 For everybody who doesn't know me, my name is Caitlin Alley-Pena. I am the Director of Operations and Programs with the Center for Election Science. We are a nonpartisan nonprofit that studies and advocates for better voting methods. And right now we are just trying to engage people and provide them with ways to stay connected to democracy and different subjects around government and civics while everybody is kind of stuck at home. And we thought that connecting with iCivics to help you all access resources while you're at home with your kids or if you're an educator who's trying to figure out how to teach online, we thought that would be a great opportunity right now to provide those resources to you all. So I'm assuming that most of you are at least somewhat familiar with iCivics, but if you're not they are also a non-profit and they engage students with civics lessons and discussions by providing teachers with the resources they need to create interactive lessons. And I think Amber might touch on this, but I'm pretty sure that you guys are kind of moving to provide some resources for parents as well. Correct me if I'm wrong, but today I think Amber will be focusing a little bit more on parents, but of course this should hopefully be helpful for both educators and parents alike. So without further ado I will introduce our presenter today. Her name is Amber Coleman Mortley and she is the director of social engagement at iCivics. Before joining iCivics she was a decorated college athlete and she worked for about a decade as a PE and health teacher and a varsity head coach at Sidwell Friends School. She has a BA in African American Studies from Oberlin College and a Master of Communications from American University in Media Entrepreneurship and she's also an NBC parent toolkit expert which is really cool. Amber also has her own blog called Mama Vault Capes and she covers parenting strategies and ed tech, civic education, parent-teacher partnerships, and social-emotional development. So she's obviously got lots of expertise for us so I will go ahead and hand it over. Awesome. Yay. Thank you everyone for joining this evening and for the people who will be watching the recording later. So welcome, welcome, welcome. I do want to give out a shout out to Caitlin for reaching out to us. Thank you so very much for allowing us the space to commune with your community. So thank you, thank you, thank you. We do have some isolationist people who are also on the webinar so please as we go because I will be focused on my presentation. If you have questions as we go along I will shoot it to, you know, Emma Humphrey she's in the chat. Kristen Shapron is in the chat and I think I see Laura DeSalvo as well. So hopefully they can answer your questions as I go along. All right I guess let's get this party started. I'm going to share my screen here. All right hopefully everyone can see that I click present. All right so we are here this evening to discuss teaching your kids about democracy with iCivics and I'm just going to give a really, you know, hopefully quick overview so that we leave enough time for questions. All right so as I was introduced before my name is Amber Coleman-Mortley. I'm the Director of Social Engagement at iCivics. In my spare time I'm a parent blogger and I also am at Mama Ball Cates on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Feel free to reach out to me during and after this presentation. I am a mom of three. I have an eight-year-old, a 10-year-old and an 11-year-old so you know iCivics is really a great resource for the kids in this age group and so I'm super excited to talk about the ways that you can connect this resource with those ages and other ages as well and then yes I am a former PE teacher and health teacher and varsity coach. So before we get started all right I just want to touch into like what does it mean to teach your kids about democracy all right. So the first thing that it is not, it is not political tribalism. This is not about raising more libertarians or more Democrats, more Republicans, independents or Green Party voters all right. What teaching your kids about democracy actually is is getting more engaged citizens you know raising independent and empowered thinkers that understand how government operates and functions in their lives. Hopefully when they do that they do it with zeal and enthusiasm to solve the most pressing matters in their communities. So the reason you want to dive into democracy even at home with your kids is so that you're giving them the skill so that later on they are ready to be empowered and engaged citizens later on in life. So today's agenda all right. We're going to cover obviously I'll give a brief introduction about iCivics. We're going to talk about responding to school closures and remote learning. We're going to talk about the other resources that are available for parents and how you guys can use those grade level and then we'll talk about what to look for at iCivics in an election year and then we'll open it up for Q&A. All right so about iCivics just really quickly. We are an online digital resource. We have 20 games. We have over 200 lesson plans. We do have ELL resources and we have questions about English language learners. Kristen can answer those questions in a chat for you. We do have resources in Spanish as well. We do have digital literacy tools and then there are also projects that you can do with iCivics. We have over 200,000 registered teachers and have been used by over 6 million students last year. So we've been around for 10 years. Justice O'Connor is our founder so we've reached our stride with educators and we are hoping that we can connect with parents more as well. That's why we're here today. So when you get started with iCivics I would love for each and every one of you if you're not an educator to create a free parent account and so you're going to go to icivics.org backslash login. Once you've logged in I will be totally honest. There is so much on iCivics. It is a rich resource rich tool so we recommend that you start with the games especially for parents to start with our games. Now your your child can play the iCivics games without logging in and creating an account. Our resources are free but if you want to use some of the other resources you're going to have to create an account. We are working on building out more resources specifically for parents so that's why we really want you guys to go to the games and then also know that our games are tablet compatible. They're not compatible on smartphone unfortunately but you can find us in the iTunes and Google Play stores. All right so we're going to talk about responding to remote learning and school closures. So in the chat you know just let's drop some answers in because I love engagement so hopefully this isn't just static but you know kind of share with the rest of the group go into the chat and just kind of answer this question what are you feeling during this unprecedented moment and I'll just you know let a couple seconds go by please use the chat you know are you feeling overwhelmed moderately stressed a little stressed are you cool with a cucumber does it vary upon day-to-day you know I'll be totally honest with each and every one of you some days I really feel like I'm killing it and then some days I am literally crying so I think you know just kind of keeping it in perspective is great. There is a range of emotions that you're going to feel during this time and thank you guys for responding in the chat really appreciate it. This moment can dredge up a variety of emotions right but I want to share with each and every one of you that the most important thing that we can do with parents is kind of take a deep breath and step back and also ask for help right so if you're ever on the icidic site and you're like completely stuck or you're like she said this resource I don't know where it is you know feel free to tweet me on twitter or DM me on twitter feel free to reach out to icidics on twitter or email us at support at icidics.org we are happy to help you to make sure that you have what you need because it's tough we're being asked to do a lot right now so because we're asked to do a lot right now we have put together a landing page to kind of assist parents and educators with some first start resources to help with enrichment while students and kids are at home so again we suggest starting with our games right they're educational they're fun they're engaging they provide structure in a home schooling setting and then also the games take about 30 to 45 minutes to play so if you're trying to get through a meeting and like I know today like my daughter was trying to interrupt the staff call you know I put them on icidics and I was like hey y'all play icidics for this next 30 to 45 minutes they did it it was great after the staff call we checked in about what they've learned the one thing I want to say about icidics games you don't really want to focus on like winning winning winning right anytime you play an icidics game you win of course we do have points but the most important part of this is having fun and then learning as you go so just want to keep that in front of mind you can find new and existing resources at icidics.org backslash toolkit and I do want to say that after this webinar I'll be tweeting out all of the links at mom of all cakes so please check those out so if you miss anything they will be there but go to icidics.org backslash toolkit and that is where we've curated you know these are the things that you could use to get started you can also reach out again to the icidics curriculum team after this webinar with questions at support at icidics.org we are here for you all right we are totally all in your corner so I'm going to cover some more resources for teaching about democracy at home so you know these are a couple ways that you can use our games so icidics covers a variety of important topics these topics are local government the elections the constitution citizenship we do cover landmark supreme court cases how to run for president so there are a lot of civic topics that are covered on our site our games cover a lot of these topics as well again they're great starting places to get started so here are a few strategies that I have for you to go deeper with our games one is a family leaderboard right so you know mom or dad or grandma or parent guardian play the game right you post your score up on the family whiteboard or just you know say hey guys this is my score and then you challenge your kids to beat your score on the game again like you learned something they learned something you know who doesn't want to try and beat their parent at a game and it's just a really fun and engaging way to get the whole family involved around civic a certain civic topic the other way that I love to use icidic games is sibling play so I will pair my sixth grader with my third grader or my fifth and sixth grader together or my fifth and third grader together and say all right you guys play together we often ask teachers to execute this strategy it includes it encourages conversations between kids it gets them thinking and working together you know it might be a great exercise and having siblings who do not get along to get along for 30 or 45 minutes it also will give you a break because you're putting more than one child into an activity together right and then it's also great leadership for your older child and your younger child to engage with each other and have these kinds of discussions and making choices during the game another way you can play is gameplay with post game questions so we do have some post games discussion questions for parents I can tweet those out for you guys we you know encourage you to play the game and then kind of think critically like what are some of the things that you learned when you played the game like what was what was this how did this amendment speak out for you what was something when you ran your own county and county's work that you really focused in zero to anyone all right so you kind of want to talk to your kids about like you know what would be experienced like our games are simulations that put kids in the driver's seat kids and adults actually you know most of us aren't going to run for president but you can run for president when you play when the white house you know so that gives you a kind of an idea of like what it's like so there's that also gameplay and family discussion so it's kind of like the post game questions you're going to want to talk about like you know just a wide variety of civic topics are happening all around us local government is happening right now all around us you know so bring up discussions about what you guys are seeing in the news and see if you can relate it to the gameplay again I highly encourage parents to play these games as well but of course you can just let your kids play and then also we have bingo a bingo card you'll find that at icivics.org backslash bingo students will play the game and then you're going to challenge them give you your kid print it out give your kid the bingo card and then let them go you know on the icivics site and there are a variety of different challenges on that bingo card that will get your kid hopefully just channeled in for hours at a time so those are a few strategies that I've used to help my kids you know kind of play with democracy in our homes using icivics games and they prove them to be pretty fun and engaging activities for us so we're going to talk about grade levels because I get a lot of questions from other parents that I know okay well my kids in second grade or third grade like what can I do on your site right so you know icivics has been used as lowest third grade all the way up through community college and even undergrad right our games are super fun and engaging they are read heavy so that's why I say third grade if you have a super second grade level you know second grade reader who's on a higher level they can also play the games we do have voiceover in some of our games and again there are ELL supports for ELLs and struggling readers that are great as well so the games that I recommend for our elementary third through fifth these are we have a coloring book the my county's work coloring book we have do I have a right where you can run a constitutional law firm in english or spanish we have county's work where you run your own county next month aka tomorrow is national county government so it's a great opportunity for you to kind of dive into local politics around you also immigration nation so you can learn the path to citizenship that game is available in english and spanish as well and so to help you guys out we have the photos here when you go on the icivics site this is where you can find them or this is what they look like and again we do have them available on the itunes and google play store games for elementary I highly recommend siblings playing together this again you know takes the reading part off with one child completely by themselves our games just work better with conversation you know we do like to if games just give you a lot about the clinical thinking process but it's really great to partner your kids up if you can also using our bingo card with the elementary students that's just another great way to get them to kind of like try and like you know get five in a row before the end of the week all right so here are the best games and resources for middle school kids sixth grade through eighth grade and again like our resources are essentially crafted for middle school we do also have high school resources as well but we when we first started our organization we really focused on the middle school level because that's where civics is generally taught so we have every single one of our games can be used for middle school but I think that these are the best at least this is what I hear and this is also what my children tell me do I have a right again county's work immigration nation then you have executive command where you can be the president and run the hopeful office you have branches of power where you're balancing all three branches of government and then you have newsfeed defenders where you're fighting deceptive ads and viral deception in the news so that touches on media literacy skills and so again here are all the photos of the game games you know with middle school you want to use our game guides and have family discussions you also want to use that bingo card maybe you'll want to like challenge your kid you know say you know hey I got the score can you beat my score you know middle school is a great time where you can you know try and get more parent-child engagement because I know for sure it's tough they want to be on their phone they want to be on tix up might not want to talk to you so I found that with my sixth grader getting her to engage with me at these games has been pretty beneficial so best games and resources for high school you can again just like middle school use the game guides have family discussions think about that bingo card I also want to encourage you to think about you know 9th through 12th grade you're getting ready to release a voter into the world right so you know really think about like how can we have this individual start to formulate their own ideas about their role as an active and engaged citizen so great to have both discussions in the house I also listed a few games here I've added race to ratify for high school that is a game where you work to ratify the constitution you can be a federalist or an anti-federalist it's really cool also we have study edge for the ap exam this we have over 100 videos and study guides here available to help your student who's studying for the ap test so please take advantage of that again I'll be tweeting out all these links and all this information after this webinar but if you want to get free access to that through the end of this school year please email icivics at studyedge.com and so I will show you guys the photo so this is you know what I'm thinking of are the best resources for our high school kids again you're thinking like I'm about to release a voter into the world so how can I begin to get my kid to pay attention to the news but then also not just award the news as you know truth how do I formulate my own opinions and thoughts about civics and politics and how that relates to me all right so speaking of releasing voters into the world this is an election year so are you ready I live in the DMV so we are always ready every year is an election year for us we're always thinking about politics and government here for better or for worse so more engagement in the chat please do you feel confident talking about the election with your kids you know so there's a variety of answers you don't have to necessarily say A, B, C, D or E you could pick your own you know but you know I've got this no worries you know I can hold my own I can get it but not with confidence not so much in no way please share your confidence level about talking about the election with your kids in the chat all right so one thing I will say you know we don't want to shy away from the election you know the last election was a bit contentious it was frustrating for some awesome for others you know there's a range of emotions connected to the election and the results but we don't want to shy away from it right now is the perfect time to have these discussions especially with the November it's going to be a super you know excited time so you know use this time where you're home with your kid to begin to have those discussions about like what does it mean to be an informed voter you know why do I vote this way but you know I respect if you don't wouldn't vote this way right again when you're talking about voting and talking about elections you want to make sure that you allow your child to have the space to formulate their own opinions and their own ideas and have discussions with you again you're not alone right like if you're like oh the election there are a lot of parents and even educators who are a hundred percent confident about engaging with the election and that's where we come in right there's a lot of like maybe I don't want to give my kid my ideas about things or I don't want to be and I don't want to be too biased right how do I how do I work around that all right the first thing is you can do this all right our games introduce your kids to the election in a fun and engaging way right we have two games that are election focused we have cast your vote right where you can prepare yourself to vote with great information and make great choices based on candidates platforms we have one the White House where you're running your own presidential campaign so you're learning about what is polling and all these other great things that go into a great campaign all right so you know play the games as a family once again then discuss the election process the candidates the issues and then there's so much more that you guys can bring up after playing these games I think with the electoral college especially trying to understand electoral college versus popular vote when the White House is really amazing at giving you a hands-on experience about how all of that works so right into when the White House so when the White House what is it you're going to learn about the issues related to the 2020 election so we've kind of freshened up the game to make sure that it aligns with what is happening or what will be happening in the parties now yes it only covers Democrats and Republicans I'm sorry we do not have like you know the Green Party or the Libertarian Party you know we just do those too players will learn how to create a slogan and they'll you know engage with the public in this game they also will have to secure funding and do some fundraising they you know manipulate ads and work with the media they poll the different states and then again you're trying to get those 270 votes once you've gotten those 270 votes you've won the White House so that's essentially your goal in this game yes you can turn a state like Texas who's generally red blue in this game we want to give you space to kind of like figure out how to manipulate the map a little bit and you know and have fun with that okay so you're going to learn how difficult it is to actually win an election you're going to learn about campaign strategy and then you're going to learn about also how long and expensive the campaign process is so this game is about 40 minutes or so depending on how quickly you move through it but it is one of our most fun games people love this game adults love this game so I really encourage you guys of the family to use this one for one of your challenges all right so we're going to move into cast or vote so cast your vote just recently got a facelift so we revamped the game a little bit we added some more stuff to it and cast your vote you're going to learn about issues related to informed voting practices so players will evaluate candidates based on their qualifications right evaluate candidates on their experience and their voting record right all the things that we as adults want to make sure that we're doing as informed voters highly encourage adults to play as well you're going to compare different perspectives and issues and then align them with your own personal views and issues in the game there you're also going to touch on like you know town hall debates local elections and obviously issue voting and candidate platforms so really recommend this game it's a really great way to teach you about like what am i looking for if i want to be an informed voter what are the things that i need to pay attention to when i'm looking at a different candidate and and how do i make those choices you know weigh those choices when they come all right so we have an election headquarters in an you know we have it's a presidential election year a lot of people are paying attention to it there are a lot of great learning opportunities that align with election years you know this election headquarters is very teacher-facing but the parents can also find a lot of interesting stuff here that i highly recommend i recommend looking at the infographics that are on this page so it's icivics.org backslash election you know look at the infographics on this page our infographics are pretty infamous and amazing they give a lot of information in a very short amount of time infographics are really awesome teaching resource to use at home you can print them out and put them up on your wall if you want have your kid read them and maybe you know write a little bit about what they've learned from the infographic so i definitely recommend you use those infographics on that site also you know our educator network members these are our teachers who you know really love icivics and they want to have a deeper relationship with us they're on almost all 50 states they do a lot of writing for us and a lot of other awesome things so definitely check out the blog post that they've written and then there's another a lot of other activities and we as november approaches will be adding more and more and more to that site so definitely keep your eyes out there okay so i have a little bit of homework for each and every one of you one would be to create a free parent account right if you're not a teacher right um and you're just i'm just a parent definitely create a free parent account um at icivics.org backslash login um other homework i have for you connect like let's be besties right connect with us at icivics.org you can connect with me at mama walk apes on twitter um email us at support if you get stuck or have questions or you know if i went too fast and you know you're like uh where is that um definitely email us at support at icivics.org um you know start a family leaderboard and then share it with me i really would love to see um you know the different ways that parents kind of engage and challenge their kids and you know it doesn't mean that everyone plays on the same day at the same time right you could just say our family leaderboard is for this week this week we're going to play win the white house all right you know johnny plays on monday and pita plays on tuesday and by friday you know mom and dad have played and like we'll see who wins you know maybe put some stakes on it all right um but please share your leaderboard with me i would love to see it you can tweet at me on twitter um and then visit our remote learning toolkit so that's the place where we've collected you know resources to help with the learning that's happening at home icivics resources can be used supplementally so if you have like you are your teachers have already assigned your kids stuff and let's say they just my kids just breeze through everything really quickly and they're like what else can i do um i'm like all right you're going on icivics so i definitely recommend um going to that toolkit bookmark this toolkit um and start with the games that we recommend there uh there are also blog posts on that page um and there's just a variety of other resources and tools as well and then explore win the white house and cast your vote those are two great places to start up the conversation about the election but most importantly i hope that you guys take care of yourself because uh in this this is a super stressful time and a lot of being asked of us and you know we just want to make this as easy as possible you're doing a great job you're here this evening you know looking for more resources to engage and empower your kids so that is awesome um i really would encourage you to you have a a work call or you need to just pick a break from your kids because i get it put them on icivics for 30 to 45 minutes um and let them play and learn and um you know have a good time so with that um i would like to open it up with questions because i didn't want to talk the whole time all right let me exit and stop sharing are there any questions that haven't been answered yet hey amber thank you so much for this this is great um one question i have is how do you create the family leader board okay so i well so the way that we do it we just use our white board we don't use like icivics for um for that you could create like in icivics you can create your parent account and then create accounts for your child um and then that way you see their score and you see how long they've played um i think we should we could do another webinar on that maybe um but i would definitely recommend just somewhere in the house just like kind of like put up a piece of paper if you have a white board where the activities are um just kind of write up the game write up the you know when it's when is the last day that people can get their scores in you know and then have people just record that way that would be the easiest way okay great thank you thanks for your thanks for your question more questions all right i see anna in the chat she says how can i relate to a teenager 13 year old how important it is to learn this ah okay yeah 13 is tough um anna like i used to coach and teach 13 year olds and they are a pretty fickle bunch um you know first thing is just kind of building rapport and just having like very basic conversations like you know i run my house like a semi-democracy right so my home it's already a democracy and so for my kids i tell them like hey like you guys get to vote on dinner right like you know i don't run this like a dictatorship you guys get to vote on dinner the same way you guys get to vote on dinner like i get to vote on whether we get speed bumps on the street right or whether this council person has done a great job and they should come back next year right um you know as you ride around town with your 13 year old right point out the different places in which civics is happening like you know the stop sign that's there that is civics right that someone said that that was important to put there um you know the reason that our lives operate the way they do is because we are either super engaged or we're not engaged at all right and we have the power to change that um and i would definitely just try to continue to relate like if you want things to go better around you you have to be paying attention you have to be informed about it and you have to want to engage with that process i hope that that answered your question um okay so um oh thank you so much oh thanks any other questions any other questions please ask you can ask anything all right i guess i killed it yes that's it yeah you you answered everything with your presentation so no needs for follow-ups oh fantastic um somebody did ask they say they were late and can they get resources or the presentation um yeah marjorie we will be sending out an email um with the recording of the conversation and icivics has a bunch of resources that they're going to include in that email as well so we'll follow up with that tomorrow and um i will also tweet out at momofallpapes um some of the links as well so that if you're looking for them just i'll be on twitter and um you know putting them out like rapidly so if you missed any there um and then you know i can i'll follow up with you later okay awesome well if there's no other questions i want to thank you amber and the rest of the team at icivics this was great i think that people got a lot of really important information and resources and hopefully these are some fun ways that they can keep their kids occupied right now because i know that times are tough and it's hard to keep kids occupied when they're stuck inside 24 or seven so um i think these will be really fun learning opportunities for them so thank you to everybody who participated and thank you to amber and the icivics team we appreciate it thank you thank you so much to the central election science we really really appreciate you katelyn thank you everyone thank you for taking the time thank you viewers later on the on the recording appreciate it yeah no problem thanks guys we'll talk to you later