KATHY ST. JOHN: Interesting. And were they at the right level? And so, yeah, we were really, really pleased at the feedback that we got. They really did make note of the fact that the pictures, the illustrations, were very helpful to them in helping them understand, especially the vocabulary that they didn't know but the pictures filled in that meaning for them.

They felt that the words themselves and the sentences were at the right level, so they could read the books independently, which is one of our goals. We think it's great if they're used in tutoring or classroom learning sessions. But we also want to build independence and for the learners to be able to read them just for pleasure reading.

They said that the topics were interesting and that actually they would like to read the books more than once because they found them that compelling. And we asked for what could we do to make the books better and really they said not much. But some of them they wanted the books to be longer.

And we intentionally kept them short, but we wanted them to tell more of what-- they wanted us to tell more of a story. They wanted them to go on. And then they did help us to be very, very sensitive to the fact that we needed to make sure authors were cognizant of different life experiences and disparities between experiences.

So if they were writing a book about traveling to someplace, we didn't want them to be staying in luxury hotels and talking about eating champagne and caviar. So it was very helpful to us to have that sensibility brought to light. So let's ask you.

We thought that we had a really good idea. Because we're all experienced literacy providers, we thought we knew what learners would want to read about, and we got some surprises. So we want to ask you, what do you think that learners said that they wanted to read about? What topics?

We're a small group. So you can either type it in the chat box, or you can raise your hand and just speak out. OK. Real-life experiences. Yep, absolutely. Food and cars.

Marilyn Dippell: Parenting.

KATHY ST. JOHN: Yeah. American culture, yeah. Good guesses. All right, let's see what they actually--

Marilyn Dippell: Celebrations. Oh, love stories.

KATHY ST. JOHN: Celebration, love stories. Good. Yep, anything else. No? OK. So let's take a look at what the learners that we surveyed actually said. I kind of thought about what bookstore. If you're going at a bookstore or if you're on a book site, what are the genres that are available to you?

And so we asked people, you know, please rank them. And so this is their preference for reading materials in order. So I never imagined that travel would be the number one topic that learners wanted to read about. And so we have a lot of travel books, animals, some about health. So we pretty much-covered everything except famous people.

And one book is kind of poetic, but we felt like poetry is a little bit hard to get down to that low level. And we do have one book that is a fantasy. We weren't really able to get science fiction, but we got pretty much-- oh, suspense thriller, I guess, we didn't manage, but we have a couple of mysteries in there.

And what is so unique about this? Why would you want to look at these books yourselves? Why would you want to introduce them and encourage your own students to browse them or to read them? And again, it's because the subject matter is what adults really do want to read about, what adult literacy students want to read about.

We made sure that things are not outdated. We made sure that there was a breadth of subject matters. And again, as somebody said, real-life situations. We took great pains to make sure there were no idioms, phrasal verbs that we used. Language that was very accessible.

Again, the illustrations they're basically picture or photo books which is pretty unusual in the adult literacy world. And then again, these tutor tips, while we hope that learners will read the books independently, we also know that they may want to use them in some of their lessons or that teachers and tutors might as well. And so we wanted to take research-based reading, writing, strategies and help you plan lesson planning ideas.

And again, we wanted these to be accessible to people. We did not want people to have to pay for them unless you want to purchase hard or soft copies. But they are all available for free online. And so this is just a very small list. And we'll give you links to this.

But so you can see just in this little one page the variety of topics. And so Marilyn categorized all of the books by title and then by topic or genre. So this will help you as you're thinking about what your students might be interested in and even sharing the list with them and saying, OK, what are some things that you might want to read about?

And now we're going to get into the nitty gritty with Marilyn.

Marilyn Dippell: OK. So as Kathy said, the photos are what makes this collection of books really unique, we think. We went, as she said too, to great pains to make sure that they were very concrete and illustrated the accompanying text very directly.

So just as a fun exercise, something you could do with a class or student is talk about the photo before you read the book. Talk about the cover. We have a photo on the front and the back cover, so you could actually do some prediction before you even open the book.

If a student has very low skills, you could actually just do a photo walkthrough and imagine what the story is about and talk about it, verbalize and predict before you start actually trying to decode the text. So in this particular-- we chose this because it's such an odd photo. It's just a collection of images that don't seem to go together, but it's really in one of our books.

So try and think to yourself for a minute what is happening in this photo. And if this were the cover, what might be a fun title for this book? You can either just shout out a title, or you can type it in the chat. Anybody have any ideas?

We're going to give you a couple seconds to keep thinking of a title, and I'm going to go on to the next slide, and then we'll do our big reveal. So as Kathy pointed out, the photos are so important with these books because they give clues to what the book is about. They can actually serve just to help with an independent reader making a selection just based on the excellent photos on the front and back of the books.

Having those photos for context and just a visual cue for what a learner of a word might be sets the learners up for success in reading independently. They can create more interest, especially if it's something related to something that they're already familiar with. There's so many topics, as Kathy pointed out, that there's something for everyone.

And if you have some knowledge of what a learner or students' interests are, you can start you can hook them with the travel, for instance, if that's what they're interested in. And they provide great opportunities for group discussions, for pre-reading activities, for pre-writing activities. They also can provide opportunities for comprehension assessment.

And you can engage your students and classrooms by talking about the photos, asking questions. You can even just create vocabulary lists based on what's in each photo. And ask what they recall. If they retell the story to you, then you can gauge their comprehension. You can also use their oral vocabulary and record some of those words as they speak to start as a starting point for reading and-- I'm sorry-- spelling and writing since their oral vocabulary is often at a different level than their writing and spelling.

I'm sorry. So this is the actual title. Let's see what some of you came up with. My bike ride, I spotted hungry goats. Stopped to feed the goats. Has anybody ever seen a goat-feeding machine like that? I never had. I thought that was pretty hilarious, a little gumball machine for goats.

On my bike ride, I spotted. Yes. Oh, yeah? Let's see the seat now. Yeah, so that's in Livermore somewhere. We have someone in the waiting room. It looks like. So this is a book about a long bike ride in the Livermore Hills. And as you can see, this is the cover of the book.

The photo on the cover illustrates exactly what's happening in the story, and it's a picture of a man going up a big hill. When you see the books in mixed book, this is an image of the cover of the same book in mixed book. And as you can see at the bottom, there's a little advancing arrow.

If you-- what's the word I'm looking for-- enlarge the screen up at the top, buy the mixed book logo. There's a little icon there, and you can fill your screen, which helps the learners if you're looking at these as ebooks, for instance, because it takes away a lot of the navigation and banners and advertising and stuff and just lets you look at a clean page.

We kept the design of the books very simple, so we don't have a lot of borders, backgrounds, patterns, colors because we really wanted the learners to just be able to focus on the text and then refer to the images for support. This is an inside page of the same book. This would be one of our lower level, level one, for sure.

You can see that the image is very clear. Even if a learner couldn't read the text at all, they could say, oh, it's a nice sunny day. Looks like someone's going to go for a bike ride, or the bike is ready to be ridden. They can actually practically tell the story by just describing what's in the photos.

So we kept the sentences short. We tried to stay with the one-syllable words. Kathy and I practically memorized the first 300 words on the Frye index because we really did try to keep the level as low as possible. And when we couldn't, when there was a word that just couldn't be substituted with a lower level word, then we simply made sure that that word was perfectly clearly illustrated in the photo.

Throughout the collection of books, we have no contractions, no idioms, as Kathy said, no phrasal verbs. Mostly short vowels as often as possible. We did make an exception for the long vowel with the silent e just sort of out of necessity. But we also tried, as Kathy said to use common words and phrases, common language that would help build these low-level learners vocabulary.

And as you can see in this images as well, it says he puts on his bike shirt. So it's very clear he's putting on a shirt. And then he's very clear that he's putting on his shoes. So even without reading the text, you could practically narrate the story.

We also leaned on repetition for practice of new texts and repeating the visual cues as well. So in this example, the gentleman leaves on his bike ride, and he goes past the farms and goats and rides past the shops. And homes, and then on the return trip, all of those phrases in terms and photos are repeated.

In addition, when we say he rides past the farms, there's a picture of a farm. He rides past the shops, and then there's the picture of the shops and then the home. We tried to always make sure that the photos appeared in the same order as the text flowed.

So, Kathy, I wasn't sure. Did you want me to cover this part?

KATHY ST. JOHN: Sure.

Marilyn Dippell: OK. So in the tutor tips that Kathy mentioned, we've included them in every single book, which is a wonderful addition to the whole collection because it allows people if you're working one on one or with a classroom or even thinking of assignments. These books can be used in so many different ways. And we tried to make sure that every collection of tutor tips has a reading, a writing, a listening, and a speaking activity is as much as we could.

For pre-reading, they're great for starting conversations, finding out more about what your learner knows about the topic or what their life experience is as it relates to the topic. As I've mentioned, prediction is a great tool for them to practice visualizing and also scanning.

Sometimes, some of the tutor tips just talk about doing a walk through the book and having the students identify the words that they don't immediately recognize or they can't decode by themselves. And then, you can develop those word lists and use them in different ways for writing activities which are also explained in the tutor tips.

And as I mentioned before, after reading, you can use their retelling as a gauge of comprehension. You can pull out vocabulary that you saw them struggle with for spelling and phonics practice and use the text to expand their writing and grammar activities and sometimes even add to the stories. As Kathy said, they wanted the stories to be longer. They could always add another ending if they wanted to keep it going.

So there are one to two pages of tutor tips in each book, and I'm going to have-- sorry. My little arrow keeps disappearing. I apologize. Some people might look at these tutor tips and think, oh, my gosh, this is too much. I can't possibly go through all this. But we really intended for it to be like a buffet.

You know, you can simply pick and choose what ones are most appropriate for your learner or your students, or your classroom. And you can read the book multiple times and use different tutor tips to expand your activities around the book in different ways each time it's read. So based on what we've talked about so far, can anybody think of a tutor tip?

I'm going to go backwards. I'm sorry. I'm going to go back and dive deeper into these. Kathy, do you want to talk about these a little bit?

KATHY ST. JOHN: Sure

Marilyn Dippell: Just since you wrote most of them.

KATHY ST. JOHN: Yeah. So we really wanted to make sure that there were pre-reading strategies to activate background knowledge and to really warm up the students brain to get going, get them thinking about the topic. And we know from the research that if you can bring a personal experience or personal knowledge of a topic to something that you're about to read, then your brain is ready for that.

It warms up the brain. It makes in taking information processing and retention of information much easier for the learner. And so we always have, before reading the book, tutor tips that try to do that to relate the student's own experiences to the story. Also prediction. We know how very important prediction is as a comprehension skill. And so, we often ask the student to predict what they think will happen from either looking at the title or doing a picture walk through the book.

And then, we chose not to do during the reading tips because even though those are worthwhile, we didn't want to interrupt the flow of the book. We wanted the learners to be having fun reading. We didn't want this to be, OK, well, let's stop and have a lesson as we're reading the book.

No. Just read the book. Go through it. Enjoy it as a whole. And then if we choose to do some enhancement activities after, that's great.

You'll see that on the third bullet. We actually have some phonics strategies there for helping the readers sound words out, some of the phonics rules that we have. Relating phonics rules to a book that you're reading can help students understand why. Why do I have to do this? It seems kind of like baby work, but OK, now I get it. It helps me read this book and understand it.

And I guess the fourth tip is also phonics. And then certainly vocabulary. We want to make sure that we're introducing vocabulary and reinforcing vocabulary that the students already know and what is vocabulary is relationship to other words. And then, oh, let's see. The last one, oh, right, we do a little verb. We do a little grammar. We do a little verb tense activity.

So each book has different kinds of tutor chips in them. And so one of the handouts that you will have is a compilation of tutor tips from all of the different books, which you can actually adapt and use for lots of different reading materials, not just these adult new readers.

And if you say you know what, I like this tutor tip from this one book, and they don't have that one in this book. I'm going to use the tutor from that other book for this one too. So they're all highly adaptable.

Marilyn Dippell: I want to add, and we haven't mentioned this yet, but it might be a question in people's minds because you mentioned not interrupting the flow and not inserting activities during the reading, so most of our reading our pre-and-post activities. But the books are all about 25 to 30 pages long, and they range from about 125 to 300 words at the most.

So they're very short on text and not super long. And they do give you plenty of time and opportunity to do different activities around the reading and/or read the book more than once just for fluency practice. OK. So based on the things that we've shared with you so far today and what you already know, which is a lot, can you think of any other ways that these books might be able to be used in your classroom or your teaching setting?

If you have come up with any thoughts during this presentation so far about wow, I could use these for this, or this would be great for that. Please share those ideas in the chat. We have kept a list of shared ideas from the very first time we presented this book project, and we are sharing that with you as a handout, I believe, in this conference. And we will add any ideas that you share that are unique and new to that ongoing list.

We've come up with some-- our participants from prior webinars have come up with some really great suggestions that we didn't know-- wouldn't have thought of. Oh, that's a great one. Acting out. Act out the difference between the word past, spelled P-A-S-T, and past as past tense. And those are tricky words. Yes, you can. Any tricky words really could be pulled from books or words that trip people up.

Word origins about why some words have a short vowel or long vowel. Yes. I hope that this chat will be saved so that we can copy the information into our master list because I'm not going to be able to write these all down. Yes, Kathy?

KATHY ST. JOHN: OK.

Marilyn Dippell: So word origins.

Speaker 3: Sure. I just can't believe that you all did this wrote your books and the pictures in them. They're really neat. Yeah, really neat.

Marilyn Dippell: Thank you. Well, as Kathy just texted me, we have a small group, and we are running. We have plenty of time. So she wanted to know if we should share a book in mixed book just more thoroughly instead of just the cover or one page. So I can certainly do that.

KATHY ST. JOHN: Yeah. And we can talk about the photos too. So we really encouraged authors to supply their own photos. We wanted the photos to be friendly. We wanted them to go as directly along with the text as possible.

So some tutors were amazing. Some authors they went out and they rounded up their families and friends, and they had these great photo sessions. One woman, oh, gosh, what's it called, Marilyn? The lost ukulele.

Marilyn Dippell: Oh.

KATHY ST. JOHN: Oh, my gosh, they got people from the donut shop involved, the music shop involved. It was just incredible. And that's a mystery. And so we were just blown away by the creativity and the talent of our authors. And then, in some cases, it just wasn't possible. Some authors wrote about their grandfather, and it was a wonderful story, but they didn't have the photographs that would have illustrated it.

And then, in some cases, we mixed the author's personal photographs, either old ones or ones that they took specifically for this project, with stock photos. And so, it's a real mishmash, but our goal was again to have the photographs match the text as precisely and directly as possible.

And then we also there were a couple of authors who were artists, and we just love their artwork so much that even though we know that the best way for especially English language learners to use pictures as context clues to understand reading materials is to have the images be as realistic as possible, so photographs are the very best for that, this artwork was amazing. And so we thought it was an opportunity also to introduce or to reinforce how art can be really instructive as well.

Marilyn Dippell: OK, well, I'm going to find a couple of examples for us to look at more deeply in mixed books, and then we're going to talk about how you can access the resources as well. Kathy is going to talk a little bit about adapting for online learning while I go hunting.

KATHY ST. JOHN: All right. And Casandra had a point, too, so maybe after this, she can unmute. So anyway, a lot of us are now still teaching or tutoring either in a hybrid model or entirely virtually or a mix. So I am teaching one beginning ESL class in person at a school. My other class is via Zoom.

And so I think that this is the new normal, where I don't think that we're ever going to back to all in-person classes. And so I actually think it's really preferable for my students, like for Day of the Dead. So I can't order, unfortunately, 16 copies of the Day of the Dead book, which is beautifully done. The photos of our Day of the Dead book are amazing. It's so colorful and just such a fun book.

And so, I can't order 16 copies for my in-person class. And unfortunately, I don't have one of those cool projectors where I can project the book onto a screen. And so I can't use that book with that class. But I can use it with my online class. And so I'm going to be really excited to share that. Simply I go to the book, and I share my screen, and the students can read on a Zoom class.

And so it really actually just depends on the technology that you and the students have and also how skilled you are at using that. But again, this is a great way to help your students build their digital literacy skills. So we would encourage you to introduce the links to the books to your students.

And then, after you've introduced them to how they can access them online, it's pretty easy for them to have the whole range of 107 books. And again, for those of you who are fortunate enough to have-- and I don't even know. Karen, what is that machine called where you have the book, and it projects it up onto the screen? I can never remember what that piece of equipment is called.

Speaker 3: Oh, like an elbow or something where you-- OK.

KATHY ST. JOHN: Yeah. If you have one of those, then it's terrific for in-person. But these books, especially because they're available online and for free, they're very easily adapted for online learning.

Marilyn Dippell: OK, so to give you an idea, I think for just ease of transition, I will go into both of these sites. I'm going to talk you through just the basic on how to access the books online and to use them with your students, as Kathy has just described. But then, while Casandra is sharing her short video, I will go in and actually pull one up from each site.

We weren't planning to do that. So my computer's not-- I need a couple of minutes while Casandra is running her little slide show. So as we've said, one of the things that was really important to us at the outset of this project was to make sure that these materials could be provided for free somehow.

And we were so fortunate to have ProLiteracy step up and agree-- actually offer. It was kind of a miracle. Like, oh, you want me to just put those on my website? Oh, gosh, really? Could you? It was pretty amazing. And the offer was grand, and the reality of getting the books onto this website is a lot of work. So he was offering a huge gift, and we're being very patient to allow him time to get the books. But I think there's about 30 right now that are currently accessible this way.

So the ProLiteracy, it's a subsite called Education Network, and the books reside in the student section. I'm going to give you lots of detail on this and a handout. So they can be accessed electronically, or at the end of each book, you can click on a link for a printable PDF or a link directly back to Mixbook. So if you want to order the book, you could do it directly from there without having to go to mixed book separately.

And we do have really detailed handouts to give you for both of these sites. And then, as Kathy has said, if you did want to purchase the books, they can be purchased-- we created a collection for the Sacramento public library that's all hardcover. And I'd love for Casandra to share with you what she thinks of the product because everyone I've seen, they're really beautifully printed, very colorful, very sturdy. They're high-quality books.

And if but if the hardcover version is to pricey and you do want to try and buy some of the books, we recommend choosing the option of a soft cover, and that brings the price down significantly.

KATHY ST. JOHN: And I'll just say that please know that this is not funding our vacation. All the books are priced so that the price of the book is purely for the cost of publishing it in print form. So there is no profits, really.

Marilyn Dippell: That's for sure. Mixbook gets all the proceeds. We just are using them as a storage facility really for their server to house these so that other people can order them. And as we said, there's going to be good detailed FAQs and handouts for you if you are interested in accessing these books.

And this is just sort of a visual walkthrough of the ProLiteracy site. So you would start by just typing in-- this is a screenshot of the home page. But you type in proliteracy.org. And then, at the top on the very top banner, which isn't captured in this screenshot, you would click on the link for professional development first.

Then the next step would be to click on the Education Network, which is in this circle on the left where you can see this navigation pane. So once you're in the Education Network, you would want to create an account. Students can create their own accounts.

And the beauty of this is that the books are set up. It's kind of counterintuitive, but they're set up as online courses. And the reason that is because then you have the ability to track progress. If the learner is doing the reading on their own, they have a record of what they've read, and you can see what their progress is. But the first step everybody would need to create an account.

Then once you're on the home page inside with an account, you would click on the student section. This is a couple of weeks old when we created this slideshow. The banner looks different right now. If you go in today, it has pumpkins up at the top, but you'll always see these categories to select from.

There's Program Manager/Staff, Tutor/Teacher, Trainer, and Student. So if you're wanting to look at the books, you would go to the Student section and then click on Explore. If none of you have or some of you have not seen this website, it's phenomenal. I get overwhelmed whenever I log on because the wealth of information and the quantity of the resources available is fantastic. So it's worth a look even if you don't end up using these books.

If you've already created, I noticed this has also changed. So these, this is a work in progress. The books are being uploaded and proofed, and it may change slightly over time. But at the bottom, the screen that I showed you just prior to this, right now, if you scroll past it, you would come to this section that shows featured resources.

And one of the featured resources is Pleasure Reading for Students. He's added that since we started this endeavor. So it's a quick link, easy way to get to the books if you have your account set up already. And then once you click on that, you will be in this section for students and pleasure reading. And these are all the covers of the books that are currently available.

Oh, sorry. Trigger finger. So as you can see, they're alphabetical. A lot of them are travel books, as Kathy mentioned. If a library wanted to purchase this, we wanted them to be shelved in a logical order. So all of the travel books start with a trip to, and that way, they're all together, easy to scroll through.

And as I mentioned, there's about 30, I think, that are currently available right now. And you would simply click on the cover, and it opens the book for you to read. Just the same way that you saw with the Mixbook. It just has an arrow to advance the pages as an ebook. So that's a wonderful thing that's still in progress, so check back frequently.

We don't really even have a timeline right now. I'm hoping by the end of the year, we'll have them all up. So after going through the book page by page, you'll see the end. On all of the books, we inserted this page to give the learner the signal that they are done reading because what follows is the tutor tips. And

As you saw, the tutor tips is just dense text, and it's designed for a teacher or a tutor to help the learner with. Not for the learner to try to read on their own. We didn't want the learners to go forward to the tutor tips and get overwhelmed. So we put in this the end page.

So when you reach that in the ProLiteracy books, there is this link for a downloadable PDF. And it prints on 8 and 1/2 by 11 paper landscape and beautiful. If you have a color printer, it's a very inexpensive way to provide your learner with a book they can take home and practice with. You can print one for each student or one for yourself, and one for your learner if you're tutoring.

And also, if you click on the Order a hardcopy of the book that takes you to Mixbook and that title. Then if you advance, as you can see at the bottom, there's another arrow with a next. If you advance, that will take you then to the tutor tips in the ebook.

So as we mentioned, we are going to provide you with a list of all of the titles, 107 titles that we created and the 21 that Santa Clara created. They're active links, so when you get those PDFs, you can simply click on them, and you'll be in the mix book to preview it.

The list of programming ideas that we just had you participate in trying to add to that list those will be shared with you as a handout, and then navigation notes for what I just went over with ProLiteracy and also for the California State Library website, which we're going to go to next, and then lots of FAQs because Mixbook, if you are doing a big order, they have a great discount program and we wanted everybody to know about that as well.

So the second way that you can access these books and maybe even faster, easier. It's not the ProLiteracy site, so you're not going to get the PDFs. But to get quickly to the Mixbook information, you can go to libraryliteracy.org, which is the state library website. Under California Library Literacy Services, there's a section at the top of that banner that says Special Projects. You would click on that, and then you'll see the Adult new Reader Project.

If you scroll to the bottom of that page-- I couldn't fit everything on this slide, so I kind of cut it in half. So you're looking at the top and the bottom. Once you're on that page, if you scroll down, you'll see this Adult New Reader Resources heading. And below it, the bullets have links to each of the lists-- the things that we're basically going to give to you as handouts. They're all here permanently.

So if for some reason, you lose your handouts or get lost in the shuffle after the conference, you can always find them on the state library website.

KATHY ST. JOHN: And again, just to distinguish between that, the books that you can access through the state library's website and just on the Education Network website are Mixbook. And so, unfortunately, you see the banners. You see the advertising.

What I do when I'm working with my students online I just enlarge it, so all the banners and all the advertising is off the page. We don't have to look at that. And if I were doing that in the classroom, that's what I would do too.

The advantage of going to ProLiteracy's EdNet is that then you can download the PDF and use it that way, and that none of that advertising is there.

Marilyn Dippell: OK, so what we want to do next is have Casandra walk you through the entire collection. We did an alphabetical by author first name, so it's very randomized, which we actually wanted. And she's going to launch the next little section for you to view so that you can see just the breadth and width of this project and the beauty of all the photography.

And while she's doing that, I will queue up at least one other book for us to share with you inside and out. You ready, Casandra?

Casandra Keitges: Yes. I will get that ready.

KATHY ST. JOHN: We practiced before you joined us. It's always different.

Casandra Keitges: I wasn't sure if I had the sound.

Marilyn Dippell: It's worth it. It's worth it. There we go.

[music playing]

Speaker 3: Certainly a labor of love. It's really beautiful, interesting titles too.

KATHY ST. JOHN: We hope that you saw the breadth of we were just--

Speaker 3: Oh, my goodness--

KATHY ST. JOHN: --submitted by all the different topics.

Speaker 3: It's amazing. I don't know any of these people, but you could see their personality.

KATHY ST. JOHN: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Speaker 3: Yeah. Erica, in the chat, also said they're beautiful, and Carolyn said I can't wait to start reading.

Marilyn Dippell: That's great. That's what we want. It's just for people to get excited about reading them. I wanted to mention-- it wasn't in any of the slides, but one of the strange, unexpected side effects of this project was we were doing training. We did three trainings for each batch of books, and we had all these tutors and staff from different programs across California.

And one of the participants was from Mariposa, which is by Yosemite, and we thought she was going to be an author. And she had like four or five ideas for books, and we were tossing around ideas for titles. And then, she ended up not writing any books, but their program, their literacy program, has a radio station for literacy.

So she reached out to all of the authors and asked if any of them wanted to record their books. And as it turned out, many of them did. And so she's been running a radio show for 30 minutes twice a week with many of these books already recorded.

I've been listening in and what they do is they create-- I guess they've been-- I'm not sure how they provide the hard copy of the book, but they make it available to their community out in front of the library the week before the show so that learners can take that home and read along and then the authors or someone who's volunteered to read the book for the author are reading.

And just some of the titles that I just heard, the one about Esther's brave story that by Sandra Riggins, she just read that this past Sunday.

KATHY ST. JOHN: And the Day of the Dead is coming up.

Marilyn Dippell: The Day of the Dead is coming up for the week of Halloween, and that will be very fun. And so listening--

Speaker 3: [non-english speech]

The French Saint's day.

KATHY ST. JOHN: So if you're interested in that, we can also send you information.

Marilyn Dippell: So if you just want to Google it, Mariposa Read. And I don't remember the call letters, but it's a nonprofit radio station up there. And then on Thursdays at 7:30 and Sundays at 2:30, they air the show, and she's been using these books as her content.

And I guess she will continue to until she runs out of books.

KATHY ST. JOHN: And they're archived, right?

Marilyn Dippell: I haven't been able to confirm that with her yet. We're hoping to actually layer that onto the ProLiteracy website once we get all the books into ebooks on the ProLiteracy Education Network site. He is interested in adding the audio link to each book when they're available.

We thought this book project was going to end, but it's not.

Speaker 3: It's the never-ending project for you all.

Marilyn Dippell: So I have pulled up-- we have plenty of time for questions, but I'm going to pull out just the one so you can see kind of start to finish on Mixbook how it works.

Speaker 3: Oh, I'd love that.

Marilyn Dippell: So when you open a link, which is how it's going to be given to you in those lists that we're going to provide as handouts, you'll have a live link, and you'll just click on the title. And this is what it looks like when you open it.

This bar is in my way. Sorry.

Speaker 3: No, we get it.

Marilyn Dippell: Yes. As Kathy mentioned, up in the upper left-hand corner next to the Mixbook photo logo, you can go to full screen. If any of the banner or ads or toolbars, or anything are bothering you, that makes it a little easier for students to just navigate if they're doing this on their own.

But for them, if they have the list and they know how to click on a link, this is all they need to do, and they can see this book electronically for free. So they would advance by clicking on the arrow. And this is one, in particular, Kathy mentioned where the author went out with her family and into her community and engaged people to take all of these photos.

So it's all cohesive, and the flow-- that's another thing we really tried to do was to make it also very seamless and believable so people would really get engaged in the story. So I'm just going to click through quickly so you can see what the level of the language is and what the quality of the photos is. And the expressions, I mean, she has two little actresses for models here.

Speaker 3: For some reason, it's not clicking. We still see the--

Marilyn Dippell: It's not advancing?

Speaker 3: Or maybe you need to hit Fn and--

KATHY ST. JOHN: Yeah, we're just seeing the cover.

Speaker 3: It might be that Fn and--

Marilyn Dippell: Fn--

Speaker 3: Well, if you have a-- do you have a Mac or a regular?

Marilyn Dippell: I have regular.

Speaker 3: The Mac, I don't know, I think it's Command and Control, whatever that is that gets your screen to extend. On the regular computer, it's Fn-- other computer, Fn+F8.

KATHY ST. JOHN: We've Never had this issue before. This is strange.

Speaker 3: Can you refresh it, maybe?

Marilyn Dippell: Yeah. Let me try again. Sorry.

Speaker 3: No, well, oh, my goodness. I think all of us understand. I know Annette is on her-- oh, there it is.

Marilyn Dippell: Oh, now you're on the page?

Casandra Keitges: Yeah.

KATHY ST. JOHN: Yes.

Speaker 3: I don't know what you just did, but it worked.

Marilyn Dippell: Maybe because I had it at full screen, it didn't want to--

KATHY ST. JOHN: Oh, maybe.

Speaker 3: OK, great.

KATHY ST. JOHN: It's OK as it is.

Marilyn Dippell: I'm very glad.

Speaker 3: Good job.

Marilyn Dippell: OK, so we'll go back to here.

Speaker 3: It's so neat how she brought her girls into it.

Marilyn Dippell: Yeah. And that she's hugging the ukulele. So one of the topics somebody said parenting. So there are several books that, just by reading the title, you wouldn't know they're about parenting, but there are, some that are and this is one. This is kind of a good little right and wrong story, like what's the ethical thing to do.

And it's a mystery because they're trying to solve the mystery of who does this belong to.

Speaker 3: Oh, super cute.

Marilyn Dippell: Yeah. So they tracked down the name of the store from the back of the ukulele. And they are familiar with the store, so they ask. They got the woman that works in the store to participate.

Speaker 3: And I love during COVID. I love it, the mask.

Marilyn Dippell: Oh, yeah, we had such a time struggling with do we want to include people with masks or not.

Speaker 3: It's the story of the time.

Marilyn Dippell: We're living through historical times. We might as well let people wear their masks. So she couldn't help because she didn't know his name. So that was a dead end. And then they went and looked at the tag again, and they saw a clue. I know, isn't that great?

Speaker 3: It's so cute.

Marilyn Dippell: --end up in that store. And I mean, these are things that are in people's communities. And all of them, like the grocery shopping one the food tips, they're just great for vocabulary, just common vocabulary. This is so cute. She sold him donuts three days ago. How did she remember that?

Speaker 3: She's not over 50. I can speak to that.

Marilyn Dippell: So they went home and got a--

Speaker 3: The loss of memory.

Marilyn Dippell: They made a sign. Isn't that adorable?

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Marilyn Dippell: They put up the sign and right away get the call. It's the donut-eating man looking all over. And they reunite him with his ukulele, and he plays for them while they eat donuts.

Speaker 3: Oh, that's very cute.

Marilyn Dippell: Ain't that great? And then this is the tutor tips for this particular book--

Speaker 3: Wow.

Marilyn Dippell: --with some prediction in the beginning. What do they think it will be about? Pretty hard to know that there's going to be a donut shop involved in that book. And then just some vocabulary stuff. There's one that's good about prediction.

Before reading the book, cover the text on the first few pages and ask your learner to describe what's happening in the photos. So you can also do that. One of the tips that one of the participants came up with was to remove the text and have them cut them into strips, and then have the students sequence the events matching up to the photos.

Speaker 3: Great idea.

Marilyn Dippell: That makes sense? Good. OK. Let me see if I can get out of here now. OK. So I think we're kind of at the end of our slides. We have time for question and answer for sure.

Speaker 3: Anyone like to unmute or and ask question, please feel free. I am going to send out the evaluation links to everyone, and I hope that you'll--

Marilyn Dippell: Thank you

Speaker 3: --fill that out, and I just appreciate all three of you and all the work you've done.

Marilyn Dippell: Oh, thank you, and thank you--

Speaker 3: For your legacy project.

Marilyn Dippell: --our understanding tech helper. We really needed that today.

Speaker 3: Well, that's a nice partnership between us.

Marilyn Dippell: We also put our emails in the text early on. But we also have the last slide, which we'll leave up for a little bit. Has all of our contact information on it as well. And if you think of something later, Kathy and Casandra, and I are always happy to follow up with questions that might come up later.

Speaker 3: Great. Thank you, and thank you so much for attending CAEP Summit. And this information is recorded, so it will go and branch out to one person here, and you've got-- it's like dog ears. You've got 100. I'm going to go tell my friend my mom works at the library, volunteers at the library.

So thank you. Great presentation. And thank you, participants, for coming. And please make sure you fill out that evaluation, and I hope you have and enjoy the rest of the Summit the next few days.