 All right, good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I'm your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly online event. We are a webinar, a webcast, an online show, whatever you like to call us. We are here live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. If you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. We do record the show every week and the recording is posted to our website later that day. I will show you at the end of today's presentation, today's show, where you can see all of our recordings, both the recordings, if there's any presentations involved, websites, links that people go to during the session, all that will be collected for you and posted to the archive page afterwards. The recording is posted onto the Library Commission's YouTube account, it's public recording, so that anyone can get to that there. Both the live show and our recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So if you do see any sessions that you think may be of interest to your colleagues, for your friends, neighbors, family, anything out there, go ahead and send them to our website. Tell them to sign up for some upcoming shows or take a look at our archives and watch anything that's on there. We have been doing Encompass Live, and Linda was just asking me that, since we started Encompass Live in January of 2009, so we did have quite a lot of recordings and archives back there. So do keep that in mind as you are going through our old shows, we are librarians here, so we do archive everything and keep it all. So you will find some things that are old topics, maybe out of date information, just pay attention to the dates, everything's set a date on it and you can see what's out there. We do a mixture of things here on Encompass Live, book reviews, interviews, mini-training sessions, demos of services and products. Really the only criteria for what we put on the show is that it is something library related, something libraries are doing, something we think libraries could be doing. Services or programs we're offering here at the Library Commission or things that are being offered from anywhere around the state and actually around the country. We also have presentations from people that come in remotely from outside Encompass Live. We do have an Encompass Live at the Library Commission staff, as I said, do some sessions for things that are programs or services or things that are opportunities we're offering through the Commission, but we also bring in guest speakers, and that's what we have today. What we're going to be here at the Library Commission offices in Lincoln is Linda Dickison, who is the distance learning manager from Lincoln Public Schools here in Lincoln, Nebraska. Correct. And remotely from north of us is Beth Gabich, and she is the director of blended and distance learning at our educational service unit coordinating council. And they, this is a presentation that was done actually, there was in southeast part of our state, there was a teacher's training day, I believe it was. Like a school library and training workshop. Yeah, workshop. And this is a session that was done there, and then the people wanting that session actually, Scott Schilder is the director of our Southeast Library System, got requests for this to be recorded somewhere online for people who couldn't attend on that day in person. And I said, yes, we will absolutely do that. So we've got Beth and Linda here to recreate this again for us, for anybody who couldn't attend in person. So I'll just hand it over to you guys, we've got control here. Keyboard and mouse to run your, okay, I'm going to warn everyone though, I'm terrible at windows, I have a windows machine in front of me, so I'm a real math geek. So I may have to be, you know, calling for help as we navigate here. I can hold your hands really well. Thank you. Beth, for, there might be a couple that are not from Nebraska. Dalvin, do you want to explain what educational service units are? That's a great, great thought, Linda. So yeah, educational service units in Nebraska are the regional service centers. So we are legislatively created and we provide services specifically in technology support, instructional material support and for staff development. So that's legislatively what we are assigned to provide for public school districts. We have 17 of these ESUs across the state and the coordinating council then really works for all 17 of them in order to coordinate statewide projects. So blended learning and distance learning is a statewide project and that is where I am, the director of those two programs. So I work with all of our ESUs across the state of Nebraska, all 17. And you mentioned the blended learning. Beth was actually on Encompass Live last year and did a session on that as well. So if you're interested in that specifically, check out our archives for a previous show. And notice folks that at the bottom of this introduction slide, there is a URL. If you'd like to have this slideshow on your own computer, there's a bit.ly address at the bottom. It's bit.ly slash Encompass dash BFT. Okay, I'm going to roll on, Beth. All right, here we go. So I don't remember, I don't remember, Linda, if this is yours or this is mine. Yeah, you're going to do the first topics, Beth. And then I'll take over when the examples at Lincoln Public Schools come up. Yeah, perfect. So again, virtual field trips is something that's really being promoted across the nation. We see a lot of providers, museums, the Hall of Fame, some of those organizations are providing content not only when you come face-to-face to their center, but also virtually. We also in Nebraska have been exchanging courses for, gosh, I don't know, for since around 1999 or so. We've been exchanging courses, distance learning. So we would have two-way interaction and two-way interactive types of exchange with a sending school that had the teacher, two, three, to four, now to five and six other received sites. And we do this across Nebraska. And we have nearly 800, actually we have over 800 courses that are offered in this kind of a two-way interactive exchange. In Nebraska, our legislature has provided us with some incentive dollars for school districts that are sending and receiving these courses. So throughout all of that process, we have this very robust backbone system that's on the IP system. And you see on that map in Nebraska, that's our backbone. So we have 100% of our school districts and 100% of higher education that are connected to this backbone. We actually call this Backbone Network Nebraska. And it's member-driven, so it's member-owned. And each of the members then pay a fee to be part of that. And we also, with Network Nebraska, can then negotiate with these IP providers to get a really cost-effective pricing for our school districts across the state. As I talked about those incentives for schools that send and receive the courses. And those courses can be regular high school ed courses. We also have a number of dual credit courses. And those are all eligible for these incentive dollars. But we have higher ed institutions that provide a college credit only. So we have students across the state that are earning college credit while in high school through a virtual or a two-way interactive experience. And we feel that that really helps to provide a higher level of support for those students that may not be ready for a totally online experience that they might receive in a higher education institution. Okay, Beth, I'm going to back up a couple of slides so you can talk about the technology and our Zoom implementations. Very good. So we have moved from some old type of interaction using an MPEG system all the way to IP, which I know that everyone in the nation is using an IP exchange. So in those movements or those iterations of distance learning, we're now using mostly CART systems. So what you see here is just basically a large screen with a camera on it and a codec. But we also use a software codec. And the codec is what we're using today so that we have this two-way interaction. We have this video and audio. But across the state and our educational resources, we use Zoom. So the Library Commission is using GoToMeeting, but we use Zoom. And we have a contract, a statewide contract, where all of our ESUs have accounts within this contract and then they can allow schools to come on as a virtual connection. So using Zoom then has brought us to being able to provide these virtual field trips to classrooms. So the CART systems are primarily for that course exchange. And previous to that, they would be static in a classroom. And so reaching out to some of these content providers was difficult for an elementary class because they may have to move their whole class to one of these classrooms and they'd have to schedule it when a class wasn't being taught. So now by utilizing Zoom and a desktop or a laptop, whatever the situation is that you have in terms of a device, we can bring that virtual field trip right down into the classroom. And it makes it so easy for the classroom teacher. And when we think about librarians, it's an easy opportunity for librarians, too, to then connect with some of these national providers. Or we're going to talk a little bit about our state providers, too. Okay. So I think we talked a little bit about the background behind these classes. Let's try to go to the EnViz website then. So I've got that website loaded. How do I switch over to that? You should be able to just use the mouse. You've got your Firefox over down the bottom there. Oh, I see. Yep. Okay. The link to our EnViz. And this is a database, basically, that we call a clearinghouse of all of our course exchange. And again, we have courses up there for this coming fall that's starting in just a couple of weeks. So our schools then have been registering to join those courses throughout the last spring and summer. And they will be ready to start this fall for that two-way interactive course exchange. But also part of our clearinghouse or this database system, you'll see a tab that says field trip. And we're going to talk about that just a little bit later, Beth. Okay. Perfect. If you wanted to go into EnViz and see what we have in terms of course exchange or any of those things, you can just go to this website and search. You do not have to log in, although it says there's a log in, but you do not have to do that. You can just go in and search and find something. So if you are a parent of a student and you wanted your student to take anatomy and physiology, AP anatomy, you could go on here and see if there is an AP and A&P course that could be available through Disasserting, and you don't have to log in. And that tells you what school it's coming out of and who the actual instructor is so you can see where the curriculum is coming from. And the time of day. So because these are synchronous, of course, that remote school has to pay attention what time it is and make sure it meets the student's schedule. I mean, what's happening over the years is the technology is getting so super easy. That part's just transparent. It's just still the scheduling. Right, that's our part still. It can still be the schedule part, but there's always lots of opportunities. And so hopefully counselors, teachers, parents can find something that will fit. And it looks like we've got pretty much every single possible topic that they're teaching you've got something for that, for them. Yeah, and then I once that tend to be popular across the state. Well, Beth already mentioned the AP courses. A lot of the smaller school districts don't have opportunities for AP courses, but also world languages. You know, they don't always have that foreign language teacher and some of the technology related ones. So we can talk about those just a little bit more. So that was really a great tool for us to use to, you know, bring that all together. It really helps in the organization and the connections for school districts. And if you do find a course that you want your child to take, then just have them contact their principal or counselor in their school district and they can get them registered. So here's a little bit. I'll just show a little bit about what that looks like. And then we'll get into virtual field trips. But this is a link about schools had course being shared. And I believe that student on the screen was from Bloomfield. And so the student on the screen and the local student are actually working together on a project. And so the right half of the screen is actually what that remote student sees of the Lincoln students. See it's in holding. Exactly. So, yeah, so the kids still do group work together, even when they're remote, dialing in from wherever. And it can work. And the people that develop this curriculum, this CAD curriculum, it's the project lead the way curriculum. And they were so skeptical. It's like, you cannot do CAD over video conferencing. I'm sorry. And it's like, no, yes, we can. We know we can do it. And they were really demanding about what reports we had to fill out, all this stuff. And after we did it once, it was like, oh, yeah, this really works. So yeah, a lot of people think of these kind of video conferencing as being very static like lectures, a bunch of kids sitting in a room. And rather than their teacher in the room, it's a different teacher. Somewhere else just talking at them. And is that how this, you can totally interact? Not at all. It's totally. Everybody can see and hear each other. And kids do group work together. And in this case, they had some manipulatives that they were actually building something. So the remote student did have to have those manipulatives. Sometimes we send them out. Or sometimes they can get them locally themselves. But so that's just kind of an example of that classroom exchange. But we do a lot of things with our video conferencing. And Zoom has made it very easy. Another example is how we can support kids that are homebound for whatever reason. Maybe an accident or a short-term medical. And this picture, it's hard to see from this angle. But that little green device is an iPad. And that is sitting on a little device called a swivel. And the teacher wears a lanyard around their neck. And the swivel is sensitive to that lanyard. And so it moves around the classroom and follows the teacher wherever the teacher's going. And so the remote student at home is just on that iPad and they're in the class. And a lot of men see tracks to keep the eye on the teacher. And it tracks. So it's following the audio and it distracts wherever they go. So what those classroom teachers tell us when kids are homebound for those kinds of reasons is just connecting with their friends is half of the healing process. And it's really what motivates them to get back. We do, I guess, back on that topic, there are some kids that have high anxiety, maybe an autistic disorder or something, that just can't be in certain classrooms. Certain classrooms are just too much for them. And so they are asking, can we get this kid into a different room? And so we video conference them for that class. And hopefully, the goal is to always get them to knock in with their classroom. I've also seen that too, Linda, where it was the opposite. So we had a teacher that was going through chemotherapy with fighting cancer. And she wanted to work as much as she could, but knew that she couldn't interact in close quarters with her students. So she would come to, she would actually come to school and they had a room that she would teach her students, actually in the same building. But she would teach her students then remotely from that room so that she was kind of quarantined from her students. But it really helped the students to continue with their work, as well as get the teacher feeling like she still had value and she wasn't feeling like out of touch or separated from her class. So it actually worked both ways. All kinds of solutions. Now, this slide just basically shows a picture of a Zoom meeting where some people have dialed in by audio only. And you can certainly do that. So people that just are on the phone or on the road, they can just pull over to the curb in a parking lot and just dial in with their phone if they don't want to be on camera. The two squares that you see that just have names in it are people that are on video conference but they've turned off their camera. Now, I tend to be an advocate for, if you are in a video conference meeting, you leave your camera on because that people want to see you, they want you to be in the meeting, you know, very present. I guess the only time I turn my camera off is if, you know, the meeting's over my lunchtime and people don't need to see me eating my lunch. But otherwise, yeah, Zoom, you can, of course, join any device. So we do all kinds of meetings across our school district. Department chair meetings from the high schools, their PLC groups are learning that they, even meeting across town can be so much more convenient rather than, you know, a lot of our meetings are after school and trying to drive to another school when the time that school's out and there's so much traffic, I call it carmageddon, you cannot get close to a school building when school's out. So being able to have their after school meetings over video conferencing, it's been just great. Now, this is just kind of a fun activity we do at the beginning of school. It's called the boohoo breakfast and our Calvert Elementary, one of the parent teacher organization, the president called me at my desk and said, you know, we want to do this thing. Is it possible to put a camera in each kindergarten classroom and then have this breakfast for the parents so the parents can watch? So their little kindergarten kiddos that first hour of their school experience. And they're like, yeah, I think we can do that. So we leave some of the trauma on both sides. Absolutely. And the kindergarten teachers at first were a little skittish about being on camera that first hour in case they had screamers, you know, or whatever, but yeah, after they do it, the teachers are loving it because the parents drop the kids off, then the teachers can shoot that out. It's like, go, go to the breakfast. But so what we do is we put a laptop in each kindergarten classroom and we start with all the microphones muted. And then as we bring up a microphone, it puts that classroom full screen and then we can just rotate through the classrooms while the parents are at the breakfast and they are just loving that. So I usually, and Lincoln, we usually have six or seven elementary schools that do that the first day of school. That's great, it helps when the parents can see their children are acclimating and it's okay. Absolutely, they just leave with a much better part. Do the kids know that this is happening? No, kids do not know that other parents are still there. Exactly, so we dim the screens down, we turn off the audio in the classroom so they have absolutely no idea that they're on a video conference. So yeah, the parents, one of the times I'll get a parent come up to me and say, well, why doesn't my kid act this way? Oh. I'll say, well, come back in a month, you know, we'll see how that goes. But no, it's gone over really well. Just to- So we really thought that that boohoo breakfast could be something to build in to the school libraries for their summer reading programs. Sometimes the kids are, you know, the parents are not quite sure how the student is gonna do with summer reading. So at a library, you could set up a boohoo coffee, something like that to watch that summer reading for your age group, your children's age group. That's a great idea, that's a great idea. And it's pretty easy to do. And now as we talk about remote providers, the kind of virtual field trip things that we'll start talking about is that we did arrange a really nice partnership with the Manhattan School of Music in New York. And at Lincoln East High School, this is their chamber orchestra, got to be in the pilot. We were just testing it out to test how music really transferred, you know, over video conferencing. And they're pretty particular about microphones, microphone placement, that kind of thing, but the experiences were just great. Now some of the remote smaller schools actually contracted with Manhattan School of Music for individual lessons. Like in a smaller school, that music teacher might not be an expert at a cello or an oboe or some instrument like that. So they were actually getting some coaching lessons from Manhattan School of Music. This happened to be, this chamber orchestra got three sessions with Manhattan School of Music. And I'm an ex music teacher, so to me, this is so cool and I got to watch them. But let's just show you just a little bit of, I've just got a one minute of what that coaching session looks like. Right there, there is you. Let's see if we can get that so that. I want you to see there, actually the teachers from Manhattan School of Music, I mean, they're really great with the kids within an hour. They got three two hour sessions. And within an hour, he knew all their names. He knew how to, you know, how to kind of coax conversation out of them. And within that first session, they were very comfortable asking questions. It was just like he was in the room. So, you know, a really good distance learning coach or teacher understands that relationships are still really, really important in the learning experience. And what happened over those three short sessions is these kids that were already individually good musicians. By the end of three sessions, they were breathing together, moving together. They were like one new organism, you know, and it was just delightful. So, their teacher, that the Lincoln Chamber Choir instructor, oh, I'm going to go back to the slides there. Right, we're here. Is on the left in this picture. And so I asked him, I said, you know, how was this? Having somebody else coach your kids? And he said, are you kidding? He said, this was great because he validated everything I've been trying to tell them. And it was to me, but exactly. And I learned some new techniques as well. So, it was really a great partnership with Manhattan School of Music. But, you know, bringing those experts into the classroom is an amazing experience. And this virtual field trip, this happened to be from Vanderbilt University in Texas. They're not doing programming anymore, but on the screen in the pink jacket is a gentleman that was mid to late 80s. And he was actually a liberator of DACA, concentration camp. And this, the kids in the room are two sections of our course on literature of the Holocaust. And so this gentleman was explaining to them what it was like to be 19 years old. And in those days, he said, there's no cell phones, no media. We didn't know that concentration camps were happening. We didn't even know until we marched in that day and what they saw, he explained what they smelled, what they heard, and the kids were totally riveted. It was an amazing experience for them because he was only 19. Yeah, at the time he was doing that. These kids were 17 and 19. Just a little older than them. He was off in the military. So, he gave them a chance to ask questions afterwards and one of the kids asked, we see a lot of movies about World War II or any of them authentic. And he said, you know, I've only seen one that was fairly realistic. And he said, that was the beginning of saving Private Ryan. That, yeah, the movie they say it is. And he said, otherwise these movies show all the troops getting on a truck and going in convoys. He said, he never rode anywhere. He said, we fought, we marched. We fought, we marched. He said, our feet were wet. We didn't have showers for weeks or months. He said, you know, we walked across France. He said, and the kids were like, oh, you know. So, a couple weeks later I asked the instructor standing in the back of the room because it was $75. And I said, okay, so was that worth $75? And again it was, are you kidding me? Because, and he said, you know, we've been reading the books. We've been having the hard conversations. He said, but there's always some kids that just don't engage. They don't get it. He said, but after that program, kids are stopping me in the hall. They're staying after school. They just wanted more. So, you know, those kinds of experts are so valuable to the learning experience. And actually, you know, these tug at my heart strings because they're gonna be gone soon. But we do a lot of connections in Lincoln. This is a connection with the Omaha Zoo who does great programming that matches our state testing standards. So this science teacher would connect to them quite frequently and make sure, you know, what they were doing aligned with the standards for the upcoming tests. But the reason I like to show this kind of a classroom connection is because he was just on his laptop with the Omaha Zoo. And we have some of these cameras. The image on the right has it on a long skinny neck, but you don't have to put that skinny neck on it. It can just sit down. But these Logitech conference cans, I have three or four that I can loan out to a classroom and they're gonna do virtual field trips. And it just expands that videoconference experience so the camera can get the whole classroom, you know, for that remote provider to see the kids, excuse me. And it has a much better microphone built into the base than your laptop has. And so it can reach 15 or 20 feet out into the room as well. So then I know there's other good ones on the market. These have been pretty popular in education. Right, and I've connected them to Promethean boards and smart boards and those kinds of things that have the audio built into the projector and it's worked really well. It's really nice instead of having your camera on your laptop or your desktop, it's just really nice to be able to turn that around and have kind of like, like I said, a little bit wider view. You can also, you know, zoom in with those but it really does make a difference in terms of how the presenter, the person that's remote to you, how they see your classroom by using one of those types of accessories. Exactly, and it does have a pretty good speaker built in. I'll go back and look. That'll do a very small classroom but most often, like Beth said, you can switch your zoom connection over to other audio systems you might have or the projector's audio or however, so you have lots of choices with zoom on how you actually connect to your audio. But this is a classroom connecting to our Durham Museum in Omaha and they're an old train station. If you haven't been to the Durham, they're an old train station and they have some steam engine, they have a steam train down in the lower level that people can walk through. So the kids not being there, they actually take an iPad and they do a train walk through. So they can show the kids the caboose and the engine and they show them where the coal went in and they talk about how steam engines go. So that's a great program for the little kids. But the Durham also does great programming on westward expansion, pioneer life and that kind of thing. So they've got great free programming there. So we dial into them frequently and NASA has free programming and we're starting to do a lot more connections to them. This was at our Randolph Elementary School and I knew the teacher was going to do it. It was kind of a special day right before Christmas. And so when I got there to observe, there was 300 kids in the gymnasium. It was all the 3rd graders, all the 4th graders and all the 5th graders and I thought, oh my God, this is going to be a disaster because there's too many kids. But we handled it so well and the kids were so involved to be speaking to NASA. They were just, oh my gosh, they were so engaged and they wanted to answer questions. They wanted to ask questions and it was amazing. Our district science curriculum specialist, James Blake, was standing right beside me. I'd invited him to come out and see this connection. And he nudged me. I said this right before Christmas so kids are a little bit crazy. But he kind of nudged me and he said, you know, they could have been watching a Disney movie or something today. He said that they are learning. They're engaged, fun. They're having fun learning and he was totally sold. We do all kinds of solutions and connections. Now, our ELL teachers, once they learned about our Zoom and how easy it was to do Zoom, they're asking, oh, can I connect my ELL kids to their home and families? Absolutely, I said, I want to be there. And this was a connection to grandparents in Thailand. And so, you know, some of these remote locations are so crazy because they don't have running water. They don't have anything, but they have internet. You know? Yeah, they have like a tablet. And so we're connecting to them and he's holding up a bunch of rice that he just sold out of the field so kids could see what rice was like. It's right from the field. And they had questions on the white board all prepared ahead of time. One was, do you have a refrigerator? The answer was, what's that? Did you go to school? Yes, two years, you know? So the other kids in the classroom, of course, from all different cultures that was really great, you know, cultural building experience to get those connections going. I think we'll probably be doing more of that. And Zoom is getting so easy for our classroom teachers now to do that they're just cooking up these connections themselves. I wasn't even there this day. They just did it and sent me some pictures that they were studying weather. So they called the local TV station channel, I didn't think it was, and connected with the weather pastors. They talked about weather. I did go out to this one, it was great fun. The second graders were learning how to weed in art class. And so our IT coach at that school said, whoa, I've got an auntie in Maine that's a master weaver. Let's see if we can do that with her. Oh yeah. And so this woman, she was in her 80s and she'd been all over the world sharing about weaving and coaching and teaching about weaving all over the world and had samples from different cultures and whatnot. And she had looms all over this big room in her house and her husband was just a deer. He was kind of being the van up white. So she was on a laptop connected and he had an iPad for a second connection. And he was walking around the room showing all the weaving and looms. I told this woman after the program was over, I said honey, you could be making money on this. She was really good and so informative to the kids. But we do some all day connections. Some of our elementary schools do special days when teachers can have extra time with their professional learning communities. So the specialists in art, music, health, they cook up activities for the day while those teachers are doing PLC work. And some of our institutions in Nebraska, this happens to be egg fossil beds near Scott's left, will do all day programming for us. So in those cases, they'll bring all the kindergarten kids into one place and they do a program for kindergartners and the kindergartners go out, the first grader come in and they get a program and they go out. So some of our institutions are just wonderful with programming for all grade levels and they do them for free. Beth, why don't you talk about how we're trying to get more of our nonprofits in Nebraska on board for virtual field trip programming? So we have a couple of programs that we're applying for some grant dollars through USDA which is a rural utilities service grant and the office of the chief information office through the state of Nebraska is with Tom Rolfes who's a part of that team has been putting that together and the distance learning coordinator across the state helps contact some of the nonprofits. So with the arts council and the First Lady that is providing resources for fourth grade students across Nebraska to visit some of these content providers in our 150th celebration in Nebraska this next year. The concept is how do we continue that? So how do we continue to provide some of these resources for our fourth grade or any classroom in the state beyond this next year? So this particular program then is allowed or to provide some of this equipment for our nonprofits and we've identified, I believe we've identified 17 nonprofits that previously may or may have not been involved with our content database that we talked about earlier and then we have 13 school districts that are involved as well and those school districts are some of the most identified as low economic or poverty level school districts because sometimes those are the students that we really wanna reach in order to provide some of this rich knowledge and opportunity. So we'll see if we can, if we approve for that grant which will provide some equipment but in addition to that, our NETA organization which is our network or our Nebraska Education Technology Association is also providing some grant dollars for schools. So if a provider charges a fee for the content that they're sharing and that's not uncommon, you could, it might be $50, Linda talked about $75 for one of those, it could be we have some that are $250 for an autopsy. Well, if a school district is interested in making that connection and having that opportunity, NETA then has some funding that will provide that and I'm calling it a stipend but provide that funding for that school district in order to make that connection. So we've got some great opportunities for schools, for nonprofits and then what Linda's showing here is workshops for nonprofits. So the same group of people across the state are, we work with schools and we work with classroom teachers that are teaching over this network and so we have some knowledge and some experience of what are the best practices if you are going to present to students. So we are bringing that knowledge then to any of these nonprofits, of these content providers that are interested in being part of this system to provide virtual field trips to schools across Nebraska. So we coordinate this opportunity with this is learning week which is a national celebration if you will and that's in the first week of November or the second week of November I guess and we provide usually two sites that are connected virtually so we need to make some connections. One is generally in Scott's Bluff and the other one is in Lincoln. It's an all day workshop. Our Distance Learning Association NDLA is a sponsor as well as the ESU Coordinating Council is a sponsor so we can have a lunch on site but it's about that this is learning coordinators that work with those teachers and talk about so how would you align your content to Nebraska standards and what are some tips when you're teaching online or teaching virtually that you could use in order to engage those students? So it's all about learning best practice of providing content to our schools or even libraries. Yeah and what was amazing is when we decided this will be our fourth year of doing this annual free workshop for those nonprofits what's amazing is as a state the Distance Learning Coordinators at all the ESUs around the state we all kind of jumped in to build the database that's like who are the foundations historical societies museums or zoos in your area and so we all just started this Google spreadsheet of contact information and we ended up just in Nebraska we got over 110 I think on that mailing list which really surprised me once we started finding them all and every year we get maybe 15 different institutions to participate in the free workshop and every year we get one more success story like Agate Fossil Beds was a success story after coming to the workshop that first year we held it or I think Hastings Museum is just almost ready to start their programming so yeah if every year we can get one or two more nonprofits to be those program providers and hopefully at free or low cost because frankly the days of kids all jumping on a bus and going somewhere are diminishing quickly it's just a lot of money it's a lot of time the truth is that hair and permission slips the lunch, how do we you know it's just those opportunities are diminishing for these institutions so we would like to give them more ways to keep their visibility and what their kids learn about what they have to offer let's yeah I'll switch over to that Enviz site there Beth and we can just talk about how we have built the virtual field trip possibilities in Enviz so again we have records for each of the content providers and within that then every program that they're offering is found in this field trip tab of our Enviz clearinghouse and database so a person at a library let's again let's say that you're providing summer reading and you want to connect with the Agate Fossil Bed you could go on here and identify what programs that they have and make a connection because in these records it has a link to an email that you would contact and it also has a suggestion of who you might want to contact at your local ESU to help with any questions that you might have or maybe you need a Zoom or you need to install Zoom or a camera those kinds of things so your local ESU can certainly help you in your library to make those connections with these content providers but our goal is to really build this within Nebraska so that our Nebraska schools and our Nebraska libraries can go here and find those resources within our state that would connect and make those standards connections so within those programs you also see what standards they might address but here what you're seeing is what is the content area so the weatherman the TV weatherman from he's an Australian but he's a Incarnian he's just terrific so he provides some content in the area of music you see the little notes in the area of I believe that would be science and I'm not sure what the middle one would be everything we've got social studies and science okay very good but also you see that it's grades 3 through 12 so it's easy to filter out based on your content and your grade level so I generally do most of the updates contacting those providers and if they have new programs they'll get a hold of me and I add to it but the providers can do the editing as well and we've tried to target mostly our Nebraska providers here that are free or low cost and some that we've connected to that we know have good programming so this will build as we get more of them on board the exception is NASA you know they're not Nebraska but they are free and they're vetted you know we've done their programs so we've included them here as well I saw there's one on the first page of this I saw Kansas is and I was wondering about the about bringing in because I see most of these are Nebraska organizations who is in Kansas and I was wondering curious about that yeah I'm not sure what you're doing because it's a national park see all the national parks are free programming so all the national parks are so yeah it's a and I think it's someone above that's in Arizona too right so some of the national parks that are not in Nebraska have been added here because they're free and of course we have the Homestead Monument right here in the actress so yeah and it's a good the AMVS site the field trips page here is a good starting place for a librarian or a classroom teacher to do a first experience because you know they're most of them are free they're vetted and it's an easy connection but you know there are other databases nationwide so Beth maybe let me jump over to CILC and you can talk about CILC yeah so this would be our second recommendation this is a national probably worldwide database and this is a very large database so most of our Nebraska providers are also you know have records or have resources listed in CILC you can create an account within CILC free and and then you can search through there you can search by cost you can search by content so again you can filter similar to what you do on in this what you also find in CILC are collaborations so maybe you would like to connect with another classroom or you would like to you know connect with something other than a provider so there are different types of you know programs that can be offered through CILC so if you're you know just wanting to do some searching of what can be done or where you can go CILC is a great resource to go even beyond Nebraska right they're nationwide even worldwide and and most most of them charge but there are some free ones so as Beth said you can search by cost and grade level most kinds of things but I think after a teacher does their first connection off of one of those sites on the end of site they've done it they're like oh yeah this is easy I can do this then I think searching at CILC is that next step because you get more hits you get more choices and you just don't want teachers to be overwhelmed with that tourism right oh sure start small and get your feet wet yeah exactly so you know basically for any of us to have these video conferencing solutions there's just some crucial things and one crucial thing is that we want to be able to do video conference on any device you know our laptops or desktops any mobile device tablet phone whatever and we've learned that that additional camera is helpful and as soon as we started using an easy program like zoom now I'll disclaimer we are not zoom sales people but we've just had some really good experiences there and I guess what what we didn't mention about zoom so for those of you have not used zoom if you need a pro license and you're not part of an educational institution but you need a pro license typically they are about $10 a month for a pro license which is an horrible but it allows you to record and stream and do all these things and have you know a lot more connections but a free account is available a free account is available that has very few limitations you just can't record with it but you can still do unlimited one to one connections so you just need something to do a quick online meeting or something exactly you can use your free account and even a free account allows you to have multiple guests now the pro accounts like most of those providers that you saw during museum a lot of you know they now have their own zoom pro license and they can connect to anyone in the world with that doesn't have a license right so they use their licenses yeah so a person with a license can connect to 50 people that are guests that don't have licenses it's just an easy download of the app and then that guest is gone so anyway so but being able to record has helped us a lot to give good examples teachers are doing nice screencasts with their zoom account for tutorials like that so they just don't connect anybody they just jump in their zoom room and and share their screen and do some screencasts it's not about that recording you talking about the the World War two that know that they are passing on this is great if they're being recorded and they're telling their stories like oral history projects or something yeah some of those sites will have rules about if you can record their program so we did not record yeah but I think the ones where we're connecting to the master weaver in Maine or the things that we are finding those connections absolutely fabulous to have some of those recorded and when you guys do record you have them somewhere then in a database or somewhere that then if somebody does need to go watch one you know right now you do their pretty right now if someone records it's probably if they're a local institution on a server we don't have a statewide place for any of that and again some of those content providers are not going to want us to record the whole program if they charge oh of course so you know we've gotten permission to do a one minute or a two minute sample to share what it could be like with our teachers but yeah if they charge for their programming naturally they don't want us to have three places to go watch it so Beth you want to just wrap and just mention blended learning and then we can yeah yeah so we use this video conferencing again within some of our blended learning classes and we do have a pilot of our blended learning so we're promoting strategies that can build engagement with students can build relationships with students and allow students to take some control of their learning so in other words they can make some choices in a path that they might want to take maybe they can make some choice in the time you know so the pace of their learning and well as make some choice in terms of how they would demonstrate their knowledge we call that voice so we we have this pilot that is in starting year two and we're very excited about the data that we're seeing coming through that has actually shown that these things are are improving or increasing or have a high level of application but we've been using we've been talking about blended learning for a number of years and within that whole package of blended learning in order to provide some of those structures and strategies we wanted to make sure that we have a place for all of these resources to be held and we're we we have those things in place we have statewide pricing for learning management systems such as campus at Blackboard and and school agi we also have a single sign on portal so schools can log in to their system and have access to their Google Drive to their zoom account to learn 360 which is our video resource so we have we're getting more and more of our schools onto that portal system we've been providing professional development for a number of years but continue to do that and again with with this this pilot we're able to identify to determine that this is making a difference in these students learning in the classrooms that are piloting so so our whole blended initiative is going forward and is a positive impact within schools and so you know reach out to your school district and see if they are are in a pilot or if they're implementing anything in the blended learning arena. Is there a limit to how many people can be in this pilot that you're doing or is it just anybody who wants to can reach me in contact you about participation? Great question we're in year two of our pilot so we're not accepting any new schools at this time of of our first pilot however we've just been funded for a second cohort is what we're calling that and those applications for participation are going to go out this fall so the ESUs will be meeting in September and identifying the processes you know and kind of maybe tweaking some of the process that we use with our first cohort of our pilot and will be accepting applications this fall and then starting next March will be the kickoff of our second cohort of our blended pilot where our initially we were we were our goal was to have 34 districts in the pilot which would have been two per ESU we ended with we ended with 27 and since then we have dwindled down to 25 so we had 25 the first year and but I still think 25 is great it's either schools or districts across the state we have schools from Adams Nebraska Freeman public schools which is the the most southeast we go all the way up to South Sioux City which is in the north the northeast we have Mullen which is in the north-central we have Bayard which is in the western part of the state and we also have Minden which is in the south-central part of the state and places in between so we are really reaching state-wide and everywhere from kindergarten to grade 12 so the pilot has been all inclusive and and so exciting to to watch what is happening with those schools so after the second cohort then our our goal is to really continue to scale blended learning across the state and get more schools and implementing these types of strategy okay that time went fast that's okay no problem all right so that's it anybody have any questions we're at just a minute past 11 but that's okay we started a little late and if anybody online if you have any desperate urgent questions you want answered right now take it into your webinar interface let me know we can answer those questions if you don't think of anything now or don't get in we do that you can obviously contact Linda or Beth for more about this and or go to all those links that were shared so thank you very much both of you um Beth Linda well Beth for being here out there and the different coming over to our offices um do you have any last words anything that you want to wrap up I just think you can kind of excited about it thanks everybody and share thank you so much I think it's amazing the virtual field trips I remember you know as a human weird kids it was get on a bus it's field trip day it's it's a um a day off kind of because you're going off and doing something different um and but it was so so rare even then maybe you're saying it's it just can't do as much anymore even then it was a rare thing and so a special thing that you did it only a couple of times a year maybe if you're lucky that with this it's the kind of thing you could have every day depending on your curriculum and the topic and the subject and the classes you're in now and the institutions they can't prove immediate return on investment but what happens is you know a kid if we connect with moral hall and we show them all around moral hall virtually they're going to go home and talk about that with their parents and I think it's like taking out a little home in a museum yeah because moral hall say oh this saturday we're doing blah blah blah and the kids are going to go on holidays and there's a sweet and you know so anyway we hope that it's good for everyone absolutely all right we so comment thank you um very awesome information thank you very well done absolutely thank you all right all right thank you then everyone um i think we'll wrap it up today then doesn't look at anybody has any actual questions you need to answer it if you do you can reach out to Beth or Linda here with their email addresses on the presentation um i am going to switch over here to see can you just type in for me encompass live yeah yeah so if um so that will wrap it up for today's show and it has been and we still are wrapping up um been recorded and will be on our website luckily so far in the world um it appears that um encompass live we're the only thing called encompass live on the internet so if you google us whatever search we come up um this is our encompass live website just off the library commissions page what we have here are upcoming shows here but i was going to show you here is where the archives are very listed underneath this is all of our shows going back to the very first show in january 2009 or here since meeting long list and we'll scroll down it for you um but today's show will come right at the top of the of the list here probably later this afternoon this is the last week we did one of the solar eclipse coming either there's eclipse coming did you know um so we'll have it on here recording i'll link to your presentation that bitly link that you've shared which has all the other links that you mentioned in there as well um when the recordings of it is ready i will email all of you who attended live and anyone who pre-registered for the session as well as being you know posted out to our mailing lists and everywhere let you know that it's available um so that does wrap it up for today show i hope you join us next week when and it's going to be me as the presenter um for those of you of public libraries in Nebraska it is a accreditation season this is my first year doing it i am the new library development director here as of april i've been at the library commission about 16 years but previous library development director richard miller retired and i am moved up to his position and accreditation has opened up in beginning of july so i'm going to do a session next week on the process how to get your library on board um if you are in the next group that's due to renew this year so definitely um if you're in the group coming up or if you're interested in being accredited and you haven't yet that would be the session for you to sign up for so please do join us for that and Ava other shows we have coming up here i've got some of the august ones i'm working on confirming dates for um september and fort as well so keep an eye on our website for any of the new shows upcoming shows um being posted there um also end compass live is on facebook so if you are a big facebook user please do pop over there and give us a like i post reminders of like here's reminder to log in on the fly for today's show when recordings are available i post down here when anything new sessions are being added i'll add it to our facebook page as well so if you are big on facebook um and give us a like to keep up with what we're doing isn't that that wraps up this morning thank you very much thank you Beth and we'll see you next time on end compass live bye bye thanks