karina. Can you do more than one redirect link? Yes, you can. And you can make that redirect link in Canvas go to any external link. So if you have some other material that you want students to connect to without fully leaving Canvas, you can put a link to anything there. You could put-- could make 1, 2, 5, 100.

Redirect link was one of the most amazing things I just learned about in Canvas. It completely changed everything for me. It's like such a simple thing, but it really all of a sudden it's like oh, I don't have to try and train students how to go to this other thing. I can give them the link right there and they can click on it and it's really changed a lot of stuff.

Lori. Yes. I agree. Authentic assessments. If we want students to be able to do something, then they should actually do that thing instead of doing the pretend practice version of it.

Maren asked, to Sway have some standalone accessibility features, and can it read aloud, and can you have it translate into other languages for the lower levels or if you open it in Edge? I don't know about the edge question. I don't know. I don't think it-- I'm not sure. And honestly, I'm not sure about the translation thing either. I do not want to translate for this, because we offer a lot, a lot, a lot of support through translation. And realistically, I think we offer a little too much.

With Canvas, we've got Immersive Reader, and they can put their Canvas profile into other languages. And I feel like sometimes we're losing a little bit of language development. So with this Sway, I have not even-- sorry, I just knocked my headphone off. With the Sway, I have not even looked into it, because I feel like they're getting enough primary language scaffolding in other ways. And I really, really want to push them so that way, we've got the layer of rigor.

Now, the way I set up our newsletter is there are varying levels of reading levels. It varies. Some things are much more simple, like the welcome paragraphs. Are going to be the most accessible for all students? But I also wanted it to be something that our students who are in GED classes might be interested in reading too. So I tried to put a mix in of style levels and complexity. So that way, all students can participate.

And then I really try to have the images, which would be for our lowest level-- for our lowest proficiency level students. Have the images be connected to the theme in a way that's meaningful? So let's take a look at a couple of those.

And I don't know about Edge. I don't use Edge, which is funny, considering I use Microsoft for everything else. So let me just minimize this a little bit so it's not so massive. So, for example, you can-- oops, you can click on every single image, and it will pop out.

So you can actually use that as your primary demonstration or lecture material, especially for your lower proficiency students. Maybe here you're talking about fruit and vegetable vocabulary or colors or comparing prices. So I really try to look for things that will assist from the lowest proficiency student to the highest proficiency student.

And then also, like I said earlier, I chose the newsletter format because I felt like this was an easy way to embed academic literacy skills in the sense of table of contents, headings, support graphics, subtitles, all of those reading skills that are beyond just being able to read the text on the page but could actually help carry them forward into more academic skills focused classes and things like that.

But even the banners, like this one here. I can click this out. And now we've got nutrition facts, which went with one of with our nutrition co op but still carries over to our health co op. So you can use these for discussions with the lower proficiency students or higher with any students. But you can also work on those really foundational technology skills. Having somebody-- we all know that for some students, simply clicking on an image could be an entirely new skill that they've never learned before. So, yeah, I guess-- I don't want to ramble too much.