 Welcome, everyone. I'm going to turn off my video here and share my screen with you. But it's great to be spending this time with you. Let me stop this video. So my name is Teresa Slotak, and I am going to be talking to you about North Star digital literacy assessments. Today, and I am not sure how many of you know about the assessments or not, so I'm going to pretty much go over everything with you. And if you have questions, I would love to hear them. Some of you may be familiar with North Star, and if that's the case, I will be talking about some of the ways that we're using North Star to help in this time when there's remote teaching. So, first of all, I want to start out by saying that North Star is a program of Literacy Minnesota, and you may have heard of us are our former name, we just changed our name this year was Literacy, was the Minnesota Literacy Council. And so we've been around for about 50 years, we are very involved in the adult basic education world and have, and we have six of our own schools here in Minnesota. We provide statewide training to programs for their staff, as well as for volunteer teachers that might teach at their schools and we are also nationally recognized for many of the free, much of the free curriculum teacher training tools that we have on our website. And the advocacy that we do. So that's kind of the bigger organization. North Star itself is a part of that. And you can see from this that we are used very widely across the United States and in several other countries. And as a matter of fact, we've had recently several countries ask us to North Star right now is only in English but they've asked if we could translate it into other languages. So it is something that around the world people are needing digital literacy and are finding North Star to be one of the only products that addresses digital literacy on a very basic level. So here's my question for you and you can put this in the chat. I actually let's put it in the q&a just so I can see that. So how does it affect people to not be able to use computers how have you seen it affect people you know your learners yourselves, maybe just type type in a couple examples in the q&a. Can access unemployment insurance. Yeah, can't use email to apply for jobs. That's right. You can't do banking online public applications the children's schoolwork or even talk to the teacher sometimes if they're sending emails. Yeah, a lot of jobs do require some digital knowledge. I'm registering for classes. All right, you all have great answers. Thank you very much. I am sure that there are many more. I won't read them all at this point. But I, I think those are like great examples of how detrimental it can be to people to not have digital, you know, basic digital literacy skills. That's my question, but most health care now are on portals. So to check your results of your lab. Those are someone wrote unable to get through life period and that's a very good, good answer. And someone wrote that they teach English, and a lot of their students aren't able to participate in the online class. So that's true, especially in this time, people are who are not digitally literate at the same time, not only for themselves learning English or going to school but also helping their children to who are now forced to online learning. I've also noticed known a lot of people who feel that they're disconnected. So maybe they don't know how they can. They want to have digital literacy to connect with their grandchildren. For example, I've heard quite a bit from people. There's also greater connection with just what's going on in the world if you can't access internet. So North Star was started in 2008. And at that time, if you remember, we were in a recession as well. And we, the local library here in St. Paul was seeing a lot of people coming in, asking for digital skills training. And the library did have a computer lab, but they didn't know for sure what they should be teaching or how to assess if people were actually learning it. So they asked us if we would make an assessment to help them, you know, with this issue. So we gathered experts from kind of around the nation and looked at what should the standards be for each, what we call modules. So for basically what do you need to know for email, what do you need to know for doing a career search online. And we created a, and then we built the assessments around those standards to show competency and understanding of those standards. And we also, because we are an organization that is an ABE, we wanted to create a product that was accessible by as many learners as possible. So we created the products to be used by learners who have an intermediate or higher English level. We weren't able to reach very basic English language learners, but the, the product was built so that they're as you'll kind of see there are words that are written and then there's a voice that's talking about what's being written and people can play that, that Oh, I'm sorry, someone asked what is ABE adult basic education is what we have done so, especially working with. We especially work with people who are either English language learners or getting their working on getting their high school equivalency degree. That's what we are organization often does. That's why we kind of our focus was on making this very accessible and easy language was easy to use. It was shorter sentences so this is something that wasn't really out there. So really believe that the that these assessments be used to help people rather than, for example, using them to not hire someone so we, we've, if organizations want to use them as a gatekeeper we kind of try to prevent that. We are non profit ourselves. And so we wanted to, well I should say back up a bit and say, so we created this initially for the St. Paul public libraries, and it's an online product and we really thought it would only be used in St. Paul. Because there's really nothing else at the time and still like it at this level. It just kind of spread on its own and became very widely used. And we, we, because we're a nonprofit we wanted it to be affordable to other nonprofits and you know, any any institution that would like to use it. So, there is an aspect of it that is free that anyone can use. And then there's also a subscription aspect and I'll, as it go along I'll kind of explain the differences. And the subscription aspect is it's a yearly subscription very moderately priced, we really only charge to be able to kind of keep up with new technology and add new add in new features. So that's our main goal in sharing and having North Star. So North Star as I said was started out as assessments. And for a long time that's, that's the main focus. And I will get into all four of these things as we go along. But at some point, many, many organizations were using us. And I should say too that we have organizations who are that that do career pathways we have community colleges we have some businesses we have libraries. We have, as I said it all basic education so there kind of runs the gamut a lot of different organizations use us workforce centers. People were saying, this is great we have the assessments, but if someone doesn't pass. In the past, we would direct them either to the site would have a class or they would somehow train the people or there are free online sources on the web that didn't always correlate exactly with the assessment or sometimes you'd have to go through a lot of extra information to, to learn different modules. So people were asking us, can you create curriculum. And we decided that we could. So we have, as I said, or I don't think I said but we have 12 assessments 12 assessment modules, we're about a little less than halfway through and creating the curriculum for those modules. So that would be more like a classroom led instruction or even a one on one tutoring. Well, then we, people are very happy about that but we also got feedback that could we do something where a learner could learn on their own. We've just recently in the past couple months released north star online learning. And that current currently has one module which I'll show you. And we are creating more modules for that as well. And then the last feature is also really important I think because it lets you, it gives you reporting features so that you can go to whoever your funders are or whoever you need to give results to and show, you know, assessments you've given how many how many have been successful. So it's just a really handy feature for that reason. I'm going to talk about assessments first. And, as you can see, the assessments are there's 12, and they're broken into kind of three general areas. The first is really the first essential computer skills the first three of those are something that everyone should be able to pass before they go on to other assessments. And that being said, you don't have to do them in any certain order you don't have to do all of them. You might just be interested in. You might have someone who's just interested in PowerPoint and and learning PowerPoint and seeing how well they do on that assessment or the career search skills for example. So, other than making sure that someone can do basic computer skills, and you know that they know what a mouse is and they know how to turn things on and off and kind of basic things. It's really up to you and your learners as to what you what assessment modules you would want to use. The assessments are the assessments themselves are free to anybody to take on our website. And then if you have the subscription, of course, all the assessments are included as well. And the, I'll talk about the difference in a second. But when you have, when you take an assessment. It's the results page and we'll let you know if he passed or not. And we in our assessments say that you need 85% to pass. And if you look down at the green column, you can't see all of it because this is a picture but it would list all the skills that you had master. And then the purple column would list what you need to work on. So if let's say you got 70%. You can do those things that that you or your learner needed to to work on before you took the assessment again. If you are in a subscriber, you can claim a badge which are sometimes used in various educational settings and sometimes for jobs, which is basically a electronic certification. And if you're a subscriber, the big difference is also is that when you pass assessment someone passes an assessment, they will get a certification because the assessment has been proctored. So you can verify that they weren't using notes they weren't asking someone else that this is a true reflection of how much they know. If someone takes the assessment, the free assessment online. There is no certification because there's no verification that they didn't have help. So that's one of the major differences. When we first created their certifications we thought. I know the biggest benefit would be to show employers what people had learned. And that definitely does happen. There was, I know there was a patron at library who came in wanting to learn Excel, because he said that if his, that his boss said if he learned Excel he would get a promotion so he passed Excel certification or past Excel assessment and got the certification and brought to his boss and got the promotion. However, we found that actually the, the biggest benefit of certifications is the confidence it will build in your learners or your participants or whoever you're working with. Many people who I work, I help out in one of our computer labs. And at that computer lab we get a lot of people who are in their upper 50s, lower 60s who have been doing manual labor for most of their career, and now just physically can't. And so they're looking to, to reskill themselves, but it's been a long time since they've been in school. And sometimes they haven't had great experiences in school. So they're very nervous and scared and then compound that with computers which they may not know much about. And when they pass the assessment, it's like this light goes on in their eyes is, it's kind of amazing to see. And I've had people start crying for joy. I've had people give me high fives. And I, I see it too in them able to translate that new confidence into other things. So I was working with a woman who was interviewing for jobs. At the same time she was practicing her computer skills. And she was feeling kind of stuck and she was feeling like she wasn't getting second interviews and she was, I think, feeling quite down. And she passed after after some struggle. She passed the PowerPoint assessment and and she like got certification and she went out and she had another interview and she just brought that confidence to the interview and ended up getting a job and it was remarkable to see the change just in her, her demeanor and her kind of attitude, just from tackling that what to her had been a little bit difficult. It also helps with persistence because the modules themselves are short enough that you do get a win. You can see your results. So, for example, if you're studying for something long term like getting a GED or something that takes a while, it's hard to see the end and it's hard to feel like you're making progress sometimes. And here you can, you can definitely see the different, you know, that you are making progress that doesn't take that long to learn the materials and then pass the assessments. We at one point, we're going to give certificates with, you know, someone's name and then all the modules they had passed on one certification. And people didn't like that they wanted to have a separate one for every module they had passed and some people have framed them. Some people put them up on their Facebook page. So it's a really fun thing to see. I did have a organization that they are a prison and they, they have classes particularly for young men to get their GED and they weren't the young men weren't seeing the value of studying or being in school really. And at the same time, they started North Star and they, they all felt that they knew computers as they all had cell phones. But they realized that cell phones are different than computers and weren't able to pass the assessments right away. So then they were determined to study and, and did and pass the assessments and that kind of persistence and that idea that studying can help you get places transferred over to them, learning different, you know, more educational English and not English but math and science for their GED. So that was kind of exciting. This is a picture of one of our learners who did pass all 12 of the modules. I don't, I don't know that he's holding all 12 of the certifications but just to show that it is a really, really something of pride for people. All right, so what are assessments used for what do people what are organizations using them for. It can often people often use the organizations often use them. Let's say they're going to use a distance learning platform, a different distance learning platform. They might want they often will use the assessments to be sure that people have the minimal skills of email, internet basics and computer basics just so that they're able to do distance learning. They often are used they can be used for employment, obviously, for higher education. A lot of times, teaching staff or people who are tutoring themselves they may be proficient in digital literacy but they may not know they may not know how to teach it so this kind of gives them idea of what what standards are in each assessment. And also, I feel like even, even though I use computers a lot, I have definitely learned things by taking the assessments that I didn't know so they do help us all become more proficient. We do have several organizations that use them to upskill their own employees. And then people use them to, if they're going to use like if they're going to go to higher level computer skills they have people go through these assessments first to make sure they're ready for that. During this time, when we're all pretty much stay at home. I talked about how our assessments are proctored if you have a subscription, and we do now have remote proctoring available. And it's fairly easy you would just use something like zoom, and you kind of verify that the person's identity and you monitor them while they're taking the test. Star Star has a great document that kind of outlines exactly how to do it. It's, it's quite easy, but it's been very helpful to people who don't have brick and mortar places at the moment for their, for their learners or participants to come to. I'm going to switch to talking about curricula. And I kind of told you why we started creating it and you can see we have these six units now available. And then the next three should be available in the next couple of months. So, when we are, we're making curricula, we, again, went with the audience in mind of people who maybe English wasn't their first language, or maybe there are people who had not been around technology obviously for a while, or at all. And so we tried to, in the curricula, make it not only easy for teachers to use, but also to make it accessible for many different types of learners, job seekers, that kind of thing. So we aligned the each curriculum module with our standards. So the standards, the assessments and the curriculum are all aligned. We tried to, as you probably know, using computers, the best way to learn computers is to actually use them. So the curricula is meant to be either teacher led or tutor led, but is very interactive and I would say there's a lot of repetition, a lot of opportunity for repetition. And what's really nice about the curriculum is you don't have to teach it from start to finish. You can pick and choose what might be useful to you. And so, for example, I was talking to a group of people who were helping their participants get jobs. So they would pick out of the lessons, the aspects that dealt with applying for jobs. So it might be how to go online. The internet would be one, how to use, how to fill out forms online, how to use email, how to properly write an email, how to create a resume. So it would be kind of they could pick and choose different, different aspects of the curriculum that related to what they were doing. I myself don't have a teaching background, but I did teach the internet basics curriculum to a group of people. And it was very easy to use. So I didn't have to spend more than probably 15 minutes of time ahead of time with prep work, and that was mostly just making handouts. This was back when we were face to face. And so it is really well laid out. It's very easy to follow. And I, I really found it helpful to me as a teacher, to me teaching it, but also to the people that I was teaching. And in fact, one of the women, we had a break over the holidays, and she I'm in Minnesota, she had gone to Florida to be with family. And she came back and on the day that we had our class and she said, Oh, I came back on a one one a.m. flight, and our class was in the in the evening. I was so glad that you made the time that you're here. I know you're tired. And she said, Well, I could have come back tomorrow. It would have been half, half the cost. And this woman was a custodian. And she lived in public housing so she didn't have a lot of money. It's just that it would have been half the cost but I didn't want to miss the class because no one else has ever taken the time to teach me this. And so it was just very moving and at how important it was. Someone asked me if this is the curriculum is available in other languages beside English. And not at this time we are really hoping to translate everything of North Star into different languages. And I'm currently looking for funding to do that. So, but it would be great if we could do that. Each module has about six to eight lessons. And they, and again, you could teach this as a class or you could adapt it for one on one instruction. So, a lot of times as I'm working one on one with people. I'll just pull out some of the worksheets or some of the practices and we'll go through the practice of something that they need help with. I did not only as good as a curriculum but it's really good at letting you know how to talk to people and how to teach people this even in, let's say, not passing but in a smaller situation. So, depending on your class size and the background of the people, we say it takes about two hours for each lesson. Mine was a smaller group and, but it was composed of ELL learners. And it took maybe an hour and a half for each lesson for us to go through the lessons. And we, and they had a lot of questions and what was really fun was to see how engaged they were. The lessons are well written for adults so that they find it engaging and they relate it to their own lives. And that was very exciting to see. As we are all now working remotely. We also have created at North Star an instructional guide on how to use a curriculum remotely with your, with whoever you're helping. And so there, there are some very detailed step by step guide on how to do that and it's, it's actually quite easy to, to use it remotely. Of course, as long as your, your students have the, the capacity, which as we know is often a problem with digital literacy. The lessons are all, they kind of all follow the same format. They have the teacher modeling and explaining something, then they have ideally people working together if they, if they do, but you could skip that part if there's only one person. And then they, there's some repetition of practicing the skill. It also always includes vocabulary, because oftentimes, even, even those of us who use computers all the time. Sometimes people are like, what's the, where, where do I, what does URL stand for or something like that. So it kind of also uses that vocabulary so that everyone knows what is meant by a certain term. And this is not that clear. It doesn't come through that clear on your screen, I am sure, but it kind of gives you, this is what the first page of any lesson would look like. So you can see the vocabulary list in the, in the right hand, upper corner talks about what standards that addresses at the bottom it's great because it tells you as a teacher what you need to copy and any, any other prep that you need to do. So it's really nice if you're teaching to just quickly glance at it and see what this lessons and help. As I said, we recently have created what we call North Star online learning, so that with a little bit of help students can get started on this and it's something that they can see on their screen and it's a tutorial but then it also directs them to practice. So I am going to, I'm going to show you an example of what the basic computer module looks like. And what you should, once I click on the link, what you should see is you'll see, you'll see a picture of a computer, and then you'll hear a woman reading, and I will let her finish reading and then I'll talk again. But this is an example of one of the kind of instructional pieces of the North Star online learning. If you look closely at the outside of a computer, you will see buttons and many small holes. These holes are usually called ports. Each port has a specific shape for different uses and different types of plugs. So you can see that she reads very slowly and clearly for someone who, let's say, doesn't speak English as their first language, but also for someone who maybe is just concentrating a lot. It's not like they're rushing through and you can go back and listen to it again over here with a little arrow as many times as you want to. You can see the words in case you have someone who's deaf who's using it, which we have had. So it's trying to be as accessible to people as possible. So now if I click, that was kind of the one tiny bit of the tutorial. Then if I click next. Here is a flash drive that you can plug into a computer. Click on the port that matches it. You can see then that it asks the person viewing to test their skills to see if they actually understand what's going on. So then if I click on the port, it will tell me I got it right. If I got it wrong, it will tell me, you know, no, this is not a USB port. The USB port is here. And so that is really nice for people to get that real time feedback. And then what I also like about it is when I click next, it will give me a check mark to say, hey, you got it right. Here are some earbuds you can plug into a computer. Click on the port that matches them. So as we went as we would go through this module, this is a computer module. There would be at certain breaking points, there would be little quizzes. And then the person viewing it would have to get the quiz right in order to keep going. And if they didn't, they'd be directed to go back and listen again. And at the end of the module, there's another quiz. And if the person does well, then they're directed to take the assessment. So it kind of prepares you or it lets you know when you're ready to take the assessment. And what's really interesting is we used to have a computer lab that I help out in. We would have people take the assessment and then we had various free online resources that we had not created that have been created by other people that we would walk through and help people learn. And sometimes people would have to take this assessment several times, you know, with learning in between before they actually passed it. We found now that even if people come in and don't don't do very well in the initial assessment, once they do the online learning something like 95% of people are passing. So it is very effective. We found learning tool. So someone asked if these are free to use for a school. And that's a great question. Right now because of the pandemic. We are making North Star online learning free to anybody. So you can access it at our website which I will show you at the end of this presentation. Normally, this is something that only subscribers would get. Whether they're a school or not. And as I, as I think I said, we currently only have the basic computer skills online learning, we have internet basics and career search skills in the works and internet basics should be done by the end of May. So we have career search skills by the end of June. And then ultimately we plan to do all of the modules as we get the funding to do that. So I see a few more questions. Yeah, so good question someone said will free access continue through the end of May or the end of June or we playing it by ear. And that is a great question we are are playing it by ear to kind of, as this pandemic plays out. And well April for sure may. Yes, I don't know about June. So, we're kind of just doing this as, as people are kind of forced to stay at home and having to work remotely for now. And then our website will kind of keep people updated as to that piece. And one thing that's nice about the online learning is it's each student has their own account so if you, if you are a subscriber you are an admin administrator, and you can sign up students as you wish to have their own account. And if you do what that gives them is it lets them see their process their progress on. I'm sorry, the online learning, as well as the assessments. So I'm going to give you an example of what that looks like. So this is what an individual dashboard would look like. And right now as I said we only have the basic computer skills but ultimately, all of the modules are on here as you can see. So here it shows that this is for me, and it shows that I have done 27% of the practice questions, and I have not yet taken the assessment, but it would show my best. I had taken the assessment several times it would show my best score. And it gives so gives individuals as well as administrators and teachers, the ability to see how, how much of the online assessment someone's done, how what they, which assessments they've passed. And then if we hit details, it also will show us that but it will then go to the different parts of the online learning and say what I've done so I went through what are computers what kinds of computers are there, and you can see the green check here. As we get down farther it will show what I have not yet looked at. And if I wanted to go back to a specific, you know, like, I don't remember what the different mice are, I could go click here and it would take me back to that section of the online learning. I saw I had a few questions. So let me someone said can we subscribe with a personal account not associated with the school so we can tutor our own group of students. Usually it's an organization that would have the subscription, and then you can have you can give as many assessments at, at as many sites as you want to. So for example, you know, sometimes it'll just be one library let's say that hasn't has a subscription and then they can give the assessments to as many patrons as they want. We also have like the state of Georgia all their community colleges are are subscribed to North Star so then they all have their own site. Someone asked how much it costs. And so it depends again on your, your organization so it depends on how many have and how many assessments you think you'll be giving in a year. So yearly subscription in general, and you can look on the website but in general it's about $500 a year for a site, but if if you have a lot of sites we often give a bulk price. That's cheaper. So, and to, yeah someone asked to clarify current free access would mean students can do the one module online. Yep, that's true and then they can take the assessments without the certifications. So that's what is available available for free. We also have on our website for free links to curated online learning that we did not make but that we feel does a good job of, of meeting the standards. We also have the ability to do bulk creation of learner accounts so at this moment let's say you you have 30 people that you want to create online learning profiles for you don't have to go in and do everyone separately you can do them by pull them from a list you might have or an Excel spreadsheet or something like that so that just makes it a little bit easier to use. Someone asked if we use edu.gcfglobal.org as a resource. I personally don't know the answer to that question. I can check it out and get back to you, but I off the top of my head I don't know. Teresa, can I just chime in on that. Yeah, so GCF. Yeah, a lot of teachers know about GCF learn free, but I'm my understanding is that GCF learn free is its own website with its own created videos and its own created activities. Everything that you're seeing with North Star today is basically developed by North Star. Is that correct, Teresa? Yeah, that's right. Yes. Yes. So you're totally separate from any other other other websites that are out there other resources that are out there everything that you've developed is developed in-house by North Star. Yes, that's very true. The only maybe my confusing point was that on our website, the free part of the website, we do link to other organizations that we haven't worked with so we just found their sources useful but that is not been used to create North Star. That's kind of those are just external links. The other nice thing, like I said about well, one nice thing about North Star if you are a subscriber is you have a lot of control over the administration. So you can create your own administrators and proctors. You don't have to go to us every time you want to add someone or change something and you can run reports by yourself. Again, you have a lot of independence. We do have a help desk that we try to answer questions as quickly as possible. So if you do have a question or you're having a problem, you know, you can always reach us that way. But it's nice because you're not dependent on us to do a lot of the administrative aspects that you can do yourself. So I do want to show you a little bit some of the reports. So you can see what it is that you may find useful to see how much you're using North Star or how effective it is for your site. So one of the reports would show you per site what which of the assessments people are taking. So you can see here that, for example, over at this site, over 1000 people have taken 1000 assessments have been given for windows. So this can help you if you're trying to do if you have limited resources and you're thinking I can only do a few classes. This might tell you what people are wanting and what people are taking. You can also be used in, you know, reporting to say we've given these many assessments on these different topics, which is always nice. And then it also goes into of the assessments past what percentage of people have passed them. So you can kind of see what what things people struggle with the most and what they might need the most the hardest assessments, or they might just meet need more instruction on. But it also can give you an idea of a we gave you know however many career search skills and 72% of people have now passed them. So that can give you some insight into how your program is running. Someone asked if a person if a person can have a subscription, and the answer is no, it would just be an organization that would have the subscription. A person could use the free, the free assessments and the free right now the free online learning module. But they wouldn't be able to have a subscription, unless they were like a consultant perhaps, then using it for a lot of variety of learners. If you feel you have a unique situation like that, and you would want to discuss the possibility. I will show you our website address at the end of this presentation and you can can write in your, your question there and we can always discuss it if it seems like something that might be viable but in general I would say it's usually, but it has always been an organization. If we look at this report, you can see also based on modules which ones have how many have been given how many have passed what the percentage of passing is. If you go into one of the reports, you will see again that information, but it also tells you how long people are taking to take the assessment, which is just helpful in planning how long you might, you might need to proctor something or how long you can expect it will take. And it also shows you what questions people are getting wrong the most. So you can see here question 14. A lot of people are getting it wrong so it could be this can help inform your teaching because it could be that maybe you're not touching on it or something is confusing about it, or the question itself, maybe the vocabulary is not understood. So that can be really helpful in in creating your training that you're doing. And then if you are like, Oh, what was, what was question 14, why are so many people missing it. You can go down here and you can click and you'll actually be directed to the actual question on on the assessment. So you're, you're able to see what is that question about that someone asked what's the difference between new and legacy models modules. And the new modules are what's out there now the legacy modules are we last year, we redid the all the assessments, one to put them on a better web platform. And to just, you know, as you know digital literacy is constantly changing so we wanted to keep them up to date so the when you actually have the assessments you are just seeing the the new ones. But at this particular site that I'm showing you, they've been running for quite a while so it did not lose any of that information from the, the legacy assessments that they're that many of the learners took, you know, years in years past. Hopefully that makes sense. You can also see by individual kind of question by question, what they, how they are answering or what they're maybe having problems with. So for example, if we, if we look at this individual and we look at Microsoft Word. We can see that he passed what his score was how long it took him to take it, but also what standards he did master and what, what he did not. And then you could even as a, as a administrator or a teacher look and see, okay, well, he missed number 12 what was that question. Here's that question and although you would never share, you know, a direct answer with a user you could then kind of inform your teaching as to what they were missing or what they were confused with something like that. So that is kind of all I have. And I am wondering if you have any questions. This is the website here that you can go to and you can check out you yourself can check out the assessments and take them for free and, and just see what they're like. You can also from there if you're interested in trying out the North Star online yourself or with with any of your students that you're working with you, there are directions on how to give them access to that. If you want to subscribe. There's a place to enter your information and get pricing information based on how big you are and how many assessments you might give. And to ask any further questions, you can always direct questions to me about any of the information that I've talked about. If you have questions that come up, you know, in the next day or two or three that you think of, I'm happy to help you with those. And at this point, I'm going to ask if anyone has any questions. So, Teresa, I don't see any questions at the moment, but I'm wondering, since we have a few minutes, would you mind just kind of giving us a general orientation to the North Star website. And, you know, where we can find some of the things that you were talking about, you know, and how we can contact you if people have questions about pricing. So maybe just a couple of minutes to kind of orient us to what we're looking at when we, when we visit the North Star website. Well, that's a great idea. So let's go to the website. So this is the website. And if you scroll down, let's see, there's kind of three major sections. One is to take an assessment for free. And we'll go there. We will do that first. So if I click on that, it breaks it down into those three kind of major areas that I told you about. You can take whatever assessment you want. Once again, these are not proctored so there wouldn't be, you wouldn't be given a certificate for them. But if that is not important to you or your learners, you can take them all if you want to. We can take a look. I think. I'm going to skip some of this intro that would give an orientation. And then it will tell you how many questions there are. Select all of the internet browser icons, then click next. So this is an example of one of the first question. Someone taking the assessment can always click I don't know and move on. They can click to hear it again. If you go to this menu, you could, let's say you were 10 questions into it and you thought, oh, you know what? I answered question five wrong. I want to go back. You'd be able to go back. Once you complete the assessment, it also asks, are you sure you're ready to submit your answers or would you like to review any of them? So it gives you a lot of flexibility in thinking about how you might want to answer a question. If you wanted to become a testing location over here in the blue, you can, and a testing location would be to mean that you have a subscription. You can click here and it tells you a little bit and then it gives you a chance to fill out a form or ask a question about your site and what pricing would be like I said in general. So let's go ahead and roll. Let's just go here and see. It would have you fill out your information and then send it in and then you would get the pricing for your site. In general, it's about $500 a site. Depending on how big you are, sometimes if you're really tiny will be a little cheaper or if you have a lot of sites will give you a bulk discount. So it's always good if you think you have a unique situation to explain that in this format. The other section was build your skills. And if we go there. That's where so that's where if you are someone who wanted to learn about how to go into a place to learn digital literacy. You could click here and then all of you who are subscribers would be listed by zip code so it would help someone find a place near them where they could actually work with a testing location. Here number two shows you how you can access the North Star online learning right now for free. And then as I mentioned here, we can click on this so these are other sources curated by North Star but not created by North Star. So this is the only part that we have not done ourselves that is linking to outside sources. For example, if you are using our just using the assessments for free and you don't have our curriculum, then you can use these other these free resources that are not tied in any way to North Star but we just have found them helpful. I have a few questions. Someone asked that this is accessible from a cell phone. It is but to be honest with you, some of the assessment questions are very difficult to do. So we, we are hoping to make it so that you can but at this point I wouldn't recommend that someone asked if you can get a free account or could use the assessments for free. So as you saw anyone can take the assessments for free you don't have to tell us you're going to take them for free you don't have to notify us in any way. And I, as of today over 4.2 million people have taken assessments. And many of them have done it for free. The curriculum you don't have access to unless you are a subscriber. And let's see someone said if we wanted to organize a North Star basic computing class online now and use the course management system with this require a subscription. If you wanted to. Yes, if you wanted to have reports on individuals learners if you wanted to have reports overall. It's true if you just wanted to direct, you know, some of your learners to the website to go through the actual North Star online learning for basic computing. You could do that you just want have access to the information of how many people had used it. How they're individual report card kind of. So if I'm a teacher. I see that you're logged into the site or signed into the site. Is there an account that I can use, or is it I can only create an account if I have the subscription. So, you can only create an account if you have subscription so once you subscribe, you would be given access as an administrator to your site and you would have as many sites as you wanted as many proctors as you wanted as many administrators as you wanted but you're given a unique kind of ID number to to access your information. And then so and if you can remind me again on this website because I've every so often I visit the North Star website. I know that there's a place and I'm not sure whether we've seen it yet where you have your kind of the standards laid out and the curriculum laid out so that I saw so that if I'm a teacher I understand kind of what is all the content that's on this North Star North Star website. Oh yeah, great, great question. So, we do have a link to the curriculum to the standards, so that you as an educator would know what are what are the standards. So here, if so what I did was I clicked on assessment info at the top. And then you can just scroll down to standards. And here you could get a list of all the updated standards for every module. And then you can also scroll down. And you can say I just want to know the standards for windows, for example, and then, and so if you would like we can look at, let's look at this one. And you what people should know in order to be proficient in this module. And then this is what we build the assessments around and what we build the curriculum around. And I've worked with teachers who aren't necessarily teaching digital literacy but they want to incorporate digital literacy into whatever it is they're teaching. So I found it helpful to look at the standards and say okay yeah this is this fits in with what I want to teach. And so, maybe we'll use this part of the curriculum or this part of the assessment, or this assessment to to work with my larger goal. So it's just in general. I mean do you find that that teachers are are have a like the method that they go about it is like they'll do an assessment as a pre test, and then do some instruction and then go back to the assessment as a post test, or are they just doing instruction and then doing the assessment like in general do you do you have some sense as as to how teachers are actually using the site. Yeah, so in general, teachers do do a pre assessment one to see if someone even needs to be in the class, you know, or to to see maybe what say they want to hold a class of 20 people. Maybe there's something that all everyone knows so they can just touch briefly on that or not even at all. So it can guide how they tailor their instruction, but also it's really helpful to the learner to see where they started and then after instruction, hopefully they pass that even if not how they've grown in their ability to understand the module. So, usually it's it's could either be a classroom type of situation, or sometimes it will be in your lab someone will come in. They're almost always given the, the basic computer assessment first, and if they pass that, then they might be given other assessments to kind of see what they know and how far along they are and where they're where maybe they need some help from an individual tutor. And so that's how I've seen it used. Like I say I've also known of organizations who have made all their teachers take the assessments, if as a prerequisite to show that they are are ready to teach digital literacy. So they have to pass the assessment before they can actually teach the digital literacy. So I've seen the assessments given to determine if a student is ready for other distance learning. I would say that's usually how I've seen it work. And I see a bunch of questions. So someone asked what what ESL levels is North Star appropriate for. So we created it created it to be used with intermediate ESL or higher, or, or native English speaker. So sometimes when I was teaching the class. I, I found that the English language learners could understand the lessons and they could understand the vocabulary that we went over. What sometimes was maybe needed more scaffolding was when, for example, they were, we were learning about websites, and they were searching for, I think they had to answer the question of the ZM website, how much is parking. Well, whatever, whatever the category that was under, if you weren't part of this culture, you might not recognize that as being where you'd find the parking information so those kinds of things sometimes I had to scaffold. But in general, for intermediate or above. Someone asked if I could answer or talk again about how much time lessons will take. So for each module, there's in general six to eight curriculum lessons that go with those modules. And we say it takes about two hours for each less lesson. And it was a class where they had a lot of questions. I would say it took about an hour and a half on average so it just depends on your class and, you know, how how adept people are, but we say two hours in general. And no, someone asked if your organization has an account is there any way to change the percentage required to pass. The answer is no, we have assessments themselves we cannot tailor to individual sites. One, we want to keep the integrity of the assessments, you know, just for our own sake. And that's really the main reason so the assessments themselves can't be changed. And so the percentage required to pass one be able to be changed. However, if you are administering assessments and you're finding something where you think the wording is is not clear or you have a question about one of the questions, or something in the curriculum, we get a lot of people. We get people writing to us who, who ask those kinds of things and, and often we will be able to work to make our product better because of what people are giving us feedback on. And also in terms of reporting, if you have specific reporting needs, we can sometimes create reports that are more specific to your organization. Any other questions that are coming up. Oh, they're actually the question just popped up in the Q&A. Okay. Someone asked what is the set percentage for passing it's 85% for each module. And then if you remember the screen that showed once you take an assessment it will tell you what. The standards you passed and what you have not as we continue as we continue to add to the North Star online learning. One really nice feature is that once you take that assessment and you see what standards you still have to work on. If you click on that it will take you to that place and the online learning that is talking about that standard so let's say you. And there's really only one kind of, or maybe like three different standards you needed to work on. You won't have to go the entire online learning if you didn't want to you certainly could. But you could go specifically to those areas where you were having difficulty. Study them and, and, and hopefully then when you took the assessment again have learned what you needed to know. Oh, here's a great question. Do the tests allow for a redo to give the student a chance to pass. Yes, they do. You can only take at a proctored site so that would be a subscriber site. You can only take what an individual can only take the same assessment twice in any given day. On the free site you can only take it once in any given day. And the reason we limited it was because we were finding that in some instances, people just kept taking the assessment over and over and over again and so they were kind of learning the right answer just by kind of trial and error. And we wanted to really want to hope that people would actually learn, learn the information through other ways than just repeatedly taking the test. So, but people do take the assessments, sometimes multiple times if it's a, if it's a something they find challenging. And it's nice because then you can see your progress, even if you're not passing, you can still see your hopefully you're getting better as your percentage goes up. And that is very encouraging to the assessment taker. Someone asked if there are any digital literacy resources available for the beginning level ESL. So I have known teachers who have taken the North Star curriculum and really scaffolded it quite a bit down and so it might take a lot longer to do something. It might take more. There are quite a few pictures in the curriculum, but it might just take more time and more effort on the teachers part. I have known of teachers who have used it for beginning level ESL. At this moment in time with remote learning, it might be very difficult, especially if it's if they don't have digital literacy skills and they're beginning ESL might be difficult. Unless you maybe had an interpreter. But, but it certainly has been done in the classroom. Teresa, can we show people again that the place on the North Star site that links to the outside resources because I did notice that I think that North Star does link to some other websites that might be good for the beginning level ESL students. For example, learning chocolate I think is is linked to a number of times and teachers have found that particular site to be helpful when they're, especially when they're helping their students learn some of the basic vocabulary words. I haven't, I haven't looked too thoroughly through that part of the website but if you could show us again where that is, and then maybe folks can take a look at what you have listed there and think about maybe some of those other resources that they could also use in conjunction with the North Star site. Yeah, so on the main homepage. If you go to build your skills and click on the see more, you will find number three is view other resources from the web. And what's nice about this is we. So again, these are not things that we created, but we show whether it is a text resource media, or has the learner do an activity. And then it's again arranged by the modules. And so then it goes through the different standards and it says okay if you want to learn between different types of devices, there's a print resource and there's a media resource. And so it will take you to this, this website computer hope, and it will show you, you know, it explains what the difference between a computer and a tablet is. So that is all available on the North Star site. And then it kind of goes through all these different standards that are associated with this module and different resources that you can use to do it. Unfortunately, it doesn't really show you the name of the resource until you click on it. But that is a handy, you know, if, if for whatever reason you just have a few users or you, you know, budgets are often tight. So if you can't afford North Star at this time. This is a great way to go to different free websites. We try to keep this updated frequently, we try to update this frequently. Sometimes as you know, like websites or die or they, they go away so sometimes the links will perhaps not lead anywhere but we do our best to keep it to keep them viable. So someone said that their school has stopped using multiple choice test questions for summative assessment, they only use it for formative. Do we offer open ended questions or other writing tests. We do not. Mainly, I don't know. That's not how it was developed but also with the ELL component in mind I think it was felt that it would be more accessible to people if they weren't having to write the answers in this. So they weren't having to not only show their digital literacy but also their, their English language literacy. Would say that if you wanted to use the standard, I mean the standards as they are, it would require, you know, your site to create questions related to those standards. Again, I'm sorry on the North Star website was there an easy way to reach out to you to contact you with other questions. On the North Star website. Or should they just email you directly or. Yeah, so you can either on the North Star website you can either go to just on the homepage. There will be a at the top oops sorry where it says become a testing location if you press if you click learn more than there's a place to answer questions there like here if we go to learn more and then ask a question so any question and that would be answered by anyone on the help desk that would be answered by the person on the help desk who would be the best person to answer so if it was a very technical question are our, you know, computer designer would answer it if it was a pricing question pricing manager would answer it for example. However, if you have a question that you want to ask me personally I'm happy to to talk to you via email and my email is here on the slide. At the top. So either way is whatever you're most comfortable with is fine with me. So I want to thank Teresa for our presentation today that's been very very useful. I'm helping us learn a lot more about North Star. While we have a minute because I know a couple of people asked the question. Teresa if you wouldn't mind if you could stop sharing just so I can show people. The website really quickly. And then where we were going to post this information. So I'm going to open up my desktop here. Let me see if I can find the website. So, so for those of you wanting more information, please go to the website otan.us. If you look at the top story on our homepage, we do have information about the upcoming activities for the week. Webinars, our office hours are also posted here at the top. And then when you're at the website at the homepage please click on this COVID-19 field support button. This will bring you to our COVID-19 field support page where we're trying to organize a number of resources that we're want to share with the field. But in time we will, as soon as we can post Teresa's handout and a recording of today's session on this in the previous OTAN webinars table, which you find on the page. So again, as soon as we can get those resources accessible, we will make them available on the website. Also take a look at the OTAN resource guide. If you click on this link, it opens up a Google Doc and we actually do have a little bit of information about North Star here as well. We've worked with North Star for a number of years. And so if you click on the online curricula section, I believe that's where it is. No, no, no, actually I think it's on our homepage. Oh yeah, right at the beginning. Websites to acquire digital skills. So we do have a number of sites listed in addition to North Star digital literacy. And we actually have a previous video from I think last year's Technology and Distance Learning Symposium. So if you also want to learn more about North Star, you can do it by watching this video as well. Teresa, actually there's one more question in the Q&A, if you wouldn't mind. Oh, I see that. So the question was, I thought you said at the beginning that the online was free until the end of May. That is, we're kind of going with the pandemic and not are not sure how long we'll offer the free North Star online learning. But since it's, it will be at least until the end of May and then perhaps longer, it's hard to say at this point. I will officially say again, thank you Teresa so much for presenting today about North Star.