 OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network. Step up to 2020. Censors, Civics and Citizenship. OTAN Technology and Distance Learning Symposium, 2020. The name of my presentation is Step Up to 2020. Censors, Civics and Citizenship. I'm going to add one more scene. This is available on my website at USCitizenPod.com. Also, it's available on the TDLS website, too. Let us begin. Does anybody know the reference to the comedy troupe related to this? Does anybody know the capital steps? Capital steps, yes. Wow, we have... Yes, please join us, okay? This is the 2020 timeline. A lot is happening this year. We just went through the Iowa caucuses and March Madness, or Super Tuesday, and it was really different. The outcomes people had predicted. One thing is going to happen and another thing was happening. Were you talking about this in your classrooms? What was happening with the caucuses? Yeah, so we even tried a mini caucus in our own classroom. So we started out easy talking about different chocolates. Are you a milk chocolate person or a dark chocolate person? And then went from there. We have National Census Day. Is anybody doing the co-ops 54 for census? The focus of the co-op was basically going out and basically talking about the importance of the census. And when you figure out how important it is, people are more ready to talk about it. Big Valentine's Day for the government and tax income tax day. So a lot of people, this might be their first experience, putting our students in touch with low income tax preparation, going to the library, accessing those services are very important, especially when they go for their own citizenship interview and they ask about taxes. April to May we're starting the USCIS pilot program, Citizenship Pilot Program. Is anybody involved with that? So this one is USCIS is updating the 100 civics questions. They have developed approximately 140 questions. Some of them are left over from the previous citizenship interview, but they are developing new questions and they are going out to different adult schools and citizenship preparation courses all over America to basically try out these questions. So from April to May they are doing this, please. So for instance, there's going to be perhaps a three month, I don't remember if it was three months or six months, where the students have the option of taking the current citizenship questions or the new citizenship questions. And they are already developing program material to distribute this to the students. So it's not going to be automatic cut off time. There is definitely a grace period in there. Not only are they doing this across the United States, let me talk a little bit more about this in the next slide. Where May first census follow up begins, so this is when students have not basically filled out the forms, that they will get house visitations, or this is when scammers start coming out and say, hi, you didn't fill out the form, I'll fill it out for you. So learning how to identify a census worker is going to be very important during this time. July and August we have the party conventions. August the 26th, we have the 19th amendment, 100th birthday, hello, this is all about suffrage. And this is basically a good way to also inform our students not only about their voting rights, but also talk about the election itself. September through November, this is when USCIS is basically piloting the new questions in house. So they're going to be at certain field offices trying out some of those new questions. This is optional, students can participate in it or elect not to participate in this. They're going to, we have California real idea in October the first, and some people have a lot of questions about this. So we have, there's a co-ops that will address this. We have the presidential election December 1st. The president receives the results of the census. Why is this important? This is important especially for apportionment and to look ahead for our representatives and how money is going to be spent in the next 10 years. December to January, they hope to deliver the final citizenship questions. I think it's probably going to be more in January and to be announced with application fee increase. So they're already talking about the current amount of applying to become a U.S. citizen is approximately $725. With the application fee and with the biometrics fee, it's going to be going up to approximately $1,200. We don't know when this is going to, and it's even more if you're bringing a student, if you're bringing family over, okay? So we're going to have to, we're using this time when we don't know the fee increases coming, use this time to start saving this or approaching banks and saying, hey, we have students that want to start saving for their, for immigration fees, can you do this? My own bank in San Jose a couple years ago had a program where they would help people and they would match funds. So community organizations were matching funds to help people meet the increased fees. So now is the time to start approaching those community organizations. Let me, is everybody okay with this? Okay. I want to talk about the National Constitution Center. National Constitution Center is in Philadelphia. It's a living museum to the amendments. Really, really great place to go and take a, take a look at learning about the Constitution. And they sponsor a really great holiday. It's called Constitution Day or Citizenship Day. During that day, in our school, we start school in the middle of August. Constitution Day is December the 17th. During this first part of the school year, we go over not only the school rooms and develop classroom rules, but we also turn, learn about our rights and responsibilities as people in the United States. This culminates in Constitution Day. However, they have this really, really great PDF about, it's a calendar that you can download and basically learn more about civics celebrations or the amendments. So they'll have the birthday of such and such amendment. They'll have things about the state of California, past women's suffrage on a certain, certain day. So this is a really rich calendar that is absolutely free that really can inform your civics and citizenship classrooms to bring in more information and be more inclusive about how students can see themselves in the civics process. Thank you so much. September 17th, it's Citizenship Day and it's Constitution Day. Okay, thank you so much. Please correct my... I'll let you take a look at my PDFs later on. That's really... Another way to keep on top of how can we keep civics fresh in our classrooms is iCivics. iCivics is a program that was initiated by Sandra Day O'Connor and she and the people surrounding her started developing different games that talk about the different civics processes. For instance, how to gain access to immigration legal services. One of the most popular ones is the run up to the White House. How do you pick different candidates? These activities are in English and in Spanish. So please take a look at them. But what's really interesting is their lesson plans because we know about USCIS lesson plans, probably use them a thousand times. We might even use the ones from the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian Preparing for the Oath has some really great lesson plans. But they also have lesson plans that were initially developed for K-12 students, but they're very easily applicable for our adult students. So take a look at iCivics and their blog, which basically talks about different months, the themes for different months. So for instance, in October, we had something in there about news literacy, which is very, very important, especially as we prepare for the election because there's a lot of misinformation out there. There's misinformation about the coronavirus, misinformation out there about the election, misinformation out there about any number of things. Here we need to learn about this and they have some really great lesson plans and activities here. Andrea, would you like to? Are you okay? Okay, you're okay. Next one. One of the big problems that just simply blew out our calendar was the coronavirus. So that's the fourth C in this year, fourth C. We have census, we have civics, we have citizenship, and we have the coronavirus. So all of a sudden, we know we're not going to have citizens come in during Asian New Year. That's okay, people are overseas visiting their family. That's great. We're prepared for that in our lessons. However, now students are not coming because they're afraid of the coronavirus. How do we talk about that in our classrooms? So just yesterday I go, hey, there's some lesson plans out here about the coronavirus. So I've gathered them together in one center. So we have Bitly, ESL-COVID. It should be COVID-19, not COVID-1, okay? But COVID-19. So please take a look at that. Shame on me for not having 19. Anyway, and we also have some EL, CASA's EL civics co-apps that would readily lend themselves to talking to our students systematically about gaining access to medical services and resources related to the coronavirus or COVID-19. So we have things here from Breaking News English, VOA News, Learning Chocolate, ESL Collective. This is a really great video. It's about a minute that talks about what is the coronavirus from VOA Learning English. So starting to talk to our students now instead of making them afraid or having them dependent on their own language resources because what's happening in one country is not happening here in the United States. And so this is something we really need to talk about. Already not only are we seeing some of our students in the classroom, but we're seeing panic buying in our stores. So for example, go to Costco, no water, no tissues, no rice, that's it, okay? So we need to start talking to our students. Do we really need to engage in these behaviors? And talking about this, using this as an opportunity is to talk about things in English and basically allowing them to have the language skills that will help them prepare for other medical situations in their class, in their lives will be really, really super important. So again, please take a look at this. Also, if you go to U.S. Citizen Pod where I have this resource, I also have a survey that basically is I'm going to be passing along to our students that basically say, how are you worried about the coronavirus? How should we respond to it? What do you want to learn more about? So, and I learned how to make that survey in the workshop that I was just here, the TDS a little bit, just the session before us. Cynthia basically showed us how to make some Google Forms and I go, aha, I will use that Google Form, I will make a survey and I will try to get more information about the coronavirus for our students. So we basically can address some of their fears and turn it into a learning opportunity. So if you go to U.S.CitizenPod.com, there should be a resource there. You might see my presentation today about step up to, you see it. On that blog post, there's the survey link. If this is, and I, because I just made it, I don't know if this survey is, it's probably, it's good for teachers, but it might be a little bit too difficult for students. So for instance, I took the descriptions from the different co-apps and I just plunked it in there. How would I do this if I was taking, doing this for the students? Instead of putting the big verbose causes thing, I would put in a picture of that, okay, so that's what they would be responding to, okay? All right, so again, try to check out Cynthia's Google Form and Google Survey Workshop, okay? I want to talk a little bit more about the census. So this is a quick, again, this is a summary of what the census dates are. Mid-March, people are going to start receiving their census forms, and they can respond to it by telephone, by computer, or online, or by paper. If you have students in minority languages, for instance, if you have some of the African languages or some of the minority Asian languages, USCIS has over 60 guides to the census in the student's own native language. So it's not the Google, excuse me, it's not the census form in that minority language. It's basically a guide that explains what they're talking about in the census. So those are available as PDFs, and that kind of information is available on my resource that I will be sharing with you later on. This is the co-ops that the cost has basically developed for us, and I would like to share some of the resources that I have basically put together about this, i.e. LCE class, okay? So this is a way to pick up some extra pay points, okay? And I'll give you an example of that a little bit. Of course, where do you go for a good census information? You go to census.gov, but if you want specifically for this census, you go to 2020.gov, and there's resources specifically for adult educators there, okay? So you probably want to go to census.gov. Really great lesson plans in both places related to math, history, and more. And I really thought, and it's like, hey, I'm an ESL teacher, or a citizenship teacher. I would naturally gravitate to that. However, we got to remember our adult students basically have all their skills in their native language. Tapping numeracy increases fluency. It basically gives them confidence. So for instance, it's difficult in talking about statistics, blah, blah, blah, but actually going through a lesson plan and talking about statistics and them basically trying to do application of statistics in their own classroom really creates a lot of conversation and excitement. So for instance, we had our ESL 1 students out on our schools basically taking surveys like man, woman, man, woman, and doing the statistics according to schools or to countries of origin or things like that. So that kind of stuff, taking a look at some of these lesson plans are really helpful. One of the best oldie by goodies videos from census.gov is the great apportionment machine. And it basically you say, we need to know about the census so we can have a appropriate number of representatives in our government. But what does that mean? Really? What does that mean? So, and how is it assigned? So this is a really great video that basically talks about this slowly and surely. And one of the things that I did is that somebody was talking about the dot, dot, dot on the bottom, the three dots on the bottom. If you open up the, what is that called? Transcript. The transcript will appear on the side, take out those, you can basically take out those timestamps, create a transcript. So now all of a sudden you can develop close listening exercises from that. So that's going to be really, really helpful for the upper level and for the lower level. You can even rental those transcripts through Google Translate. Or even have some of your students to do that. So they can learn the value about apportionment. So again, I have this up as bitly apportionment slash dash video. Please watch this for yourself. Okay. This is case basically developed. Is anybody using case for their lesson plans for census? Case developed lesson plans specifically to address co-apps 54.1. They have them for the lower level to the higher, to the advanced level. They have the lesson plans. They have their practices and they have the assessments. Now to get you're not supposed to publicly post assessments to the web. However, if you contact case, they will send you the assessments. Okay. So that would be something that you would ask your ESL coordinator to do. This is really helpful and we use these at Melpitas and adapted them. But we also use stuff from LA Unified. So you might want to use the LA Unified census information. It's a little bit more integrated. The stuff from cases specifically addressing the different co-apps tasks. So if you use one set for assessment and the other set for practice, God bless you. You will have some really good information there and students will get a much better idea of what's going on with the census. So that also I have put together some of my own favorite census information for adult education, adult students themselves. This is bit.ly slash 2020 dash AE, capital AE for adult. So this is where I put links to my own things that I've developed. One of them is, especially for lower levels, I did a whole series of things about learning chocolate. Learning chocolate is important for our students because we get students, a lot of times they've never used computers. Learning chocolate is great for learning mousing skills and learning appropriate vocabulary. Learning chocolate, their servers are in Hong Kong. And a lot of times, so things that are a little bit sensitive or things related to potentially politics, you can set your games for private and share the links, which I did. So these will be up there related to census. You've seen a couple, there's a couple of sentences related to Kahoot. Now, I don't consider this a good Kahoot and I'll tell you why. It is impossible to see this, okay? So when you develop your Kahoot, make the choices a little bit shorter, okay? Think about the vision for your students. One of the things I also did was on YouTube, I put together a playlist of different census videos. And this one up here, so I have different interviews with adult students related to the census. And one of them was particularly interesting, was a group that I did with people from San Mateo Adult School. They created a census ambassador program with a county of San Mateo. So they've gone through a training program, they've learned to talk to other students about the census. So I do have a video where I am talking to the person from the county. But it's much more interesting to talk to the students themselves about what they learn and how they share the information. Now, if you watch this video, it is 25 minutes long. Nobody wants to watch that. Nobody, okay? So what I did was I used Ed Puzzle. And Ed Puzzle is an extension that you can download from Google and it will take snippets from different videos. And you can basically watch the video and then it automatically stops and it can ask multiple choice or open-ended questions. So for instance, I think this is a two-minute snippet from 25-minute video. It stopped 30 seconds in and it basically said why are some people afraid of answering the census? And there's a multiple choice. You can respond to it or for a higher level group I would basically put in something that they could fill out themselves. Of course, I've also used a lot of the great videos from census.gov from their own YouTube channel. Has anybody been watching those? Best video when they start the day one of the census up in Alaska to the indigenous Alaska native habitations and they're doing the census. Very interesting. But these videos are approximately 30 seconds to 20 seconds. If you basically take it and embed it the video is really small. It's better as a listening activity because with EdJoin it's automatically stopping that. If you're stopping a 30-second video every other second it's not going to work. It's going to be really disruptive because a lot of our language is learned in context. So for instance, if you put it into a Google form and have them go listen to it and then answer the 10 questions it's much more effective. I also developed some mock census forms. So the mock census forms I did for either one person or two people. So form one it's for simple for basically ESL one students so they're answering the basic questions for person one. Then I've incorporated standard languages into the other ones. You can make your own copy and have that on your own Google Drive. So instead of me getting your students answers you're getting your students answers which is going to be very effective. So you can basically, again you make your own copy of this or you can simply fill out have your students go to my website fill out their responses. So I've probably gotten about over 300 people who are just randomly coming to my website and practicing filling out the census. Do people have access to their information? No, it's absolutely private and it's deleted every night. Okay, let's go talk about the upcoming election. Anybody really excited about the next election? Oh my God, people are laughing and not going, yay, okay. This is basically the calendar but we have some specific co-ops that we can use to get our handle our arms around the election process and also to celebrate the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage. We have, if you need to know about local, state, or federal government, we have co-ops 38. Co-ops 39 is going to be very important about the voting process, particularly if you have people who had to vote, you're having provisional ballots or if you have people who are having, there's voting irregularities in your area. Some people are very concerned about environmental concerns. We have that in Melpinus that nothing will get people out of their houses to vote, except when you talk about the smell in Melpinus, people are there at the voting ballot, okay? Mean but true, okay. Obtaining legal help because there is a lot of problems with legal legal services or which require people to have access to legitimate good legal services. We have the California Real Idea coming up and so we have to talk about agencies that provide ID. In fact, this year we're kicking off having student IDs in our own school and then 48.6 especially if you're concerned about news literacy. You need to jump on this because this talks about, you're thinking about 4748, isn't that about computer literacy? Yes it is. But here you're evaluating the news online critically and I want to talk a little bit more about that particularly. Voice of America or Voice of America news or VOA news and VOA or learning English. VOA news has a section specifically dedicated to press freedom and they have a lot of press freedom stories that feature other countries. I kind of would like to see more press freedom in the United States. What's happening with the press in the United States? They also have a short mini course on VOA learning English which is five or six videos plus listening and listening activities and articles that talk about critical thinking and how to use talking about two sources, talking about the elements that how we can make good decisions about the press. We have these really great adult education newspapers so, oh I'm sorry, this is Elizabeth Claire dot com. So easy English news. Anybody subscribe to easy English news? She's starting to do her future stories on YouTube so she's reading her stories on her YouTube channel. Take a look at those, okay? So if some of the students can't get access to the newspaper take a look at her YouTube channel okay? Change agent I think it's the New England Literacy Resource Center they have a magazine specifically talking about students affecting change in our adult schools and our community colleges they did an issue dedicated to the census which is really really good and you can download the PDF and share that with your students and also new readers press you can access, if you subscribe you can access their information and they have a great issue specifically on the census so please take a look at that discuss it and use it as a jumping off point not only for the census but also for the election that's coming up. Okay, this one doesn't fit into anything okay but I still have to talk about it. Alright so we speak New York City originally it was we are New York or something like that in 2009 they put out a very successful series of videos addressing different EL civics situations so back to school night dealing with asthma quitting smoking domestic violence so they basically did it in a telenovela format and then and then they basically put together some PDFs that in English some photo novellas and then also scripts in multiple languages this one was really good using them to death but now they're all they came back with a second series so please take a look at these diverse cast they speak slowly they are engrossing very very interesting so please take a look and see how you can fit these into your to your citizen or your civics programs now so it is we speak NYC. City of New York. U.S. that's the website but if you just simply want to watch the videos on YouTube they are our literacy partners they're approximately six minutes because they were up on broadcast television however you're going to be able to find them chunked up into four minute segments and they have been basically reformatted because originally the technology they've updated the format so please take a look at these the one about Rolando's rights is about on the job people get hurt on the job really really important alright citizenship calendars so we were in the middle or just ready to kick off the pilot program the pilot program phase 2 is coming in September November it's going to be in-house after the interviews they're going to ask some people do you want to participate in some of these questions and they will the people can choose whether or not they wanted to do it December January we can look for the delivery of the new USCIS questions and we're talking about the application increase of course these are the cost assessments we have 965 and 966 the listening test it's easy and you can also make your own where the people have the multiple choice answers in front of them they have to listen to the questions and that is really interesting but sometimes I feel like this is going to fall it's so there's such a lag time between the questions I think it's like 20-30 seconds they're getting nervous because it's like come on wait for that also for the speaking test okay so I want to talk a little bit about the CIT test you have to do training for that it's really helpful for the teachers so they can do the assessment it's based on the N400 before 2014 after 2014 they add a whole bunch of questions about war crimes okay so but the hard part they're having problems with is they use colloquial language in some of the questions so how do you make your living or what do you do for a living? I hear that in the Midwest I don't hear that on the West Coast they'll ask in the middle of it about how do you financially support yourself and it's like wait a minute it's deviate slightly from the N400 test and they have to do some definitions from part 12 and that's where they have they know they hear the have you and they just say no but then they can't define the thing and by the way USCIS officers are really savvy about they know the students are just listening to the have you and they say no they're trying to rephrase the question if you look at the current N400 they're using were you ever okay so they're trying to rephrase it so they're not dependent on that have you Q so make sure you tell your students about that okay I'm going to talk about a disadvantage okay you have to have your student away from the classroom for about 15 minutes so sometimes you have to release your class early okay the advantage is is that you're in a safe place to practice the N400 you have a safe place to practice how to deal with interruptions you're in a safe place to deal with colloquial language and make giving definitions okay and those questions are very similar to maybe like similar to the actual USCIS interview so I would try it plus think of the pay points can I talk a little bit more about it if there's any problem with that course it's that there's it's absolutely complete okay so there's just so there's so much so if you have and so one of the really great thing about USA learns is you could create a class so you can monitor your students your students fork so that's really helpful and our students my students particularly like the part the later parts where they're talking about the story so there's problems with people's relationships it's like how many people say yes I married one person but some people have very complicated lives or some people have very they have have you ever been in trouble with the law well yes and they basically go through that so please take a look at USA learns okay USCIS.gov just I guess I have a like two more slides USA.gov your program where we talked about the pilot test they have information about public charge please emphasize to your students that this is for people who are coming into the for immigrating into the country not to people who are basically becoming citizens now and the fee increase watch that area for fee increase and that's it from OTAN the one minute video that they watch about the coronavirus from VOA learning the question is up here are you worried about the coronavirus yes or no okay how should our adult school respond to the coronavirus and I said watch read and discuss new stories about the coronavirus every day complete a health co-ops that focuses on the coronavirus invite county health professionals to our school to listen to the presentations have a health fair or temporarily close the school and believe me some white students say yes to the last one which kind of hurts me personally but anyway which co-ops is the best way to learn about the coronavirus and I would replace these with the pictures I was talking about so I'd have co-ops 26 how to identify and access free or low-cost medical dental and health resources learn about health and safety precautions learn how to access healthcare system and interact with the providers learn how to interpret medical insurance and last one learn about pharmacy and drug information so the co-ops numbers are next to them and the last question do you have any further questions or concerns because we want more feedback I don't know how that was just off the top of my head I'm sure you can come up with a better form okay I really encourage you to do this one final thing that I would like to share with you is this I have a website for my ESL class and I was talking about the resources for COVID-19 it's going to take a second for it to load but again I have that resource I have the things there from VOA Learning News but on the side our counties have developed widgets that people can get information in their own languages so they have it in Vietnamese Chinese, Spanish and English course you can copy this code for myself but I'm sure your county has something similar that you can put into your own school website so students can basically learn how to go and look for that information themselves and make the best decisions okay so now I'm really done bye thank you