 OTAN Outreach and Technical Assistance Network. Welcome, everyone. So my name is Martha Clayton. I am the only full-time ESL faculty person at my home college, which is Los Angeles City College. We are part of a nine-college district called Los Angeles Community College District. And what I'm going to talk to you about today is what we call Liquid EL Civics. This is part of an evolution. This has been an ongoing project for several years. This started way back before the pandemic. Actually, let me ask you a question really quick. Is everybody here an EL Civics participant? Did your agency or school, your program, participate in EL Civics? OK, I see a couple of thumbs up. All right, excellent. You can feel free to turn your cameras on and give me a real thumbs up if you want, or if you're sneaking your lunch, that's fine, too. OK, so hi, Laura. So when I started working at my, hey, Karina, when I started working at my college, EL Civics was a new thing to me. Adult Ed was a new thing to me. And when we started participating in EL Civics, it was kind of like we were handed a stack of paper and told, jam this into your syllabus somehow. And I hated it. And I was like, why are we doing this? You're telling me two weeks into the semester. I now have to include 30 hours of instruction on the DMV. That's not in my syllabus. How am I supposed to do this? And you want the results in two weeks. So we've been kind of playing with a lot of different ideas and to make EL Civics more truly integrated and more natural. Because I think that the skills that we target in EL Civics are incredibly useful. These are real things we all need to know to be successful in Southern California, in Los Angeles, in California, in the United States. So I've been working for a while with our EL Civics coordinator to find ways and techniques of kind of making it a little bit smoother. And we started really simple. We started with doing things like having an EL Civics calendar that outlined what the co-apps would be before the semester started. So we could actually build our syllabus around that important milestone. And step in the process. And so one of the big things we did was a few years ago, myself, I, and another faculty person from my college participated in D-LAC for our district. And so what we did was we started a project called Digital EL Civics, which I'm going to show you right now. I'm going to share my screen, which may take over your screen. You can minimize. So that way you don't have to see a giant version. So what we did was we created Canvas-ready shells that faculty could use. And we had a few reasons for this. One was my love-hate relationship with EL Civics tasks and assessments. But the other was that we were trying to increase digital literacy skills for our in our curriculum overall. And we kept it kind of simple. We would start out with a little module so students could learn how to use the tools in Canvas. Let me actually put this in Student Views. You can see it from a student perspective. And so I went too far. So we started step by step. Here's a couple of different tools students need to be able to do in the class, like a discussion, how to make a video, how to record your voice, how to take a quiz. So this would be kind of like our introduction to the actual technology skills that we needed them to use. And then we worked out some really fantastic curriculum. And this was designed by me and a few other faculty members. And we really wanted these lessons to be something that wasn't inserted in the middle of something else. We wanted faculty to say, oh, hey, I've got that health unit coming up. I can just I can add this supplemental unit in Canvas. And so it follows a WAPEA lesson plan format with lots of opportunities for students to learn all four skills plus grammar and pronunciation. So it's not just limited to the final tasks they need to do. We wanted it to be a real ESL lesson. And so for this one, this was for our health and nutrition 46.4. We started with healthy food resources. This is where students learn how to search for healthy food resources in their neighborhood. We did comparing food prices. So we included vocabulary, reading, speaking, grammar, presentation, things like that. So we didn't want students to feel like their course was disrupted or there was some kind of strange hiccup in the flow of curriculum. So and then there's always like an in-class activity that you do with them to see if they're ready for the assessment. And we also put our assessments into Canvas. And this has been one of the things people ask me the most questions about. They'll say, well, how do you proctor this? We're in Zoom. I can see everything they're doing. I can have my entire class record their voice while they're in Zoom and also using Canvas. So that's been a real lifesaver. So basically what I do is I have students mute their Zoom microphone, but then use their Canvas microphone so they can do role play conversations with me as an entire group. And so we were super proud of this. And we've used this for a few years now. I was in the D-LAC cohort that graduated like two days before we were put into lockdown. So we were actually flying home from Sacramento and got word that we weren't going to be able to go back to work in person. So one thing I want to say is that D-LAC made it possible for our program to really thrive during quarantine. So if any of you haven't participated in D-LAC, I highly recommend it. It really, really helped us a lot. So that was our original project. And we're still working on improving integration. And one of the things that I've, oh, Carmen Delgado is here. She's my D-LAC partner. For me, she's down at the bottom there. So I'm just going to check the chat really quick to see if there's any, how are, okay. So I have a question here from Lori. How are the assessments kept secure if they're in Canvas? You put a date on them, you lock them. You can put a date so students can't open them without a password. So there's a bunch of features in Canvas where you can limit access to different parts. And that's what I do is I give them, I have a password. I have it passed, the assessments are password protected. And so they don't get the password until we're in class together that day and go into it at the same time. So no, okay. So next question is from Laura. She says, it looks amazing. Thank you. Did you make different shells for different ESL levels or was it one size fits all? So the way that we created the shells, for example, for that nutrition co-app, there are three parts. Beginner low, beginner high have to do the first two parts and then intermediate has to do the third. So the first two and the third. So basically as they move through, it becomes increasingly more challenging. So for students who are only beginner low, beginner high, they're just gonna do the first two lessons and the first two task assessments. For intermediate students, they're gonna do all three. And they're broken apart, so that way faculty can use them in whatever order they want. Instead of having like one giant module, they're broken up by topic. To teach, do teachers manipulate? Yeah, okay. So this is a question from Karina. Teachers can adjust these modules however they want. If they've already covered the grammar topic or maybe they don't want to cover that particular grammar topic, they can totally adjust it. They have, I'm in a community college, so we have academic freedom. We don't have a top-down directive on what we have to teach. So faculty will adjust them the way they want to. They can just unpublish anything they don't wanna use. And we tried to make it robust enough that there's a lot to choose from or they can just start at the first one and work their way through it. Carmen, okay, you don't have, all right. I think that's the last question. If you have questions, please, you can put them in the chat or you can just kind of politely interrupt or raise your hand or whatever. I'm totally open to an open forum. So that was the first phase of our digital EL civics project. And I'm still always trying to figure out ways that we can integrate EL civics more. And so this is an example of what I did in the winter, our winter intercession. I was teaching a conversation class and it was a 54-hour class. But because it's the winter session, we met Monday through Thursday and instead of like once a week for 16 weeks. And so what I did was I decided to use the EL civics materials for my entire class. And this went in conjunction with us developing themes for EL civics for our entire program. So this academic year, our theme is health and nutrition. And so what I did was I just used the materials. I mean, this is what we used, went through the same process. This is the same module. And I would intersperse the EL civics materials with other materials I use in conversation classes. So in my conversation classes, we watch a lot of short films and we have discussion topics and things like that. So that's how I introduced it. We started with one of our film analysis modules. I'm gonna turn my blinky light on. And that led into the first EL civics lesson of healthy food resources. And of course the topics correspond so they're kind of paired together. And this worked really, really well. Students didn't feel any kind of strange scheduling. It made sense, the entire class, the topic of the entire course was health and nutrition. And they knew that when they started. So they were just like, okay, let's do this. And so every other module in this class was an EL civics module. And so by the time we got to the end, which was here, mini portfolio, they were ready for these assessments. One thing I did notice for like kind of improved integration and better student engagement was I stopped calling the assessments assessments. I found that anytime I said quiz or test or assessments or even like a little check-in, students affective filter would go up and they would just be like, I can't teach or I can't do it. And so I changed the name of the assessments to mini portfolio. And it was like, it was all of a sudden the sun came up for everybody. The students were like, hey, when are we doing the portfolio? Do we get to see it after? Are you gonna share it with the office? Like they had all these excited questions and all I did was stop calling it assessments. But I ended up having in this class, I actually did this with two classes during the winter and I had almost 90% participation in the complete EL civics materials and assessments for those classes, which was like incredibly high because half the time students will try and dodge the assessment day and things like that. So I totally recommend teaching through trickery. If you need to, it really works. And then I just kind of closed out this whole topic with a final project. And what we did was we watched Super Size Me, the documentary about the guy that eats McDonald's for a month. And we did some writing about it. And so this was like a little bit more in depth integration, which was really, I felt really successful and pretty easily adaptable for kind of any class format. Do we have any chat questions? Okay, let me just check the chat. No chat questions. Okay, thanks. All right, so, but still this is like kind of preliminary experimentation was really trying to make it a more seamless process. And one of the things that faculty in our program shared with me was sometimes they didn't like the materials that were offered to them. And, you know, a lot of our books have correlative materials, but maybe it's not quite enough for what they need to do overall. And, oh, okay, Laura, great question. All of my EL Civics Canvas modules are available for free on Canvas Commons. If you type in my name, you will find them. They are edited, you can edit them however you want. You know, I would love if you, you know somewhere on there, keep a little credit for city college or something, but, you know, I am open to share always. So if you go to Canvas Commons, you can find all these materials. Yeah, okay, so Lori, totally 30 hours, right? Sometimes I teach, we have a lot of 54 hour classes at my location, at my home college. So if you all of a sudden have to do 30 hours on the DMV, you don't have any time to actually adhere to your course outline. So this is absolutely part of my motivation. How can we truly integrate EL Civics where it's seamless and we're getting that 30 hours of exposure to a topic? And that brings us to where we are today. So about a year ago, I guess now, our voc ed full-timer, Kimberly Guppy, who is a fantastic instructor, she attended a workshop on something called liquid syllabus. And she sent me a link on my phone and I clicked it and this amazing, beautiful, slightly, like animated, dynamic, completely accessible document opened that just blew my mind. And I was like, what is this? And she's like, it's a liquid syllabus. And I was like, well, how did you do this? Where did you find this? What is this that you're showing me? And so I ended up doing a training which took like an hour or something. It was really short to learn about this idea of a liquid syllabus, which means that it's highly mobile, highly accessible. That's all it means. And so in the training, they had used a tool, they'd used Google sites. Now at our college, we don't use Google products. We use Microsoft products. That's what we have that's protected by FERPA. So I try to avoid Google stuff because I don't know if students' privacy is protected and whatnot. So we have a product in Microsoft called Sway. And so I started thinking about it and I was like, this would be really great for EL Civics. We could gather materials, authentic materials, not weird worksheets and strange, like scripted interview style dialogues for students to use, but we could actually put together real materials which supports the entire kind of principle of EL Civics and base it around our college and community and make something that's really useful for students that is accessible for all levels that we teach and also all disciplines in our program. Cause we have ESL, vocad, CTE and basic skills. And so I didn't want this to be limited to just ESL and EL Civics. So what we did was we created, let me go back, I'm going to share my screen again, get ready. What we did was we created the, let's get to work newsletter. And I'm going to send you the link to this. I'm going to put the link in the chat and I recommend that you open it on your phone as well. Let me just double check that I typed it correctly. Hang on. And Martha. Yes. One of your contract, I think it's your chat box. It was the black box on the picture. Yeah, I'm just going to, I'm going to just double check this URL and then I'll share again in one sec. Oops. I know I hate those black boxes, right? You would think that Zoom would have figured something out for that by now. Hang on. I made a tiny URL for this. So it would be a little bit easier than trying to do the, you know, like the generated. Yes, that's it. Okay. So here's the link in your chat, in the chat. You can look at it on your computer screen but I would love for you to see it on your phone so you can see how gorgeous it is for all of our students, our non-credit students or our adult students who are mobile device only. It's completely resizable, scalable. It works with screen readers. I can make it really small and it still looks good or I can make it really big and it still looks good. It has a table of contents button so you can use this as for reading skills which is really fun with the lower, with some of our lower level students, lower proficiency. And you get these gorgeous table of contents images that are based on the things that you put in your sway. Again, you can do this with Google sites also. So if your agency relies on Google products, you can do it with Google. If you're using Microsoft, you can use sway. Now they don't need an app for this. They don't need to install anything on their phones or their computers. So it's really nice. They don't have to log in to an account. There's no sign up. Anybody who gets the link can look at this. And so I'm gonna make this just a little bit smaller. And move it over there. And so what we did was we, just like a newsletter or a newspaper or a magazine, we started with information related to the program. So we start with an introduction. Oh, sorry. My mouse is acting up a little today so I apologize. We have lots of links embedded. So we're amping up the technology skills and digital literacy. At the same time, we're secretly giving them ESL lessons and EL Civics integration. So they can click on anything, any link and open it to find out more. So this goes to our program website so they can enroll in more classes. We have a few events that we've tied into this. You know, we're always trying to increase our persistence and increase our attendance. So last semester we started doing a family movie night and we scheduled these for the Sunday after major holidays. So in the fall, it was the Sunday after Thanksgiving for the spring. It's the Sunday after spring break because we noticed the biggest dip in attendance after those big holidays. The films that we watch are related to our theme. So in the fall, we watched East Side Sushi which is a fantastic film starring only non-native English speakers in situations that are very similar to the life that many of our students have experienced being in the United States. And we do that on Zoom. We share it on Zoom. We don't have people come to campus. We do the whole thing on Zoom and we have the instructors share instructional materials. We have viewing questions. You know, we have before viewing, during viewing, after viewing because we wanna make it instructional for multiple reasons, but especially so we don't get a copyright infringement against us for showing films without a license. So that's one of our big ones that we've added in that goes with it. And then we also for this spring, we've started, we're starting next week what we call walk and talk Thursdays. Many of our ESL students have told us they have a hard time getting speaking practice outside of class. So we decided to have this walk and talk Thursday. So that way students have an opportunity to speak with people and each other. So it's very casual. We're just meeting at our office and then going up to our track. And we're gonna try and trim some of the COVID-20 that we've all gotten in the last couple of years. And it goes again with our theme. And we're actually tying it into a little bit of a contest. Students can share their step count and we're gonna create a leaderboard that, sorry, my, oh, there we go. Students can enter their step counts. So we can do a leaderboard and kind of share our success. Again, this gives them another technology skill. They're using a form, which is part of the EL, almost every EL civics co-app has some fill out the form task to it. So we figured we would make it an authentic one that we're using. So, oh, Naomi, I have an idea for that. Remind me, don't let me go before we talk about that. So, Mark, there's another question from Lori. Are staff slash instructors paid to develop these materials? Yeah, I develop these materials on the full-timer. Faculty, like this was, wait, are you talking about the canvas shells? The original digital EL civics? I was talking either of them, but this especially seems like an extracurricular kind of thing. So I was just wondering, do you feel like you're compensated for doing this? That's all I was asking. Oh, yeah, well, I'm full-time. So, yeah, so you know how that goes. Yeah, this actually is not, this was actually pretty fast to make. And now that I've done it a few times, because I update these once a month, I change out some of the information and I'm gonna show you how Sway looks. So you can see it's really simple. There's templates and stuff. So, yeah, the form that students can use to share their step information for the walk-in talk, again, that reinforces those EL civics tasks that are benchmarks for us. So everything you'll see in here is part of an EL civics task or assessment or some goal that we have related to whatever the co-app is. And then we also have a student writing showcase where students can submit their writing and it's tied, they'll have some questions. We haven't published the questions yet. They have some writing prompts that are related to the theme. And then the last month of the semester we showcase all their writing. That's what the entire issue is, it's all student writing. And so, you know, with Sway, all of these images pop out. So even if you're working with very low proficiency students, there is material in this that students can, that you can use in your class and that students can engage with. Even our lowest proficiency students can click on an image or tap an image on their phones. We went with the newsletter format so that way it supports all of the reading skills and academic skills as students kind of transition between community English and sort of academic professional English. So of course we have tables of contents. We always have hot skills, some things students need to know, like how to enroll in a class or how to use cleared for access. That's our app we need to get onto campus during COVID. And then we just have a lot of material that's related to the co-app. So again, right now this year, our theme is health and nutrition. So we've got, you know, how to create a healthy plate from the USDA. We have an article about eating your way to a healthy life in 2020. Lots of stuff has links so you can learn, students can learn more. If you want to go more advanced, it can click out to an article that's like at a higher lexile level and things like that. It's really your choice. We always spotlight one of our certificates and we just, we have a lot of new medical certificates and that goes with health and nutrition. So we highlighted the phlebotomy technician program that we just started. So students can read about it, see if they wanna do this and then if they do, they can click the link to talk to a counselor. We've got videos about some of our classes that we offer and then we always highlight campus resources. You know, a lot of our students come to campus, they go to class and they never look in another building. And so they don't realize that they have a ton of community resources right there at the college. And so because it, you know, again, health and nutrition this month or this semester's campus resources are all centered on our wellness center or health and wellness center. So again, there's all, this is all authentic materials and students can do all of the things we are trying to help them do for EL Civics using real things they can interact with on campus instead of just like, you know, paper examples. So you've got phone numbers, schedules. What do they offer? What's the address? How do they fill out a patient registration and consent form? This one's one of my favorites right now because when you click on this, it goes to the forms page for the clinic. So you can actually use these real materials for students with students in class. There's a fillable version that you can practice online. Like this one is actually a fillable form, but then there are also the English and Spanish forms that you could print out if you want. And students can see what a real form looks like and they can practice in class. And then if they want to, for us, they can actually pay a nominal fee to get healthcare on campus. So you can actually get them through that whole process as the EL Civics assessment. So like that's what my class is doing. We're actually going to, you know, practice these forms, fill them out, go to the health center, you know, make sure their fee is up to date. And I have a rubric and I'm just going to check it off and be like, okay, they really did this. Instead of pretending to do it in a classroom, they're going to really do it for their life. So it just kind of goes on. We always have a people in places section and we highlight people from Los Angeles. Our college is practically in the heart of Koreatown. And so our people in places this month or actually probably for most of this semester is Chef Roy Choi, who's a local. And, you know, it's got biographies about him. It's got some videos. So people can kind of see the success that other folks who have moved to LA, who they relate to, because, you know, they know them from their community or maybe they just kind of look like them or they share some kind of, you know, cultural practice. There are a lot of people that are successful in our area who have a similar story. So just to kind of reinforce that community feeling. And then we include job postings, right? Workforce education and literacy. So we've got our job postings. I try to pick a job that's connected to the theme and then or to one of our certificate programs. This time it's a catering job, but students can also click to go to our job center on campus. And they can see all of the jobs that are available to them. And almost all of these jobs require a high school diploma. Some don't require a high school diploma, but you know, they're all kind of entry level positions. So they're accessible for everyone. It's an opportunity for everyone. And then of course we've got our contact information. And so I'm gonna pause for a second and answer some questions. And then we will look at a couple other things. Oh, thank you, Lori. Lori said something. She said, this is great. It looks good. Thank you. I appreciate that. And then did anybody open it on their phone or click so you could kind of see how you can resize things? Yes, no, maybe so. Yes, no. It's just like a class. Oh, awesome, Barbara. Thank you. Okay, I got a great question here from Marin. Marin says, how do students... Yeah, it does work great on the phones, right? It's like gorgeous. Students can do it all from their phone, which is really nice. Marin asks, how do students get these newsletters each month? Do the teachers email this information? Do they need to teach it, break it down for students first, or is it posted on the school website? Okay, this is a great question. I love this. Yes to everything, except the last one about the website. I'm gonna show you a couple of things here. So it's got a share button. And depending on... Like I make the settings for this, the sharing settings are set up so anyone with the link can share. They can't edit. I'm the only one who can edit, but anybody can share it because I want students to also know how to share things. So you can share it a couple of ways. Can you all see the little share dialog box that I just opened? Yes. Okay, so you can make it be for specific groups, people in your organization, or anyone with the link. If you choose anyone with the link, then it's really easy for students. They don't need an app. They don't need their login information. They can just look at it. So you can just send the link out. You can copy and paste this link. You can get embed code. If you're using social media tools, you can send it to those. But I love... And there are also more options here like, do you want them to have a share button or not or require a password? You can get really technical about it. But this is one of my favorites here, this get visual link. This is so good for sending out emails to your students. So when you click on it, it makes this gorgeous little graphic. And so you just copy this and then paste that into an email. And they get this picture right here that you're seeing and they can click on it. So it makes a really beautiful graphic link instead of just like a text link. And then the other thing we do, oops, the other thing we do is we use Canvas at my college. Let me turn this off. I am in the wrong shell here. Wait, is this the right one? Oops, hang on. Let me get the right Canvas shell. So we use Canvas at our college and we use it for in-person, online, everything. And so we have a great tool in Canvas called redirect. And this allows you to put your own link in the navigation of your Canvas class. So right here, you'll notice it says, let's get to work. This is the link to the newsletter. So students can click on this and it's gonna open it for them right away. They don't have to click play. Sway knows that I'm the author so it shows it's me in edit form. So all I have to do is tell my students to go to that link and then they can read it. So the way that I use this is in some of my classes, it's just kind of extra credit, extra practice. And I say, oh, go read it and we'll talk about it in class next time we meet. For some of my classes, we go through and we analyze a text, especially for things like any place where there's a form, if that's a task we're working on, completing forms and personal information or if we are talking about how to enroll in classes, we'll watch the video together and then analyze a certificate requirement description so that way they can see the real materials and make choices. And then we can use all those real materials instead of an example one. I'm just gonna hit the questions really quick. Martha, there was a question above from Karina. She asked, did you get reassigned time to develop shells, sway, et cetera? Okay, so the Canvas shells, our digital EL Civics Canvas shells, we, the team of us that did that, we got stipends. We got stipends for that. For the sway, this is part of my full-time job. Curriculum is part of my obligation. So it's actually really quick to make these. So it's not that much time. And it's just kind of part of what I do. It really depends on your situation for some agencies or programs. I would definitely, I'm always forgetting us more money or release time. So it kind of depends on what you have going on, you know? Last semester when I did this, it was a little bit more of a pilot. So it took me longer. There were some mistakes made as far as like how much updating I could actually do with my workload as well, my teaching load as well. And so this semester, I'm only updating it once a month. And I actually didn't do a different update between February and March. Like February and March are the same because February is so short. It really kind of depends on what works best for you. And you could just have one newsletter that's not updated for the semester and you'd still have plenty of material to share with faculty and students. So it really, it's really up to how you feel about it and how much time you have and what you wanna accomplish or what you wanna include. Did that answer your question? Thumbs up, yes. Okay, awesome. Your next question starts with Laura. Okay, so have you ever tried to embed this Sway newsletter into Canvas? Yes, I don't like it. It ends up like, it's not, it doesn't look as good. I'm not really sure how it works with the screen readers. We have a lot of visually impaired students because our college, my home college is right next door to the Braille Institute. And so I try not to do too much embedding of like apps within Canvas. Like if it's a document, it's okay but I just didn't like the way it looked. So we discovered the redirect tool which I can show you guys, I can show everybody how that works. And it just simplified it by having it in the course navigation instead of having it be embedded in the page. Marin says, how do you decide the topic themes of each month? Do students and teachers give you input as well? Okay, so our EL civics coordinator did the needs assessment and our themes were picked from that. So for, we had, it just kind of happened by a happy accident that last semester and this semester we had nutrition and health. So I was like, hey, that's easy. Let's, we'll do health and nutrition. That's our theme for the year, right? So somehow I'm actually gonna squeeze in the DMV at the end. And I think I'm gonna do that through, the way I'm gonna connect it is, it's time to go on vacation. We need to get our licenses to go on that trip to the beach because we need to relax from our hard work which is healthy. So, I mean, there's some room there. You can play with it. You can kind of make those connections however you need to. But yeah, it seems that creating themes for EL civics makes the integration a lot easier because then you have everyone involved. Everyone knows, oh, this is our group theme for the semester or our group theme for the academic year. And it makes it a lot easier to find places where you can get that 30 hours of exposure to the topic or you can slip it into your class, like, oh, we're gonna work on this which otherwise might seem like a strange shift in topic. And it also helps with, so I have this, so kind of my philosophy for, especially for non-credit adult education is that instruction starts at outreach. And so using the themes, we can have everybody in our program talking about these ideas, whether a student is coming into the front desk to enroll in a class or pick up a textbook, there is material there on the topic, on the theme. You can hear people talking about our walk and talk Thursdays, they can get access to the wellness center. Like, I'm trying to improve that sort of full integration and almost like immersion in the theme for the semester. So that way, any place they go in our program, they're going to be exposed to this topic which will add to their overall exposure to the co-app information if that wasn't like a super long explanation. Did I answer that question? Okay, so I wanna go back to Laura's question about embedding the sway. So I didn't really like the way it looked and I'm gonna show you, let me just go to my, I'm gonna go to one of my development shells so we can see what this looks like. All right, so this is just a development shell that I use. So it's got a whole bunch of mix and match, all kinds of weird stuff in here. And so I'm just gonna go to modules. And so if I wanna embed this in a page, it's going to look like this. So I've got my page, create page and we'll say, let's get to work. And I add my page and then I come in here and I'll clickity click, edit. And I want to embed, where's my sway? So I'm gonna share, I'm gonna get my embed code. And when I come back here and I put it in, I just didn't like how it looked like this and it restricts it in the page in a way that I think is kind of a waste considering how like dynamic sway is. So I just did not like this. And that was my, other faculty did different things. I just personally didn't like the way it made it all kind of blocked in like this. And so what I do instead is I go to settings and I go to this apps tab here and I type in redirect. I'm going a little bit faster than my internet is so I apologize. And so I click on this redirect tool, add the app and I can make the name anything I want. So I say, let's get to work. So I spell everything right, no. And I put my link in the bottom here and I'm gonna tell it to show in course navigation. And I say add app. And now when I go to my navigation it's right here. This shows it at the bottom. I actually move it up to the top in my classes because I want students to click on it. But I just wanted to show you that it puts the navigation. It makes a unique navigation item for your class. And so I put this link into all my canvas shells. I'm gonna leave this and I'll show you a live course so you can see what it actually looks like. So this is my ESL level two like intro to academic skills class. You can see it's right here, students can click on it and go directly to it. I also send it out on Remind. So if any of you are using like other apps to communicate with your students like Remind or Google Voice or anything where you can send them a text message I send it out on that a lot too. And I will use Remind to remind them and say like, hey, don't forget to read that city spotlight that we talked about in class and put the link in there and then they can read it on their phones. And yeah, that's kind of the whole thing. Let me see, I see a couple of questions. So I'm just gonna answer those. Okay, needs assessment. How much collaboration between you and the teachers to develop this or evaluation from teachers? So we have a really interesting situation in my program. I'm the only full-time, there are two full-time faculty people. One for ESL that's me and another for Voguead. And we have about 50 adjuncts who participate in sort of administration style activities to varying degrees. So it's a mix. Some people collaborate and some people don't. Some people offer feedback and some people don't. So it really kind of depends on who contributes and who doesn't. I get a lot of feedback from our different discipline coordinators. And a lot of the materials I choose for the newsletter, it really has to do with what the topic is and will that material, will that item, whatever it be, whether it's a text or a video or a form or whatever, will that scaffold students' ability to complete the assessment in an authentic way? Will students be able to do the thing that we're trying to help them with, whether it's filling out a medical application or calling into their boss to tell them they're gonna be absent from work? I'm really, really into like authentic materials and authentic assessments. I cringe whenever I see an assessment that's like a fake version of a real thing. So I'm always trying to find ways where students can really do the thing instead of just doing it in the classroom because doing a dialogue in a classroom is not the same as calling someone on the phone. And so why waste their time having that be the assessment when I can have them actually call me and call in? And so it's kind of a mix as far as like the collaboration. It's a mixed bag. Sometimes there's lots of collaboration. Sometimes there's not as much. Yeah, I think that might be all. So Laura asked a question about Canvas Commons. I'll double check on that Laura and make sure that everything's available, but it's not like a huge, we don't have Canvas shells for every co-app. We've got Canvas shells for some. And then we have, but I'll double check some of the settings, like later to make sure that they're public. I'm just double checking. Oh, so the redirect link. Yes, okay. So the question is from Karina. Can you do more than one redirect link? Yes, you can. And you can make that redirect link in Canvas, go to any external link. So if you have some other material that you want students to connect to without fully leaving Canvas, you can put a link to anything there. You could make one, two, five, a hundred. Well, redirect link was one of the most amazing things I just learned about in Canvas. Completely changed everything for me. It was like such a simple thing, but it really all of a sudden it's like, oh, I don't have to try and train students how to go to this other thing. I can give them the link right there and they can click on it. And it just really changed a lot of stuff. Laurie, yes. I agree, authentic assessments, right? Like if we want students to be able to do something, then they should actually do that thing instead of doing the pretend practice version of it. Marin asked, does Sway have some standalone accessibility features and can it read aloud and can you have it translate into other languages for the lower levels or if you open it in Edge? I don't know about the Edge question. I don't know. I don't think it, I'm not, and honestly, I'm not sure about the translation thing either. I do not want to translate for this because we offer a lot, a lot, a lot of support through translation. And realistically, I think we offer a little too much. With Canvas, we've got Immersive Reader and they can put their Canvas profile into other languages and I feel like sometimes we're losing a little bit of language development. So with this Sway, I have not even, sorry, I just knocked my headphone off. With this Sway, I have not even looked into it because I feel like they're getting enough, primary language scaffolding in other ways and I really, really want to push them so that way, we've got the layer of rigor. Now the way I set up our newsletter is there are varying levels of reading levels, right? It varies. Some things are much more simple. Like the welcome paragraphs are going to be the most accessible for all students, but I also wanted it to be something that our students who are in GED classes might be interested in reading too. So I tried to put a mix in of lexile levels and complexity so that way all students can participate and then I really try to have the images which would be for our lowest level or lowest proficiency level students have the images be connected to the theme in a way that's meaningful. So let's take a look at a couple of those. And I don't know about Edge. You know, I don't use Edge, which is kind of funny considering I use Microsoft for everything else. So let me just minimize this a little bit so it's not so massive. So for example, you can, oops. You can click on every single image and it will pop out. So you can actually use that as your primary, demonstration or lecture material, especially for your lower proficiency students. Maybe here you're talking about fruit and vegetable vocabulary or colors or comparing prices. So I really try to look for things that will assist from the lowest proficiency student to the highest proficiency student. And then also, like I said earlier, I chose the newsletter format because I felt like this was an easy way to embed academic literacy skills in the sense of table of contents, headings, support graphics, subtitles, all of those kind of reading skills that are beyond just being able to read the text on the page but could actually help carry them forward into like more academic skills-focused classes and things like that. But even the banners, like this one here, I can click this out. And now we've got nutrition facts, which went with one of our nutrition co-app, but still carries over to our health co-app. So you can use these for discussions with the lower proficiency students or higher with any students. But you can also, you know, work on those really foundational technology skills. You know, having somebody, we all know that for some students, simply clicking on an image could be an entirely new skill that they've never learned before. So yeah, I guess that's, I don't wanna ramble too much. Yeah, all of the images click out. I love the hot skills. Is it okay to share your link? Yeah, you can share the link. Share, share with everybody. I think there was one more question too that I missed. I don't think so. Okay, okay. So I wanna take a few minutes and we have a few minutes left, right, Veronica? Yes, we're done at 3.30. Oh, okay, perfect, okay. So I wanna show you a little bit of the back end of Sway. So you can see how easy it is to use. I'm not, like I said, I'm not a huge Google sweet user, but I do have Google sites open. So, I mean, this is what the workshop I went to about using this for syllabus design, they used this. And this is, it works very similarly, similarly, but you can click on a template and then it has all kinds of, you know, you can change the text. You can do all these things on the right for design elements. So if you're a Google nerd, you're probably gonna wanna use Google Slides. If you're using the Microsoft Suite, I use Sway and now my computer is being, oh, close that. And so I'm just gonna bring you over to my dashboard here so you can kinda see what it looks like. So Sway is really simple. You can create new, you can start from a topic. You can, if you have a document, a Word document or a PDF that you've used in the past for something, you can actually start from that too. And it'll put it into a Sway that you can then edit, which is really, really useful if it's your first time using this tool and you're feeling a little intimidated or nervous. What I did was I started with a template, which was the blog template. And so this is what it looked like when I first got there. And I just kinda started changing stuff. So I just clicked on start. It turns it into a template. And then you can, it's, you just start typing. You can add images. It's got a little, it's got limited functionality. I mean, it doesn't have like tons of features, but you can do a lot. You can put captions in for everything. You can put an image in. What I really like is that it connects to a whole bunch of options, including YouTube. So I'm able to embed my videos right into it through YouTube. I don't have to do any HTML. I don't have, you can't even see the HTML for this. And so for example, if we go back to, let me get rid of this guy. Yes, delete. Here's the actual newsletter. This is what it looks like when I go to it because I'm the editor. So it always shows me from the edit view, but I can change all of these anytime. It's as simple as copy and paste. It really is no more, it's no more complex than any social media you've ever used or a Word document or a PowerPoint. If you can do a PowerPoint presentation, you can do this. One of the things I think is really cool is you can export it and it will make a Word document or PDF. And this is how I archive our different issues of the newsletter. I don't make a new one for every month. It's always, I use the same file so I don't have to change the URL, the tiny URL. And I just save a copy of it. So I can click on Word and it's gonna export it for me. And so let me just save this really quick and I'll show you what it looks like. So I'm gonna stop share, open the document and reshare. Come on friend. And so this is what it looks like in Word document form. So it makes a really beautiful Word document and it also will keep the links active. So it copies all the links into the Word document. So maybe you have a student who can't access technology. Maybe they don't have a phone, they don't have a tablet, they don't have a computer, no laptop, they just don't have anything. You can give them a document that has all of the same information in it. So no student is being excluded from this for lack of technology resources. They may not be able to click on the links but they can read them and they can understand what's happening and they can share with the rest of the class. They also pops out all those banner images. So you get the full image. They still have a table of contents. They still have the videos. The videos are embedded in the document. So even if they don't, if they can't see this document on a device, if they're only looking at the printed form, they can at least have a connection with what's going on and possibly ask another student, hey, can you show me that video on your phone? So, which will hopefully encourage collaboration and teamwork and peer-to-peer support. So I really love how it keeps all the links active and it keeps the formatting almost identical. So yeah, this is what it looks like in the paper format. And I'm gonna answer a couple of questions here. Oh, Laura put in a really good link to liquid syllabus, liquid syllabi, I don't know, liquid syllabuses. They're really cool, students love it. When you send them a liquid syllabus link, they seem to get really excited. So do you link to previous newsletters in the current one? No, because I only use one Sway file. So what I do is before I do an updates for the month, I export the document version and then I just put the new information on top of the old one. One of the reasons that I decided that is because one, I didn't wanna deal with storing a whole bunch of old Sways. If I'm gonna update this every month or every two months, I didn't wanna have just like dozens of Sways in my dashboard. And also I really wanna keep it like a dynamic living document. And so one of the things that has frustrated me about Yale Civics for a long time is I'm handed the same materials that I was handed five years ago. And I just don't think that that's really valuable. So I wanted it to be really contemporary, like really in the moment of what we're trying to accomplish with whatever the task is. So I don't keep the digital Sway like for last semester, I only have that in Word and PDF format. Now you can take that Word or PDF document and you can put it back into Sway and make it a Sway again. But I wanted to just have like the document form for like the archive, so to speak. And Martha, there was a question from Marin. Do you provide a lesson plan to teachers on how to teach scaffold these newsletters? Yeah, we put together like a user guide when we first launched this and then they're on their own. They can do whatever they want with it. They can use it if they want, they don't have to. I really kind of promoted it to faculty as something that students could engage with a little bit more independently. So, you know, or use it for warm-up activities, you know, to kind of use it as like kind of a frame around other things they're doing. For one reason, I didn't want people to feel like they were being told what to do or anything like that. And I wanted them to see it as like a useful tool that they could use right away. I think I have, let me show you all the, where do I have that? I know I put in a user guide. I think it's, let's see. The Elsevix newsletter, yes. Okay. So in our digital literacy canvas shell, that's the one the faculty use to share materials and information, I started a module called Elsevix newsletter training video and instructional guide. And so in here we've got like the training video which was from a Zoom that we did, a Zoom training. It's probably really boring. It's just us talking. So I kind of walk faculty through it, like what it was and how and ways to use it. And then we also had, sorry, I'm all over the place here. Come on. Then we also, I also created an actual document instructional guide that kind of talks about different things they can do at different points. I'll make this bigger for everyone. So it has a description here of what it is and then how to, like what is it for students, what is it for instructors and then how it related to our co-apps. And then I did language and literacy objectives, the tasks and then how it all connects. So I don't do this for every single issue. I didn't do, honestly, I did that one in fall to get the ball rolling. And now we just kind of talk about it when it comes up. So, yeah, I mean, faculty have complete freedom to do what they want with it. Some faculty have told me, oh, it was great for showing students how to use a YouTube video, how to use the features on the, like the controls for a video. Last semester we had, one of our videos was about using student email. So a lot of faculty use that to show their students how to access their email. And then students kept going back to the sway to review the video when they wanted to check their email. So they ended up kind of organically reading articles and then asking questions about it and things like that. So we're not using it with like super strict guidelines by any means, which it was really kind of part of it. We wanted it to be really organic and let people do what they wanted with it. But there is a methodology like in the back of my head on what articles I pick and how that connects to a co-app and what campus resources we highlight and how that connects to everything. So there's a method, but then from the front, it feels really natural. Is it possible with either tiny URL or bit.ly to redirect existing short links? This way you wouldn't need to delete, rewrite everything. Probably I'm not, yeah, I'm just not doing that. It's just easier. It's just easier for me. I just do it this way. Some people like to archive the whole sway and then they make like a new one. I just copy over the old one and I save the Word document or PDF or archive because that's just what works for me. Yeah, I can share the user guide with you for sure. Let me grab that for you. Like I said, I did the user guide once and then I was like, that's it. I'm not gonna do this every time, but I did it to kind of get our faculty up to speed on that. Let me save a copy that I'll share with you. And I'm gonna put this in the chat for you. And I went kind of like nerdy and whatnot on the instructional guide, but yeah, but I figured like once we all started using it then people would kind of make their own practices and habits and I really didn't want it to feel like another example of EL Civics meaning somebody's gonna tell me what to do in my class because that was the way that I always felt about EL Civics, like someone was handing me a paper and saying, you have to do this and this is how you need to do it. And that really bothered me. So I tried to avoid that. So the instructional guide was really kind of more like, we made this thing, here's a bunch of stuff you can do with it but you can also do whatever you want or not use it at all. So that is in the chat. Anybody can download that and you can have that. And then Barbara asks, Martha, can you tell me how many of the teachers are using it? And I don't remember what that was in reference to. Maybe of using the sway. I don't know exactly how many are using it this semester. We've had about, for the last couple of semesters, because of the situation with COVID we had limited, it was only seniority staff was working, only seniority staff was assigned or mostly like 95%. And so that was about 30 to 35 people. And I would say, I think when I checked last semester, when I kind of like informally polled people, it was about, everybody had at least shown it to their class, but then using it really actively and making lessons around it and really integrating it into their syllabus and into their class practice, their community, their classroom practice, it was about, it was over half of them. Now, one of the things I really like is that when I go to my sway, if I click on like the main sway button, I can get analytics. And this little number here in the lower corner of the icon for each sway that I've made shows me how many people have looked at it. So right now for this sway, we've had almost 900 people look at it since I published it. It doesn't really, it breaks down the analytics by time, like how many people have glanced at it, how many have done a quick read and how many have done a deep read. Now, I don't really know how they judge that in this. I'm gonna assume it's by time, but you can see we have a lot of people who come and look at one thing quickly and then maybe move on. And that's okay. I feel like it's been worth the commitment. And I think it's gonna get better as we expand the integration and kind of like come together as faculty to think of other ways that we can improve it or make it work even more for like more students. So, we really only started this at the end of last summer or intercession at the end of last summer. So I would say that we're still kind of technically piloting this because it's only the second semester or really third semester, fall, winter, and now spring. So we'll know more. I'll have more data at the end of the semester, I guess. I don't really have a lot of data right now. So, yeah, that's kind of the whole, that's liquid EL civics. All right. Let's see if we have any other questions. There was more from, or one more, excuse me, from there. If some teachers decide not to use this resource, is there another way all students to access this? Oh, yeah, they can just go right to the link, you know. A lot of faculty like just put the link on their syllabus or they don't necessarily teach with it, but they give out the link. So, yeah, it's completely accessible for any student. They just have to be given the link, that's it. So, you know, and there are people who are doing that, you know, like they maybe used one part of it to demonstrate something, but then they, if teachers, if people don't share the link, they don't share the link, yeah. I mean, they could ask in the office. But, yeah, it's, I mean, teachers are the ones who are sharing information in general. So, if they're not sharing something, then they're not sharing it, which would make me really sad. And then they'd get my sad face and hopefully feel really bad about it and then share the link. But, yeah, you know, it's all about sharing. Could you share it at outreach? Yeah, you can share it anytime you want, you know. You could put it on your postcards, use a tiny URL. Remember, you know, instruction starts at outreach. Put that tiny URL on your postcards you're mailing out to your community and get students going to it that way. So, they're learning even before they're enrolled in a class, absolutely. I would love that. That's like my dream right there. So, that's a really great idea, Lori. I love that. Okay, cool. All right, any other questions for me? Did I miss anything or anything unclear? It's 100% free. I'm assuming you mean Sway, Marin. Yeah, we have Microsoft Suite is part of our college. So, all students get the Microsoft Office 365 suite for free, but you don't actually need to have the suite to access the Sway. So, even the students who like don't even know they have student email and they don't, you know, maybe they don't even know what Microsoft Office is, you know, they can still access Sway on their phone because I have the Sway sharing features to be anyone with that link. Yeah, that's weird. Did anyone else have trouble opening the instructional guide? Let me just make sure it, okay. You know what, I'm gonna really quickly make a PDF just in case and I'll put that up also. I'll put them both up just in case. I know, you know, sometimes the chat is not always 100% with the, that share feature. So, I'm such a dork. I just saved the PDF, I saved it, named it PDF, but then saved it as a Word document. I just put the Word document up there. So, and then we'll also do that one. Let me just double check that to make sure I didn't do it twice, okay. And I'll put the PDF up there for anybody who prefers that. So, hopefully you can open those. Let me know if that one opens, if you have any trouble opening that second, the second one and the PDF one. All right. Okay, we have, I think we have like five more minutes. So, hit me with your questions. What's the login for? Is that for me? There shouldn't be a login for anything. There should not be a login on, there is no login for Sway. Are you being asked for a login, Marin? No, just I noticed on the settings wheel, you can log in. And so I thought, oh, that's maybe for modifying or, I can pass everything without logging in, but I just wondered there was that option to log in under Hotmail or Microsoft. So the way, I'm just gonna share my screen one more time and for as many times as we want. So when I'm looking at it, so here if I go to the Sway, when I go to the share, there are options here where you can restrict it. You could make it specific people or groups, people in your organization, or you can require a password. So you can modify the sort of security and sharing settings. I just make it anyone with a link and that also that everyone can share. And you can reset the share settings and things like that because I want it to disseminate. I want students to share it with their family, especially when their writing is in there for the student writing showcase. So I make it completely public. So that way it's, there's no password, no login, no app that you need. And, which should allow you. Oh, so yeah, I make it completely public and open because I want them to share it with as many people as possible because it's also advertising for our program. It's if students are like, hey, this is cool. My cousin wrote an essay for her class and now she's in this newsletter, check it out. And they start sharing it and they're like, oh, hey, this is LA City College non-credit. We're gonna go sign up for their classes. Like, I feel like it fulfills multiple jobs. It's not just EL Civics, it's also a marketing tool. So yeah, so yeah, I make it totally public. All right. Okay, Laura's got some good notes here about Office 365. So yeah, it kind of all depends on what your agency uses. I know some are more Google oriented, some are more Microsoft oriented, but the Google sites liquid syllabi are awesome too. That's another great way to do it. Yeah, so whatever is most accessible to you is a really good way to do it. And students definitely love the writing showcase, you know, the fact that we do the last issue with a semester is all student writing. And they can also submit videos too. We just haven't had any submit videos yet, but they're encouraged to submit videos, artwork, writing, anything that they want. Because eventually I would like it to be student managed and not faculty managed, but that's gonna take a few years until we get to that point, I think. All right, okay. Any other questions? Oh, you are welcome. Oh, I'm gonna put my email in the chat. Also, you can also email me anytime to talk about sway or newsletters or teaching through trickery or ways to make EL Civics more integrated and kind of less of like something that makes people grown when they know it's time. So if that happens, that might not happen where you are. So yeah, you have my email and you can contact me anytime. Again, my name is Martha Clayton and I am from Los Angeles City College in the Los Angeles Community College District for non-credit adult education.