 Welcome, and thank you for joining us for today's TechSoup for Libraries webinar, Digital Literacy Training Tutorials for Libraries. My name is Crystal and I'll be your host. We have two guests today who will talk about some free digital literacy resources that you can integrate into your library's services and programming. And they'll also share some ideas and examples of how libraries are using these tutorials in unique and innovative ways to help improve digital literacy in their community. But before we begin, I have just a few announcements to share. We'll be using the ReadyTalk platform for our meeting today. Pre-use the chat in the lower left corner to send questions and comments to the presenters. We will track your questions throughout the webinar and we'll answer them at the designated Q&A section at the end of each presenter's section. 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For more information about TechSoup product donations or services, please visit TechSoup.org and click on Get Products and Services. So once again, thank you for joining us for today's webinar, Digital Literacy Training Tutorials for Libraries. We have two guests joining us today. Scott Allen joined us from Chicago, Illinois, where he is a program manager for the Public Library Association. Scott oversees the DigitalLearn.org project, a free resource for libraries that includes self-directed tutorials that teach basic computer skills. Jessica Rich joined us from Raleigh, North Carolina, where she is the Curriculum Coordinator for GCFLearnFree.org, a website that teaches essential skills from work and career to technology through free multimedia course content. My name is Crystal Schimpf, and I'll be your host for today's webinar. Assisting us with chat and Twitter, we have Jenny Meese and Becky Wiegand from the TechSoup team. We'll be on Twitter using the atTechSoupforLibs handle. We'll have time for questions throughout the webinar, so please send in your questions as they arrive, and we'll keep track of them. We'll start off today by hearing from Scott about the DigitalLearn.org project. He will give us an overview of what's available, updates on new features and courses, and we'll share some innovative ideas for how libraries are integrating DigitalLearn into their programming. Then Jessica will join us to talk about GCFLearnFree.org, and she will give an overview of what's available, highlight some of the course topics that will be of great interest to libraries, and share some examples of libraries using GCFLearnFree to support technology instruction for their patrons. We'll have time for questions after each speaker, so again, please send in your questions as they arrive. Now, most public libraries in the United States are offering some form of digital literacy training and assistance to patrons, whether in formal settings like computer classes or in more casual settings like drop-in computer lab assistance, tutoring, and one-on-one help. Even reference questions can contain elements of technology and digital literacy, and most libraries provide a wide range of resources to help library patrons learn technology. And I know also some nonprofits who may be joining us are offering digital literacy training as well. Now, we'd like to know which of these activities you're directly involved in providing at your library, meaning that you do them as part of your job or volunteer role. So please select up to three of these, the top three that apply to your job role by clicking the radio button, and then clicking submit. And once you've submitted your response, then you'll see a summary of what everyone else has responded, of everyone else's responses. Now also if you have any specific ideas you'd like to share at this point of how you're providing digital literacy training, you can share those in the chat, and we're happy to share them out as we are able to. So we just want to get a sense for what the most popular activities are and what your experience levels are in your library or in your nonprofit as it may be. So selecting the top three, and then clicking submit. Looks like we're getting quite a few responses at this point. And definitely technology reference questions is what we're seeing as the most popular. So people coming in and just asking questions about help with technology, helping them at that point of need. Drop-in assistance is also very popular. And providing training resources is the third most popular that I'm seeing right now. Now we'll give just a few more seconds for you to respond if you're still taking a look at those responses and thinking about it. We'll close the poll. We'll give a count down here in three, two, and one. And it looks like we got just a few responses in here right at the very end of that. So yeah, pretty much the same. Some of you are definitely offering public computer classes and tutoring appointments as well. So it's great to see a variety of activities being offered here. Now another thing we would just like to know is how familiar you are with the resources that we're sharing today. We're starting off with digitallearn.org. So tell us, are you familiar with Digital Learn? Have you used it as a resource prior to today's webinar? Were you familiar with it but never used it before? Or is it a new resource for you, not aware of it? I'm taking a look at those results. I can see a lot of you are new to this resource, which is great to hear. We're happy to introduce something new. And again, it is a free resource that you're able to use. So we're happy to introduce that to you. For those of you who have used it before or who are familiar, I hope you do get some new ideas from Scott who's going to share this with us in just a minute on how you might be able to do something different with Digital Learn and what you're currently aware of. Hopefully you get some new ideas as well. We're going to close this poll in just another few seconds here so everyone gets a chance to respond in 3, 2, and 1. Well, you've come to the right place if you're here to learn about Digital Learn and that's what Scott's about to tell us right now. I'm going to turn over the controls and Scott's going to tell us how we can use this tool in our libraries. Scott? Thank you very much, Crystal. And thanks to TechSoup for inviting us to be part of this webinar, Public Library Associations. Very proud of Digital Learn and it's exciting for us to be able to share it with all the Public Library staff and others who are on the webinar and to be able to talk about some of the features. So as Crystal mentioned, I'm going to talk a little bit about the history and what the website offers now, but then also talk about some new features we'll be building out this year that I think will be very much of interest to public libraries and their patrons. A little bit about the history. PLA received an IMLS Grant, Institute of Museum and Library Services Grant in the fall of 2012. We consulted our public library members about what they needed and what their patrons needed in terms of digital literacy training to make sure that it would meet the educational needs and literacy levels of the learners and that the length of the courses would be appropriate and that it would really work into the flow of a public library. We hired a Neil out of Denver to develop the strategy and manage the technology and we hired Kixl, a training and instructional design firm to develop the courses and we launched them in the summer of 2013. What became the first set of 14 courses was up in 2013 and then in 2014 we added a second feature which is essentially a community of practice for digital literacy trainers to be able to share information. Last year in 2015 we brought on some new funding partners and we started developing some exciting new features which I'll be talking about momentarily. Our partners in digital learn include IMLS but also two ALA offices, the Office for Information Technology Policy and the Office for Diversity, Literacy and Outreach Services. The chief officers of state library agencies has been a partner since we started the project and just last year Chicago Public Library joined to help us build on some exciting new features. So what is digital learn? I'm excited to see that a lot of people on the webinar are not familiar with it so this will be new information and hopefully after the webinar you'll be able to go on and play with the site and use it yourself. There's really two segments to digital learn. I'm going to start with the community of practice segment. When you go to the landing page you'll see a link to say help learners and that's intended for anyone who is a digital literacy trainer or this happens to have to do digital literacy training as part of their job to go to get resources. It's essentially a site where people can post and share information. You can learn about upcoming events that might help you develop your digital literacy training skills and it's really just taking off now. We had about 10,000 registered users as of the end of last year and then we took the site down and just put up a new version that will allow users to share materials much more easily. Hopefully if you're interested you should log on, sign up, and start to peruse what's being shared on the community of practice site. The main feature in digital learn are the courses for learners. What you see on the screen right now is the home page. We have changed it recently so that you go directly to see the courses that are available when you go to digitallearn.org. We have 14 courses on the site right now. You'll see a short introduction to each and links to go to the various modules when you go to the home page. Here's an example of a learner module. This is the Intro to Email course. Each course is 6 to 22 minutes. We intentionally kept them short and it's broken up into modules. Again, short modules because we knew that's what's going to work best in a library setting or other settings where people can't sit down for a long period of time to really dive into something. We kept the reading grade level at fourth grade for all these courses. There are some exceptions. Some computer terms do not go below the sixth grade reading level. We also made these courses as mobile-friendly as possible, but then there are some features in the courses such as how to use a mouse that really don't work on a mobile device. When a learner opens the module, they'll clearly see how many lessons there are, what they cover, and how long they are. The first lesson within the module is a video with narration. You can also access a course transcript of each as a PDF that has the entire text of the course. And then later this year, we'll be adding subtitles to the courses so that people can read the screen if they can't use headphones or play the speakers. As I mentioned, we have 14 modules up on the site right now. We intentionally started with very basic critical skills for entry points for using a computer. And when a patron comes into your library, for instance, and says, I need to apply for a job online, and you start to help them, sometimes you realize they don't really know how to even go online. They don't have an email address. They don't know how to use a computer. So the intent behind Digital Learner was to give them those basic critical skills that help them get to the next level and do what they need to do online. You'll see I've included these specific lessons on how it's broken up and how short they are. We've also found in our data that a lot of users will complete a lesson, a non-module, and then go back and repeat a lesson like the mouse, repeatedly four or five times to be able to really hone in on that skill. So that's how we've broken up these courses. We know we're meeting a critical need. In the first year, the site exceeded our estimates and we had over 36,000 visitors who completed about 6,000 classes. And then since January 2015, we've had another 16,000 classes completed. The most popular classes have been getting started on a computer, using a PC, intro to email, basic search, and navigating a website. Now I'm going to talk a little bit about some new features that we're rolling out in 2016. First, we've benefited a lot from the libraries they're using Digital Learner and the patrons to get ideas for new topics, what are the new things that they want to see on the site. So this year, we're hoping to develop five or six new modules at least. And we already have a few in development. Those modules will cover safety and security, things like logging in, passwords, scans, and phishing. And we also have a module which is somewhat unique. It's about addressing fears of using computers and using the Internet. We heard a lot of feedback from our library, public library members and staff that a lot of users come in and are initially just nervous and scared about what they can and can't do on a computer. So even though we're not teaching a skill in terms of how to use the computer, we're giving them information that will help them overcome those fears and get started. So that'll be a new course we roll out this year. Another exciting thing we're doing this year is translating all of the courses to Spanish. We know how important it is to have things in other languages to serve all your patrons. Right now on the site, two of the 14 classes are in Spanish, and there's a toggle to go from English to Spanish. So a Spanish user would see all of the site content plus these two courses. But by the summer this year, all 14 of the modules that are on the site will be translated, and so the site will essentially be a mirror image in Spanish. Another new feature we just added is the ability to log in. Initially, Digital Learn was an open website that didn't require logging in. We knew that was a barrier for some of these learners who don't have a lot of skill. So we didn't want to make it any more challenging for them to get to that first level of content. But we've also heard from libraries that a lot of users, once they start learning, want to be able to keep track of what they've done and go back to where they left off. So we did create a login screen which is accessible from the home page. But you'll notice in keeping the focus on the target audience of those with very low digital literacy skills, we've done a few things that are typical. An email address is required to create this account just like you would expect, but we know a lot of these users don't have email. And so right below the email box there's a link to the course about how to set up an email address. We also don't ask for much information because we see that as a barrier to getting started. And the passwords can be anything. There are no requirements in terms of letters, numbers, or special symbols. So we don't ask for the password when they type it in as opposed to having it hidden because we think these users probably benefit from seeing it. They might not be the best typists. They need to make sure they've got the exact letters the way they want them. So that's just a little bit different, but we know our audience here. So those are some new features we're starting. And I just want to talk a little bit now about how libraries are using DigitalLearn or how they might use DigitalLearn and then give some specific examples. First, we hope that your public libraries or other community agencies that might be on the webinar today will link to the site from their library computers or from their library website and direct users there to help them develop digital literacy skills. We also think it's important to educate the library staff that DigitalLearn is a resource that's out there and that they can refer patrons to it who have training needs. And we have flyers that with PLA, Public Library Association, can send you that includes space for personalization. So you can put your library or your branch name in the box. There's an image on the screen right now of a flyer. And you can put the address or you can say see Becky at the reference desk for help getting to DigitalLearn. Whatever you think is the most useful information to help patrons get to DigitalLearn. We also would like to see DigitalLearn promoted at the state and library system level, promoted to member libraries. We also encourage libraries and state library agencies to identify staff who are either digital literacy trainers or just have that responsibility on them day to day because of patron requests and encourage them to join the community of practice because they will learn from each other. We've also heard from some libraries that DigitalLearn has helped use them to do staff and volunteer training. A lot of staff of course come with these skills but if you have volunteers or staff that really learn computer and internet skills DigitalLearn can help them get started. In Alaska, the rural library IT aid were required to complete DigitalLearn courses as a hiring prerequisite. The Alaska State Library decided to give all librarians in the state a detailed training through digitallearn.org. We also would love to hear from you about what you want to see in the training content. Again, we are trying to be at a lower level with some other training resources but we still think there's quite a bit we could build out to help people get started. Now I'd like to cover a few examples of how libraries are using DigitalLearn. The St. Paul Public Library is actually the site that gets the most referrals to DigitalLearn when we look at our data and we wanted to know why so we talked to them and this is a little bit about how they ended up using some of the modules and lessons in DigitalLearn. In 2010, the St. Paul Public Library and many other community partners participated in a process determined how to best assess and quantify digital literacy knowledge among lower skilled adults. The intent behind this was to help employers and job seekers and through this process they developed the North Star Digital Literacy Standards which are online at digitalliteracyassessment.org. Once those standards were developed they wanted to help patrons and other community members make progress so the library set up a website that links these standards to digital literacy training resources and as you can see by the arrows on the screen some of those specific learning resources are DigitalLearn lessons or modules. Some of these even link into the specific lesson within a module because that's what met the needs of the library and their community. So we really appreciate St. Paul Public Library finding this creative way to use the DigitalLearn training modules. Another example I want to share that's leading to some of the most exciting developments with DigitalLearn is the Chicago Public Library. In January 2014, Chicago Public Library embarked on a process to collect and review ideas for how it could help advance workforce development efforts in the city. They assembled a lot of local stakeholders including city colleges, public schools, the Chicago Jobs Council and others and together they planned a phased approach to determine how the library could help Chicago citizens achieve digital proficiency which would then in turn help lead them to productive employment. They began piloting a digital literacy initiative in their branches using staff that they have in the branches to help training. And after about 100,000 sessions with patrons they realized that the staff in the branches needed a more consistent training curricula and they had been working with a whole range of resources including DigitalLearn. They hired a consultant to identify the digital literacy training materials and that consultant identified 36 resources and ultimately boiled it down to three that they thought would meet the library's needs for this engagement. One of those was DigitalLearn and so they approached the Public Library Association asking if we would be willing to work with them on some new features that would make DigitalLearn exactly what they need for their initiative. So that's led to some really exciting site customization work that we're doing initially with the Chicago Public Library but that will be available to libraries across the country later this year. So we've developed features that will allow learners to log in and save their progress to receive certificates and go back and find those certificates if they need them for instance for a job interview or for some meeting with a social service agency. They can use a course recommendation tool that I'll show you momentarily to help them figure out which courses they need based on what their goal is in using a computer. And then they can get a custom course list and work through it in a progression in order to meet their goals. For the library and Chicago Public Library and soon other libraries and organizations can add custom content to the site. They can pick and choose from what we have with DigitalLearn or they can build their own courses. They can make custom page content so when a learner finishes a course in the Chicago Public Library site they might get an instruction to go work with a local agency on their resume or do something specific that's community based. Libraries also get user analytics and they also have the ability to co-brand the site with their logo which shows the community and local stakeholders like the Chicago Jobs Council and funders that they're providing a critical service here in the city of Chicago. So just quickly I want to review some of the new screens we've developed for the Chicago Public Library which will be available to other libraries later this year. When a user first creates an account, a wizard walks them through these questions about what they want to do and then recommends some courses depending on their goals. You can see that it asks about their current comfort level and what they want to do with the computer. The questions on the screen you see right now are all on the screen. In the wizard it gives them one question at a time because we think that that's probably easier for some of these users to complete the wizard. They'll get a plan and it will pull courses from the existing courses to help them meet their goals. So in this case you can see the user has gotten basic search enter to email. They've completed basic search and they're a third of the way through enter to email and then they may be able to add more courses by retaking the quiz or by simply starting a course. Once they start a course it gets a certain amount which courses they've completed and when and as I mentioned earlier they can download the certificate again if they need to for a certain purpose. That's the learner perspective for the library perspective for the administrator perspective. You can just see how simple we've made it for the library to add courses. So here is the administrative dashboard where they can pick different courses, publish them, review them, change terms, change titles, add a new course if it's something that either digital learn has developed or the library has developed themselves what they want to put on the site. On this next screen I'm just showing quickly how you can add supplemental materials as I mentioned earlier. Once the user finishes a module in digital learn they can then take direction from the library or the other agency that's working with the library in terms of what to do next to build on those skills, to seek employment, to use the city or school website for their child education. Anything that the city and the library decide together that they want users to be doing with those skills can go into these post course completion areas. Again this is just another screen in the back end for the administrators about adding a course and this would be if for instance the library or library system wanted to develop a course on how to use the local school systems parent portal. So we know we have children in school and their parents may not be as comfortable with computers. They can learn basic skills but maybe they would need a separate course specifically on what the school's parent portal offers and how to make the most of those features. So that might be something a local library develops and uploads to digital learn so it shows up for their patrons. And with that I've covered what digital learn is currently and also what we are hoping to turn it into this year and hopefully it meets some of your needs now and that you'll be willing to work with PLA in the future to help develop your own customized site. Great, well Scott thank you for sharing so much about what digital learn has to offer. We've had a lot of great questions come in and I want to go back towards the beginning of your presentation to where you were talking about the way digital learn is now and the way that it's openly available to all libraries not about the custom part of it. Because we had some questions about the new login feature. And just to clarify, is login required for users going into digitallearn.org as it is now? No, when you go to the digitallearn.org homepage what you see is all of the courses and you can start one immediately. There's no need to login but there is a button to allow a learner to login and create an account. Great, and then what are the benefits then of signing up and logging in for users? If you could just go back and touch on that. Sure, well we've heard from some of our public library members and library staff who are working with these patrons that users will come in and they'll know they did some courses but they weren't sure which ones or they did a course and now they want to prove to someone that they're talking to outside the library that they've done that course. So we added the create an account feature to enable them to track what they've done to go back and get their certificates of courses they've completed. Just another way to add some features for users who are maybe more consistent and routine but a user who simply wants to do one module and move on is still able to do that without creating an account. Great, and then also related to account creation. They are creating accounts but they don't see a library listed or they're not joining from a library site. Can they skip that part of the registration process? Yes, they certainly can. Great, all right. And then a few questions came in about the course content and the language. I know you've indicated that they are being translated into Spanish but are there plans to translate languages and the specific languages mentioned were French, Arabic, and Vietnamese? I'm sure there are others as well. We are so proud to finally get the Spanish translations done and we know how important those are that we would love to keep doing more but at the moment we don't have the time or resources or skills to do that. We do welcome partners, especially libraries in communities with a lot of speakers of those languages who have staff and skills to help us get the translations done. We would love the site to have more translations but right now the only plan is to do the Spanish. Great. Now in terms of the additional courses that are being developed you mentioned a few of them. Is there anywhere where there's a list of upcoming courses and also are libraries able to request courses or provide feedback on what topics they'd like to see? We don't actually have a list out. We had about 15 topics that we rotated through some of our member volunteers, some libraries using digital learn and some digital literacy trainers and they helped us pick the next five or so that we're going forward with. We would love, my email is on the screen, I would love to hear from you all what are the courses you want to see on digital learn or another digital literacy training resource. We'd love to help find them if it's already out there. Again, we are trying to keep it and had requests to go to like we have an intro to Microsoft Word and they wanted levels 2, 3, 4, 5 and we feel like some of those are out there and other resources so we may not move that way with digital learn, but we still want to hear your ideas. Great. Great. Now we're getting more and more questions coming and we're just about at the point where we need to move on so we can hear Jessica talk about GCF Learn Free as well. So we'll try to come back to some of these questions at the end but maybe just one to end on is to go back to that concept of customizing the site for your library and people are wondering is that something that's going to be freely available or what is it going to take if libraries are interested in having a custom digital learn site. So the short answer is watch PLA and keep in touch with me to get more information as we roll this out but we are currently looking for grant funding to be able to roll this out to a number of libraries at no cost. There are some costs involved and so we're trying to come up with a very manageable, reasonable fee for libraries to customize the site but we've also heard from a few libraries that have ideas that tie into their local initiatives that would require even more customization and we're really willing to do that but we need to have those discussions to figure out what it would take to make that happen. Alright. That's a short answer for now. Scott, we'll see if we can come back and answer some more of these questions at the end of the session but right now it's time for us to move on so I'll say thank you for sharing everything you've shared so far. We really appreciate it. Great. Alright. So we're going to move in and hear about GCF LearnFree.org and again we just would like to know prior to today's webinar is this a resource you were familiar with? Was it before the resource? Were you familiar with it but never used it? Or is this an entirely new resource for you? And again, I want to select your response and submit it. You'll be able to see what everyone else in the room is saying. And again we can see this is a little bit more awareness than when we saw Digital Learn but still a large majority of you are learning about this resource for the first time so again thank you for coming to the webinar today and taking this opportunity to learn about it. If it's something you're very familiar with again we hope you get some new ideas on how to use it so stay tuned for some of those ideas from libraries which Jessica will share towards the end of her session section. I'm going to close the poll now. It looks like we are getting most of the responses at this point so I'm going to close that poll in 3, 2, and 1. And there are our final results from the poll and then I'm going to transition and hand the controls over to Jessica who is going to tell us all about GCFLearnFree.org Jessica? Thank you Crystal and thank you for inviting me to talk to everyone about GCFLearnFree. We definitely see some people that haven't heard of GCFLearnFree. Got a few that look like they've used it so even if you have used it before maybe there will be some new information for you today. GCFLearnFree is an educational website funded by the Goodwill Industries of Eastern North Carolina. We offer free tutorials and technology reading and math and although I'll obviously focus on digital literacy today if you weren't aware of our reading, math, or career programs then those may be also useful topics for your patrons. I invite you today or at your earliest convenience to go to the website and to look at some of the other things that we offer in addition to digital literacy. Feel free to use anything that you find at the GCFLearnFree site in the service of your educational programs or with the people you serve and I'll talk in more detail at the end about specific ways you may be able to do that. As I mentioned, we are a program of the Goodwill Industries of Eastern North Carolina. It's actually the stores here in Eastern North Carolina that make GCFLearnFree possible. I happen to notice in the registration list we have people from Pender County, Hoke County and Wake County on the line today and so the GCF stores that are in your communities are what make GCFLearnFree possible not only for people here in Eastern North Carolina for all around the United States and all around the world. In 2015 we actually served 21 million learners and this year we're on track to serve more than 30 million. We recognize that everyone learns differently. That's why our tutorials offer written lessons, video tutorials, interactive, and informational graphics. It's our hope that our users can find the learning modality that works best for their learning style. All of the information that you'll find at GCFLearnFree is completely self-paced which means that users are able to work at their own speed at their own time. We have learners that will maybe look at the site for an answer to a quick question and then never use us again or a learner could work sequentially throughout the entirety of the tutorial for reviewing content as many times as they need. An account is not required to access any content at GCFLearnFree but if a user does want to document their progress and maybe be able to demonstrate what they have learned then creating an account is a very simple process, very quick. Once you've created an account your progress will be tracked and then you can print off a transcript of your completed tutorials and then show that to a teacher or lawyer. I'm not going to repeat a lot of the same topics that DigitalLearn offers. You'll see here on the page that there's several that DigitalLearn also offers but some additional topics that may be of interest to use that we offer a mouse tutorial which is a fun interactive for completely new computer users. We were talking about that earlier where maybe someone is completely new to using technology. This is a learning tutorial which is a highly interactive tutorial that teaches learners to touch type which is obviously a skill that's necessary for any patron interested into transitioning to maybe an office type environment. We have internet safety tutorials internet safety for kids and then we have lessons on the setup and maintenance of computers, how to set up a Wi-Fi network, what to do if your computer gets a virus. That was one of the ones that was mentioned earlier and the poll was that one-on-one assistance that getting a lot of technology reference questions and so being able to direct people to GCSEarn free to answer those questions may be something of use to you. Again, there are some similar topics here that you'll also find at DigitalLearn. These tutorials and our living in the online world program tend to focus more on the digital skills we increasingly see in our day-to-day lives things that we need to know to navigate life on a daily basis as technology becomes a larger and larger part of our lives. Interesting topics here that may be of use to you. Again, knowing that you get those individual type questions how to use iPhone, how to use an iPad or an Android phone. I know libraries have device days or other programs and opportunities where patrons can begin their devices to get answers. So this may be something that's helpful that may supplement those programs. Topics like using Wikipedia and Craigslist how to use streaming video services, listening to podcasts downloading free audio books and then additional social media tutorials like YouTube Instagram and LinkedIn. Our Microsoft Office tutorials are our most popular tutorials and this is how most people originally would find GCF LearnFree. These are great for getting up to speed with new versions of Microsoft Office and finding out what changes or differences they've made, but it's equally great for someone who's had no or very little experience with Microsoft Office. The tutorial state would start with a very basic and then take a learner through what we feel are the most common tasks employees will encounter in most offices. These tutorials are not comprehensive but we feel that they will largely be one of the most important skills someone would need to be able to get a job in an office. We have just added Word, Excel, PowerPoint 2016 and we're currently working on Access 2016 and that should be available by the end of April. Very quickly I'd just like to showcase a few tutorial topics to give you an idea of what some of our content may look like if you haven't used GCF LearnFree before and it looked like most of you hadn't but even if you have used GCF LearnFree I've changed a little bit in its look and feel and so this may look a little different to you. I anticipate that this may be a relevant topic for many of your patrons. Our technology buying guide includes computer, smartphone and tablet buying guides lesson on how to choose between a laptop or a tablet to choose which best fits your needs, information about e-readers, wearable technology and more. Online Money Tips is a newer tutorial that we recently added in the last year. Some of the topics here that may be of interest to you is how to get a free credit report, how to use PayPal, how to download free e-books from your local library. It's tax season so you might be having a lot of patrons coming in and asking about how they could do their taxes online and so we have a lesson on that that may prove to be useful for many of your users. With some of the feedback from our learners on Photoshop basic tutorial a couple of years ago to help a new user with navigating the Photoshop interface and has lessons on some basic tools and tricks. This is not a comprehensive tutorial either but really would help anybody who's new to Photoshop. We also offer a digital photography tutorial and an image editing tutorial and that focuses on editing using free or more affordable software more affordable than Photoshop. Excel formulas was also created based on learner request and it quickly became one of our most popular tutorials. This is really great for any learner who's interested in increasing their Excel skills so this is not for a beginner Excel user but somebody who maybe wants to get a job or get a better job that's going to require these skills. Our tutorial teaches using real life scenarios to help the learner better understand when to put these skills into practice. I'd like to briefly discuss a few ways you can use the content at gcf-learn-free within your educational programs or to serve your patrons. We do actually ask that you complete an application to request to use gcf-learn-free content and we'll get that linked to you by the end of this session. This is really just so that we have a record of the organizations that use us in the ways that we're using us. Like I said, you don't have to create an account and so oftentimes we don't know who's using us and so this is just for our information for our records. This is not required. If you do have a very unique use case, we would want that application. Just make sure that you're still following our terms of use. Largely, whatever way you'd like to use our content is allowable. The only common use we deny is to copy and paste our content into an LMS, a CMS, a portal of some kind of closed system. That would be against our terms of use. You can certainly link to our site. You can even embed YouTube videos. You can even iframe our content but you would not be able to grab our content and then put it inside of your system, unfortunately. One of the most popular ways that organizations use our content is through traditional in-person classes. It looked like some people, some libraries are using that. That was one of the ways that people said they were using digital literacy tutorials. In this situation you could use GCF LearnFree and Lua of a textbook, so perhaps it would be maybe your entire curriculum or maybe just the parts that you need to supplement an existing curriculum. Feel free to use the content from us to create and distribute presentations, handouts, brochures, any other educational materials that you would use within that class. If you do offer traditional classes you may want to look at our educators resources for suggestions and best practices for using the content in your class who also provide a link to this as well. Specifically, our curriculum guides offer learning paths so that will help you make connections within the topics that we offer and also give you some ideas and suggestions for your learning space. One-on-one assistance, that's huge. We know that librarians spend a lot of time assisting patrons one-on-one and GCF LearnFree should certainly be used in these instances. For instance, maybe you have a patron that asks a specific question about Excel. Navigate the patron to that particular lesson at GCF LearnFree. Show them the text, the videos, any additional content that maybe will help them in performing that task. Hopefully this would allow you to then be available to assist other patrons and it empowers that learner to then take ownership of their learning. It really allows them to learn at their own pace so they don't feel rushed or embarrassed about not getting it. They don't feel pressured that you're sitting there next to them. This is certainly a resource that you could use in those instances. Another way was resource links. I think that was one that was in the poll. For libraries that have websites that offer a list of helpful resources, feel free to add GCF LearnFree to that list. We also have flyers available. You can print those off, distribute to your patrons, post around your library. Again, we'll post the link to that as well. Some libraries will even put a shortcut to the GCF LearnFree site on maybe their computer lab desktops. Honestly, any way that you'd like to spread the word about GCF LearnFree and the way that you think it makes the most sense for your patrons, we are certainly okay with it. I think this is one of the things we don't think about very often, but GCF LearnFree isn't only for the end user. It's not only for your patrons. It's not for the people that you serve. It's for us too. Technology changes so quickly that the most tech-savvy person can't know everything there is to know. Maybe when your library upgrades to the newest version of Microsoft Office, when you transition from Windows 7 to Windows 10, the tutorials at GCF LearnFree may help you get up to speed with anything you need to know. We work very hard to keep our site up to date, and when there are changes to technology, we hope that you'll think of us as a resource. Thousands of organizations of all types that use us in a thousand different ways. I'm not going to go into great detail about each of these particular examples. One unique story from this slide is the Santo Domingo Cueblo Library. We work with them to provide them a downloadable version of our site, which they've been translated into a language used by one of the local tribes. This may be relevant for some of you, and I think that was some of the questions we received earlier. For more populations who speak languages other than English, please reach out to us and contact us about translation opportunities. Currently, we do offer Spanish and Portuguese tutorials through our sister site GCFapprindelibre.org and GCFapprindelibre.org will pass those links out to you in a moment. These are not direct translations of the tutorials you would find at GCF LearnFree. They're actually created by a team but their focus is also on technology reading and math. You'll see many of the same topics and that still may be helpful information for you, for any learners that you may have whose primary language is Spanish or Portuguese. I just see that we had a few academic libraries signed up today and we're seeing a lot of community colleges, a lot of four-year colleges who are using GCF LearnFree to help their non-traditional students kind of get up to speed. To teach the technology skills students need to be successful as they return to school. I'd like to encourage you to consider different types of populations that may be served by GCF LearnFree and digital learn. It could be school-aged children, young adults preparing for the workforce for the first time, adults returning to the workforce after some time out, older adults who want to learn more about technology and even adults who are already tax savvy so I just wanted to let you know that if you're in an area that has no internet, unreliable internet, if YouTube is blocked in your library, we can provide you with a version of our site that works offline. This version is created about every other year and therefore it doesn't have the newer content after it's created. So this is definitely not a replacement for the online site. The live site is always going to be the preferable version if you can access it. The downloadable site is a great substitute. It's been a huge success in rural areas of the United States developing countries around the world and we're huge in prisons. We're actually on tablets owned by every Georgia inmate. So if this applies to you or if you ever have any questions or comments even after today's webinar please contact me anytime. That is all of the content that I have to share with you today but I'd love to hear your questions or any of your comments. Great. Jessica, thank you for sharing such detailed information about what GCF LearnFree has to offer and we are getting some questions in and I'm sure we'll please send us questions if you have them. We do have time for questions right now and I think we'll bring Scott back on in a minute. One of the first questions I've seen come in Jessica, it's just about one of the topics you have available. I know you have a lot of Microsoft training. Do you have any questions for Office 365 available? That's an excellent question. Office 365, we actually work with Microsoft Office. They are aware that we create tutorials. When you search for Microsoft Office tutorials we come up above their own support. So moving forward they are going to stop doing versioning. If you look at our 2016 there aren't any references to the date. Office 2016 mirrors Office 365 the online version. So if you are using Office 365 the 2016 tutorial should help you with 99% of your questions. If there are slight differences it's because 365 is going to start being continuously updated and then moving forward more likely it's going to be Office 365 instead of every three-year versioning. That's some good insider information there to know about the relationship between those two as well because I think we don't always realize that similarity. So that's great to know. Another question that we got in was asking is GCF Learn Free mobile device friendly and the context there is that they have a lot of students who use tablets and they were thinking this could be beneficial for them if they worked on it on their tablets on a desktop or laptop computer. Most tablets should be fine that screen size. We are working to better optimize our site for smaller screen sizes more, you know, phone size a tablet size should work. We'll say that we do have some of our older programs that still require flash our reading program, our adult literacy program, our mouse tutorial, our everyday life program still operates in flash but moving forward everything is in HTML5 the typing tutorial some other interactives and so if you do have an iPad you may run into some flash barriers but otherwise everything should be mobile optimized for using a tablet and you should still be able to access most content. Excellent. And is it just through the mobile website or do you have an app available? It would just be responsive design so there's not a separate app or there's not a separate M dot or anything like that. It would just render to be optimized on that screen. Great. And actually Scott I think this is a question that also came up for digital learn. So in terms of accessing this on mobile devices tablets in particular is digital learn compatible with that? We've tried to make most of the courses compatible with that some as I mentioned earlier and translate if it's about how to use them out and things like that but that is something that's on our list to try and improve. Great. And same question about app availability. If you're on a tablet would you just go to the digital learn website or do you have an app available? We do not have an app available at this point. Right. Well I'm just taking a look to see if we're getting any new questions and it looks like we've tried to answer as many of the questions as we could from earlier and here's one question I can actually ask to both of you. Nicole asks if the courses involve practice files or hands-on activities and I know you've both touched on that but maybe just now you could summarize by saying what's the level of hands-on activity and also what files are included and Scott I'll have you take this one first since I know this came in during your section. The courses as we built them initially were a lot of hands-on activity or practice direction partly because we didn't have a way to support and monitor that. The partnership with Chicago Public Library is allowing us to do though is build in some exercises for users to do and the staff in the library are able to then help them finish those or verify that it was completed or respond if a response is necessary to the learner. So I guess the short answer is really there aren't a lot of those that are being built as we expand out this year. Right, right. And you also have some print materials that come out along with the courses, correct? Yeah, the entire course transcript is available to download and save or print. Great, great. And then Jessica, I know you did touch on this but can you just summarize again what type of hands-on activities you have available? It would vary from tutorial to tutorial. Some are more in-depth than others. For instance, our Microsoft Office tutorials would offer you a practice document that you could work along with the video with the lesson. There's a challenge at the end where the learner is prompted to try to make changes to the document and try to get some hands-on learning. That's pretty deep for our tutorials. Most would have interactive, maybe a quiz at the end. Practice documents were relevant, but we do do try to respond to all different types of learning modalities. Great, great. And then also just to clarify, we got this question earlier and I think it's come up, but just to clarify libraries are able to link from their website to both of your resources and tell me if I'm wrong here, but it's free for any library or any nonprofit to link to the resources and recommend that their users go visit digitallearn.org and gcflearnfree.org. Do I have that correct Scott? Definitely, and actually I neglected to mention this, but I'd like to add it now. Not only is it free and we encourage it, but the files that we use to develop the site are open source and available if a library wants to take them and use them and customize them or use them for their own purposes. So we really just want to get this out there. Excellent. And Jessica? Yeah, absolutely. We certainly encourage anyone to use gcflearnfree in whatever way they think may be best. Everything that you find at gcflearnfree is free to use, free to the learners. They definitely don't encourage people to use it at home or when they're not at the library, they can access it anywhere they have an internet connection. Great. And then to follow up on that, we got a great question just now from John that says, do you refer users to other resources from within your sites? And I know, Scott, you mentioned the custom resources that libraries could put in, but does DigitalLearn refer out to other resources at all? No, and actually that's a great question and something that I think until we started working with specific libraries to personalize it, we didn't have that feature built in, but we do expect that as we build out these personalized sites, libraries will then want to direct users to whatever other resources that they're comfortable with, but right now we really don't direct users to a lot of other sites. Yeah, and certainly in the situation you described, being able to refer people to local resources is a great benefit there. And then Jessica, on gcflearnfree's side, do you have any resources you refer people out to? I'm going to post our great, big, gigantic list of free resources that we have found within our Educators Resources area. And so it's just a curated list of free resources that we think are good and may be relevant for different educators, different librarians, and then throughout Pepper's throughout the site, if it's relevant we certainly link to Microsoft, Google, Apple, things like that. But then other resources, people where we think are doing really great things in Technology Basics, Internet Safety, we certainly link to them as well. Excellent, excellent. And so all of the links that Jessica and Scott had shared today will include in the archive email that will be going out by the end of the week. You'll also have access to the slides, they've put their email addresses in the slides and invited you to reach out to them if you have further questions. And if we didn't respond to your question during the webinar today, I know there were a few we didn't get to, we will follow up with you via email later on so that you'll be getting that within the next week. So thank you for Scott and Jessica for sharing all of this information today. I just have a few announcements if you'll all stay on the line for a few more minutes. We have a survey at the end. You can tell us what you thought of today's webinar, but first just a couple of announcements before we wrap up. I wanted to make sure you know about some upcoming TechSoup for libraries and TechSoup webinars coming up on March 29th. We have our TechSoup Tuesday tour so you can learn more about what TechSoup has to offer at that if you're interested. And then we have two libraries webinars coming up on Wednesday, April 27th. We have one on Instagram for public libraries. That should be a lot of fun. And then on Wednesday, May 4th we have one on outcome measurement for public libraries and we'll be looking especially at smaller and rural libraries in that webinar. So mark your calendars and stay tuned on our webinar and events page for registration details on those if you're interested. Also, if you haven't been to TechSoupforLibraries.org in a while please take a look at that website. We've recently gotten a little bit of a makeover website there, but TechSoupforLibraries collects stories about libraries, how libraries are utilizing technology and we share them via the blog and we also share them on webinars like this one. And so you can read more about other libraries experiences there. Also if you have a story to share you can submit your story there and we would love to certainly love to hear from you. So please do stay in touch and visit TechSoupforLibraries.org for more. Thanks also to our webinar sponsor today, ReadyTalk. Once again, stay on the line please for just a brief survey. Thanks Scott and Jessica for sharing what their expertise is in digital literacy training resources and thank you for joining us today. We hope you have a great afternoon. Bye-bye.