 Thank you so much. It's great to be with you here today. My name is Barbara Suetz. I am the Open Educational Resources and Instructional Material Program Manager at our State Department of Education. Just to give you a little bit of context of where I am, I am in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States in Washington State, and just wanted to acknowledge our local tribes and nations. Near as to me are the Squaxon Island, Nisqually, and the Federated Tribes of Shehalis. So a little bit about the K-12 OER project that I direct at our State Department of Education. We really have three big buckets of work. The first is OER awareness and advocacy. The second is actually reviewing OER and assisting districts with the development of open resources. And the third is really maintaining a library of openly licensed resources for sharing across the state and around the world. We call our online repository the Washington OER Hub. It is housed on OER Commons, which I'm sure most of you are quite familiar with. And really our Washington OER Hub is intended as a place to share resources that are created by Washington educators and our collaborators, and also curated for those folks. Our vision is certainly to share resources widely and to promote equitable access of equitable access, I should say, to standards-aligned content. Given the fact that we only have 20 minutes, and I know it goes so quickly, I'm not actually going to jump out to our online platform. But please know that in the notes for this section, I have put a link to that platform, as well as a copy of the slide deck and some additional resources that we'll be talking about in just a second. The way our online platform is organized is really in two big sections. The first section is our working group section, and this is a place that Washington educators that are developing content in collaboration with our State Department of Ed are able to post their materials. We have an area that is administered by our local content experts at the state level, but we also have sections that are administered by our grantees and collaborating organizations throughout the state. So in addition to really robust lessons and units that are being created by Washington educators that we're sharing, we also have added continuous learning collections. And these came about pretty recently with the advent of the pandemic, certainly. We wanted to include additional resources that were from third party sources that weren't necessarily created for Washington, but certainly were pertinent to our educators. And we chose these resources because they were aligned with our learning standards. And most importantly, they had some connection to remote learning, and hopefully also had an integration of different subject areas. We're finding that we have a number of benefits that we are reaping from having this hub on OER Commons. First and foremost, it's really a platform to share resources beyond the level of the individual school or district. For years OSPI has provided OSPI I should say is our State Department of Ed. That's the acronym. We have provided money to districts to create instructional materials, but oftentimes those resources, wonderful as they may be get kind of locked behind a district learning management system, or just kind of left within the realm of one building. And this is really a chance for us to share those resources beyond that level. So it is, as I mentioned before, an opportunity to provide equitable access to content, regardless of the zip code folks happen to be living in. And as it turns out, it really gave us a leg up on getting information out to folks in a distance learning format when that became a necessity just recently. I do want to mention that I have linked on this slide and you'll have that as a resource to our playlist. We've been starting to create little 10 minute YouTube live videos that highlight a particular resource on the hub, so that we can just kind of shine a spotlight on some wonderful resources that are available there. I wanted to talk just a little bit about how we are populating our hub with resources. It's really important to have a pipeline of content that is going to to feed this online site. And there are a number of different ways that we do that. First is by taking a look at existing content that has been created by our State Department of Education, usually through some sort of legislative mandate. A couple of examples here one is our since time immemorial tribal sovereignty curriculum. This is a great resource for educators around the state it is openly licensed and certainly something that can be remixed by folks that would be applicable to their own local tribal population. Another existing material that we have openly licensed is our modeling world with mathematics resource. It's a secondary resource that's designed to follow geometry that really includes thematic units like health and civic readiness and the arts and applies those kind of real world learnings to math. Another area we were able to lean into to kind of acquire content was really reaching out to our external partners and requesting that they openly licensed their materials. Another good example is the work that we've done with the League of Women Voters of Washington to openly license their state of Washington textbook. I'm going to let you click on the other options when you have a chance to review this at your leisure but just know that in addition to those areas we do do collaborative development work with district educator teams to bring their content to the table and work with them to make sure that it is aligned with learning standards and openly licensed and ready for inclusion on the hub. And as I mentioned earlier we've started to curate content from third party sources as well. Another area that a lot of folks were interested in is the competitive grant program that we have. As an incentive for developing openly licensed resources we do provide small seed grants to district teams for the development of either full course or unit level instructional materials. For the requirement they obviously need to be aligned to state learning standards and they are required to openly license the content that they develop and include that on the OER hub. We've been doing this for about five years now about 31 grants have been given out to districts and the numbers that you see here are reflective just of the individual grants or of the direct content with contact with teachers. And students that we've had through the grants. As you know these materials are remixed and shared and spread on a much larger scale. So the numbers that you see here for teachers and student impacts are just in the individual classrooms where the teachers had actually developed the content. We know that the numbers are much higher for the actual distribution of those materials. Taking a look at the findings for the grants. We're certainly seeing the impact of grant funding in a number of different populations teachers and students obviously but we've also had reports from our grantees that parents and policymakers have seen the advantages of the work as well. Taking a big look at the overview of all of the responses that we've got back from our final reports there's some some common benefits that we we can certainly point out. First and foremost being that the development of this openly licensed content is typically the best professional learning that these educators have ever had. The benefit of having an increased pool of standards aligned content. And also what we're really finding now is that we're able to generate content in some underrepresented content areas. We're finding a great deal of really good quality open resources in math and LA science certainly, but areas like health and the arts and world languages are underrepresented out there so we're able to provide grant funds to increase the pool of content in those areas. Not surprisingly, the challenges that our grantees are pointing out are ones that you've all heard before, I know from folks that you're working with the issues of time, certainly is is probably the biggest one, and also just the the comfort level with instructional materials development. And sometimes technical issues, we have different team members that are working on different platforms and that obviously provides a challenge for folks. Teacher and student outcomes, I've got a couple of slides that speak a little bit to that. And that's an area that we would still like to do more research on a quantitative area, a lot of the evidence that we have now as anecdotal in nature. And we'd like to put a few more numbers to things. I pulled some quotes from from some of our most recent round of grantees, because I think they speak to a lot of the benefits that they're seeing, certainly an increased student interest and engagement level. We had a group that was developing STEM content science technology content in Southern Washington, and they saw a reduction in disruptive behaviors in class. They also had class discussions that were certainly a little bit more rigorous than they had seen before. So our grantees have seen improved student performance in terms of meeting standards and and leaning in to conversations to provide evidence for their thinking. And one of the greatest quotes I saw was just from our last round of grantees and then the comment was that the development had proved liberating rather than restricting. And they had really good things to say about the implementation of their developed OER and are excited to share it with other folks. This one in particular was from a physics curriculum full course that they had developed. I should say that there are links to all of our grant projects and reports over the last five years. I've included the link on the copy of the presentation that you'll find in the session description. Another area I wanted to mention too is this idea of cost shifting I know in higher ed we we often talk about a cost savings to the students in K 12 it's really much more of a cost shift that money still gets spent, it does not get, you know, shunted into another area. But what we are finding is that folks are able to move those funds into areas that are also critical for learning and teaching so instead of spending it on the purchase of content they're spending it on release time for teachers, or providing it on time for educators to get together to curate and adapt content. I want to end really quickly with what I think is a really great example of a number of these different content creation streams that are coming together. I mentioned earlier the state were in Washington which was work that we had worked with our external partners to apply an open license to. With the result of doing that we were able to include that work on our Washington hub and then have a grantee district who took up that material, and not only translated it into several different languages for their dual language immersion courses, but really adapted that content so that it met the needs of those particular populations. We were above that we were able to collaborate with school districts on creating teacher guides and inquiry based activities and lessons to accompany that textbook material. And so it was a really nice way to show that open licensing extends the life of a work and and just increases its usefulness for folks. That was a whole lot of information in a very short time. I do want to I think I think I have maybe one minute left if there are any questions I'm happy to answer those. And if we don't get to them here. Please feel free to reach out to me via email or in the we global connect format and I'm happy to talk with folks offline about this work. It's amazing but right just in time we even have four minutes to spare for questions so anybody. Wow, you were perfect, but in any case I have added the follow up. The link for you to connect so they can follow up with you. But if somebody wants to make use of the mic to make a quick question to Barbara. We're good. Thank you so much but I love listen to what you guys are doing in line with now that we're in this stage where we want to facilitate the resources not only for the users but also the creators seeing the type of work that you guys are doing it's just it's just amazing. Thank you very much for sharing. You're welcome. Goodbye everybody have a good rest of your conference.