All right, welcome everyone to our last webinar of this OFAR cohort, and this is Una Daley. I'm here, of course, with James Clappa Grosskleig from College of the Canyons, our course facilitators, Liz Yadda, and some of our wonderful coaches for OFAR, and of course, all of you wonderful participants. And thank you so much for sharing more about what you've been doing this spring today with all of us, and sorry, I'm getting a little confused here, must be Friday. So I just wanted to say yay for happy Juneteenth, and it's, this is something that is long overdue, and this is, I did take this image from the CNN website, I normally don't do that, but I think this is fair use in this case. And so this is showing our President Biden signing the bill into law, which is from this year forward 2021 will be, I think it's our 12th national holiday. So very exciting. All right, our agenda is pretty much just to get in there and let our participants share a little bit about their experiences with their students, lessons learned. Once again, for those of you who might be joining us and don't know about CCCOER, we're supporting this program, co-leading this along with College of the Canyons. We've been working with colleges for over a decade on open education to support student equity and success. And once again, we have this wonderful cohort from 17 California community colleges dispersed around our state and in disciplines from administration of justice, right through social work, sociology, chemistry, biology, English, ESL, and you're going to hear from some of those folks today. This is our order of speakers. And Megan, I have to apologize to you. Somehow you got left out of our table of contents, but you're very much welcome. And I really apologize for that. I caught that a little earlier today. And so you are scheduled to go third to the last. So I hope that works for you. And we've moved Cindy Stevens to the end because Cindy is having some scheduling issues and we're certainly hoping she'll join us, but we've moved her to the end so that we can accommodate some issues that she's ever risen this morning. All right. And at this point, I'm going to turn it over to Jackie. I'm going to stop sharing my screen so that Jackie Williams from Fresno City College, who teaches English 1A composition and quite a few other things at Fresno City, will tell us about her work. Of course, I forgot to unmute. Thank you very much. Let me go ahead and hopefully everyone can see my slides. I just wanted to start by thanking everyone who is involved in OFAR from the grant coordinators to our facilitators, mentors, and all of my peers. This has been an amazing and transformative process. And my OFAR project was to create a student curated living reading list. So I wanted to start by talking a little bit about my OFAR journey because I had actually already done some pretty significant course redesign in response to the chancellor's call to action. I previously used a theme of happiness in my English 1A class and I had changed that to challenging power structures to really open up conversations with my students about how things that are happening in every day, you know, day to day life are really have these root causes that are deeply racist and embedded in American culture. And so we look at the struggle for equal representation in the media. We look at the struggle for representation in sports and several different topics through the course of the class. And doing the OFAR coursework, one of the things that I realized was that while I had selected an OER textbook, and I had selected an OER book length text by an African American activist, my first reading list on challenging, excuse me, on underrepresentation in film and media, most of the articles were actually written by white authors, which I hadn't even questioned that myself in the initial creation. And also every time I did this, this was my third time offering the class, I had gotten feedback from my students that there were other ways in which they were not seeing themselves represented. And so I wanted to give students an opportunity to help me design that unit better, as well as embed some of the key principles that we had covered in OFAR all into my project together. So what we're doing in the class is we're taking that initial reading list, and my students this term, they wrote their essay based on the list that I provided. But then as a group project, they revised that list. So they were able to expand, they were able to remove texts from the list, they were able to add topics that I had not previously covered and made sure that they had authors that were more representative of them as well. The students worked together to evaluate the text in small groups. And then we created a lib guide that can be shared not just with my future classes, but any of the faculty at my campus that would like to use this topic will have access to the lib guide. And so the plan is to make sure that we are continuing to revise this every semester and it's a reiterative process. When new students come in, they're looking at the list and they are bringing in new voices and new perspectives. Looking back at the OFAR curriculum, I was really inspired by the topic of open pedagogy. I had not really thought about the fact that all of my assignments were disposable. And so creating a lib guide created a non-disposable assignments. There was a lot of information about OER to go through with my students, which is actually going to make it easier for me to share information about OER with my colleagues. And so that was a really helpful part of the process. And then doing this project just, I think, really improved my course theme about challenging power structures because it turned the power to select the course materials back over to the students. So it's really been a positive experience for me and I hope for my students as well. Here's an example of the prompt that I gave them, inviting them to share their criticisms of the initial reading list, which some of them had shared with me individually, and then explaining how the list was going to be used for their class and for future classes. And then I did have to create some lessons, some additional lessons for the course on using OER. And so I just wanted to share we had some real issues in the class identifying the difference between copyrighted and creative commons. And so we had to have a lot of conversations about that as we move through the unit, which will help me improve the unit in the future. The resources here were shared by my mentor Aloha. So thank you again for all of your help through this process. And then we did an evaluation based on another OER resource, the CRAP test, which my library was already using, but I revised it a little bit to fit this project and make sure that it was tied really closely to our course theme. So the student reception for the project was overall very positive in what was a challenging semester. So I will say at the time we started this unit, I only had 36 students left between two sections. As many of you probably experienced a loss of students due to COVID-19 and remote learning, the retention rates weren't quite the same. And I had 21 students who completed the consent form. 20 of those students agreed to share their work in the final live guides. There was one student that was not comfortable sharing their work and only 13 students agreed to have their names included. So I had really hoped that being able to put this out there as something public that they worked on and they could show other people would be part of the incentive. But having only 13 students agree to do that, I'll have to kind of rethink that in the future. But you can see from the quotes on the screen that my students were very receptive to the project overall. One student noting his personal interest was about the underrepresentation for women in STEM fields. So that was not something I had covered in my original unit. And now it's something that's part of this larger living reading list that the students can choose from. For outreach, I have been sharing this. As was mentioned at the top, I wear a couple of different hats at Fresno City College. So we're doing a customized teaching and learning project right now where we're customizing math and English classes to our guided pathways and asking students to engage with their major material even earlier in their academic career. And so I was able to share what I learned about OER, examples of open pedagogy and some of the anti-racist reflection that we did in the course with the 25 faculty partners that we've trained for that program to date. And we will continue to share that as we move forward. I also am the faculty coordinator for our Title V grant. So we're developing a first year experience program and the CTL will become a component of that program. And then we as a campus created an OER work group last semester and we are running an OER grant in the fall asking other faculty to do scalable OER projects and the projects selected for the grant are going to be selected with an equity-minded rubric. So all of these things came about and were influenced by my work in OER and have been places where I could share what I learned in the program. My key takeaways that I think might be helpful to anyone starting a project or considering a future project. There was significant confusion among my students about the difference between copyright and Creative Commons. And so that did require a lot of support and reteaching on my part which again like I said before will make it a little easier for me to teach the second time around. But it was a lot the first time. But I put this unit right before our research paper and it actually led to the students having a much easier time with scholarly research. And in fact I normally have to reject several of their project proposal sources because they are not scholarly, are not credible, are not relevant. And this time my students are just like slam dunks left and right. The research that they identified for their papers was great from the get go. So that really helped the class overall. It did help improve the outlook on the course theme and the anti-resist goals of the course for some of the students that were a little resistant to that theme when we started the class. And my last note is that I learned more about Libre Texts after I decided to do the LibGuy. And I do think that the Libre Text platform is easier to use than the LibGuy platform that we have for our campus. That may not be the case for everyone but I am going to put this in a Libre Text as well. And I think that's a great way to share curated reading lists. So if you haven't checked that out that's definitely something I would recommend. So I just want to thank everyone for your time and attention. I know that was a lot of information. So if you have any questions, there's my email address and I'm happy to share any other info on my project that you would like. Great. Thanks so much, Jackie. Very inspiring. And Jackie also was one of the faculty members who volunteered to do a video with us. And so at some point this summer we'll be releasing those videos so you can hear what Jackie had to say in more detail. All right. Excellent. Next up is Robert. And Robert, are you on the phone there with us? Yes, I am. Can you hear me? Yes. Yes. Okay, good. Wonderful. So Robert Brown from San Bernardino Oh, Community College who taught English 101 composition with his students this spring. And Robert, do you want me to move your slides? Yes, please. Okay. All right. Great. And that's San Bernardino Valley College. Valley College. Thank you. We'll correct that before we publish. Thanks. Sounds good. Okay. This was a very interesting and amazing semester with the OFR Action Plan that I had in mind. It was called Heart Healing Economic and Racial Trauma Actors. A very ambitious project to do in a very short amount of time. Let's see what that next slide looks like. These are the things I'm going to address. The background, why heart, why English 101. Some of the challenges and successes this semester. Feedback from the students and feedback from school. And some sample module screenshots that I included in the presentation and some of the future for what I and the school have in mind with this curriculum. And then the final project is called the Heart Project that the students took part in at the end of the semester. And I'll show a link so that you can see some of their final artwork. Well, my action plan was to completely redo my English 101 curriculum. So that it would be based on healing economic and racial trauma. The goals were, of course, to use some open ed resources and anti-racist pedagogy, but also to have content that's centered on race, race-based trauma and economic trauma. And the immediate goal for the English 101 students was to rely heavily on personal narrative writing and what is called auto ethnography, where they connect their personal experiences to a well-researched social issue. Part of the reason why I thought this was perfect for English 101 is because unlike a lot of other disciplines, English 101 has that allowance for personal narrative writing. Composition professors have a whole lot more flexibility in the materials that they choose and the readings that they choose, and it lends itself very well to thematic curriculum design. Now, before this action plan, another professor and I, we had agreed that whenever we're teaching English 101, we would center our entire semester around the themes of misogyny, racism, and economic inequality. And so when this OFAR cohort got together, I saw how I could expand that a little bit into diving a little bit deeper into economic and racial trauma. Now, some of the challenges, this was interesting because I was going to implement this for my short-term English 101 class. Normally, our semesters are 18 weeks long. I had an eight-week English 101 session that started March 29th. So once we started the cohort in January, I had two months to redo everything, curriculum, find the materials, get the modules together, and that limited time to put all that together is a little bit challenging, but it was done. The other challenge was the time restriction of an eight-week course. I tried to take everything in an 18-week semester and squish it in eight weeks, which was not the best idea because eight weeks and 18 weeks are very, very different. Another challenge was the combination of the pacing and the content. But I sent the letter to the students before the class started letting them know what they were getting into. I let them know that this was going to be a full semester squished in eight weeks. I let them know that the content was going to be somewhat heavy looking at some personal experiences of economic and racial trauma and let them know that this is what they were getting into before the class started. It was a good idea, but it had a different effect of 11 students dropping within the first two weeks. So I went from 25 students to 14 within a matter of days. Now that being said, there were several successes. This focus on healing added a sense of resolution at the end of the class for a lot of students. You'll see some of the student feedback on some of the later slides. The students produced a lot of personal writing, a lot. Everything from journal writing, class discussions, reading responses, to formal essays, a lot of personal writing came out of these students. And the creation of the Heart Gallery as a public showcase to showcase their creative expression is now a permanent part attached to the campus. So we'll see a link to showcase that Heart Gallery. We had amazing support from the English department. In fact, I became a regular part of the standing agenda. So every department meeting, there was a reporting out on how things were going with the OFAR cohort and the planning of this course and implementation of this course. And last but not least, I had to let go of trying to teach everything in half the time and simply give the students what they needed, what they wanted, instead of what I thought I needed to do. Does that make sense? Let's see the next slide. Okay, so students were asked on their final heart projects to discuss what healing looks like to them when it comes to past trauma. What ideas do they have for their final project? What feedback can you give to help other classmates with their ideas? And so the next screen shows some of their feedback. And it's a little hard to see. Luckily, this is being recorded and is going to be posted on the OFAR website. But you can see some of the very insightful things students had written down on the screen when it comes to their own healing and their ideas. Or like this student right there in the middle, healing to me is something that can be very hard to fully accomplish. To some, it may even feel impossible. This kind of thing was happening throughout the entire course, this kind of discussion. They were talking about their own trauma, connecting it to what this means in the world. It was very enlightening and inspiring for a lot of students. And the next screen also has another piece of student feedback. If you move on to the next screen, you'll see some sample modules that I had created. There was a little bit of structure every single week. So every week began with a book. Every week began with writing in a free right journals. And just for everybody's clarification, I found a way to create a digital journal online using the discussion pieces so that the students can write in a group of one, so that they can kind of write diary style in these journals so that I and them are the only ones who can see. And if anybody wants to contact me to see how that's done, you can. Just feel free to let me know. But every single week, there were free rights discussions. Another thing that I did, if you can see right there in the center, there was this thing called list of assignments. And I just kept a running tab of every single thing every week that the students were completing. So they didn't have to do that for themselves. So all the assignments for the entire year were on that page. And they had a chance to kind of like a checklist keep track as they Robert, you have about two or three minutes. So just no problem. No problem. Go ahead to the next slide. This is the heart of the heart project. They had to express in some kind of creative way, their own healing journey. So they could write poetry, they could create a painting, a drawing, a song, speech, PowerPoints. And the students had the control of how they wanted to express within the flight to them.  This part project is now going to be a continuing part of the English department. So a couple of things happened this semester to push this along. The first one was I had been approved by the academic senate to be the OER liaison for the college. And that was a big step in the right direction for making sure this continues to happen in campus. I'm moving the curriculum from English 101 to English 102 to spend more time on this time on actual teaching and the life formatting. And I'm no longer doing this with eight semester. I'm going to make sure this is a full semester 18 course so that we can flush everything out. And all of this curriculum will be pushed through on the comment on campus. And I think I have one more slide. There you go. That's the last slide. For anybody who's interested, you go to that website. It's SBVC, that's answer to San Bernardino Valley College, SBVCheart.wordpress.com. You'll see the students' artwork. You'll see videos of spoken word poems. Thank you for putting that in the chat. You'll see paintings. You'll see artwork. One student wrote an apology letter to her former self. It was some very moving pieces on that website. Thank you so much, Robert. Oh, I came in right at 30 seconds. That's pretty nice. Thank you very much for advancing those slides. No problem. This is wonderful project. I can't wait to check that out. And Robert was also one of the faculty who volunteered to do a video interview. And so those will be released over the next, probably in the next month. So we'll make sure that you get to hear those as well. All right. Thank you. Next up I want to introduce Ruth Calcanas from Mount San Antonio Community College where she teaches Soche 20, Intro to Race and Ethnicity. And Ruth, I'll stop sharing my screen so you can share yours. Perfect. Thank you. All right. So yes, so like was just said, my name is Ruth Calcanas and I do teach Sociology at Mount San Antonio College. I'm an adjunct professor, but let's go ahead and jump in. So I chose to focus what I learned in this OFAR course onto my Introduction to Race and Ethnicity class. So I was in a unique position where I already teach a lot of the history of race and ethnicity and racism in the United States. So I really had the chance to really rework I think my assignments and how I teach really this content. And like many of you, I wanted to then focus on the aspect of healing and resistance and privilege in addition to just teaching the history of racism in the United States. That was really what I wanted to focus on and focus my overall project for this course, how I can help guide students to the next level now that they know the history of race and ethnicity and racism and understand institutional racism, what can they do now to resist it and perhaps to work through any experiences or racial traumas that they have experienced. So I also realized as a result of taking this course, I had a lot of work to do aside from my assignments and how I could get students to start considering how they can apply their knowledge. So here's just an example of things I was doing before OFAR and how I changed it after what I learned. So I really did rework the language in my syllabus. A lot of it was just standard language that I had borrowed with consent from other instructors because I again, I'm a relatively new instructor and some an adjunct professor. So it was very generic. So I went through and really personalized the language, made my anti-racist statement very clear and was consistent, I think with my anti-racist language throughout. I also made some changes into the first couple weeks of my course. So instead of immediately starting to lecture on day two, week one, I decided to not lecture the first week and only focus on community building and building community agreements and explaining the significance of that, especially with the conversations that we have in a course like introduction to race and ethnicity. I chose to also push back lecturing until week three. So week two, I really got to explain to my students what anti-racism was and the perspective this course was going to take, which was not only are we going to be learning the history, but we're also going to do the hard work of reflecting on healing, agency, resistance, oppression, and our own privileges as well. I also made some changes to my assessment. So I was more confident with my decision to move away from tests and quizzes entirely and focus more on reflections and creative projects. I've been looking at a lot of different readings thanks to OFAR as well on how I can help students guide them through this healing process and just reflection process. And I decided to remove tests and quizzes altogether. And then my overall project for this course, which I was excited came through in the end, was creating an anti-racist reflection workbook for faculty, staff, and students in higher education. And I'll show you a couple pages of that in a second. But all the questions and artwork and quotes were created by my students after they completed the main modules of my course. But first I want to talk about the reflections that I replaced the quizzes and exams with, because my students gave a lot of positive feedback about this. So again, instead of these traditional quizzes and exams, they now have these two reflections where they got to incorporate what they've been learning about institutional racism to apply it to their own life. So the first reflection was based on examining oppressive structures that they have experienced, their oppression they have experienced within their life, as well as agency and action steps they can take to resist oppressive forces. Now I didn't want to put students in a position where they were going to perhaps be retraumatized by an encounter working on these reflections. So I also gave the option that they could reflect on a loved one or a friend, but it had to be them or someone that they knew I really wanted to have that personal aspect to it. And then the second reflection was for them to examine on their own privileges and how they might have benefited from current oppressive structures, which was challenging for them, especially since Mt. SAC is an HSI, most of my students are students of color. So we really had to discuss how folks of color can also benefit from oppressive structures and something new that I did as well was get vulnerable with my students and giving the example of me, how I identify as Latina, but as a light-skinned Latina, I also benefit from current oppressive structures that exist in the United States. So that kind of helped guide them into being more comfortable examining how their own privileges and perhaps how they benefit. Now, again, still in the theme of not really wanting to retraumatize students who have perhaps gone through something very significant, they also had the option to explore how they can begin healing from racial trauma. And the whole course set them up to be in a good position to understand what agency was, oppression, privilege, racial trauma, and healing because of the readings that I incorporated throughout my class. So they were in a good position at that point to engage in this reflection and they all did very well. Now, the bigger project of the anti-racist reflective workbook for faculty, staff, and students came together in the end. I was nervous that it wouldn't happen, but students had the opportunity to submit reflection questions for other students to reflect on racism in the United States. And then they also submitted reflection questions for faculty and staff to reflect on how racism impacts students and how they can support their students better. So by the end of my 16 week course, they have gone through and examined really the nuances of institutional racism and interpersonal racism, which is a lot of training. And to be honest, it's more training than many people get when it comes to race and ethnicity. And here's what a couple pages of what the final workbook is looking like. So they came up with these questions of what they want faculty and staff to reflect on. Then all the artwork throughout the workbook was also done by my students. That's part of the final creative project, where they were able to express themes of racism and inequality through artistic means, like paintings, poems, drawings, some did videos, etc. But you can kind of see here, these are the questions they came up with. Some students also authorized me to use some of their quotes from their own reflections if they aligned with what the workbook was geared towards. So I have a student here who describes her experience of being a woman of color and her experience in the education system. We also have more artwork down here, all again tied within the themes of the course. So this artwork is meant to represent the white supremacy rooted in laws to regulate women of color's bodies. Again, next to some of these more personal questions that faculty and staff can use to reflect on. So this is kind of what the whole workbook looks like. It's a mixture of their artwork, their quotes, and all of these questions they came up with based on what they had learned in my class at that point. Overall, my students received these changes very positively. They appreciated the reflections. They said it was really an opportunity for them to apply what they were learning at an institutional level to their own lives. And it also provided this outlet to kind of validate what they are experiencing in their day-to-day lives. So they were very appreciative of that. They love the final creative project option. These was lessons on agency healing and resistance. So they did feel that it took them to a different level as opposed to just learning, which is significant, but just learning the history of racism. They were also now able to come up with action steps of what they can now do with that knowledge. They were also very happy to contribute with the workbook. They said it felt like it validated, I was validating their learning. And they felt at that point what they were learning could make a significant impact. Students who have taken other classes of mine did say they noticed the difference that this was a more challenging course, especially that second reflection on how we might benefit from oppressive structures or what our privileges might be, even as folks of color. But overall, the reflections and participating in the workbook did make the experience more impactful for them. And then very little resistance, only from two students who were getting used to not taking quizzes and exams and shifting more towards reflections. And then quickly, the lessons I learned were, I want to spend more time explaining open pedagogy to my students in addition to anti-racism. I think it would benefit them, especially when it comes to kind of validating the reflections or showing them how these reflections can be meaningful. Because I think sometimes students are so used to test and exams and validate that mode of learning. So that was something I wanted you moving forward, discuss open pedagogy and explain it a little bit better to them. And then something that I would encourage anyone who's engaging in this work to consider is to discover your own anti-racist pedagogical and methodological styles. I found that not one approach to anti-racist teaching fits all instructors. You really have to find what works best for us. We all come from different lived experiences, different backgrounds, different positionalities, and our students can see that. So we really have to figure out what approach to anti-racist pedagogy works for us and our students. And then I have had the opportunity to participate in anti-racist task force for pedagogy and curriculum at one of the colleges I work at. And I'm planning to share what I have learned in this course and my workbook throughout my campus. Planning to present at Flex Day and Mt. SAC has an equity speaker series that I'm hoping to present at. And it looks like I might be able to create a training through the Office of Professional Development at Mt. SAC as well. Now that I feel a little bit more equipped after taking this course to share what my approach is to anti-racist teaching and then conferences as well. But I think I'm hitting time. So thank you, everyone. Thank you. And Ruth was also one of our faculty volunteers for videos. So and she has more in-depth things to say there as well. All right. Next up is Sharon Sampson, who is administration of justice at Grossmont College. Sharon, would you like to share your screen? Thank you. I certainly would appreciate it. Thank you. Can everyone see my screen? Fantastic. So before I get started, I would like to start off with a land acknowledgement. I'll do a little flip. Let me do a present. As so as we commune together in this virtual space, learning community, I would like to acknowledge the land that I live and work on by naming the Kumiya peoples upon whose unceded and stolen territory my campus and my place of residence currently situated. I further acknowledge the enslaved people, primarily African descent, whose labor built much of this country. So thank you for the opportunity in this space to be able to share this information. Subsequent to the murder of George Floyd, Martin Arbery, Brianna Taylor, and many more at the hands of law enforcement, the lift from many of us who are in AOJ, administration of justice became a lot heavier. And then we had the call to action by Chancellor Oakley. So this course, this participation in this cohort came at the right time. So I wanted to thank Una. I wanted to thank Joy, James, the global education platform to be able to provide a space for me to be able to move forward in this work with a team of supports and not just felt that the burden was just on a few of us. So thank you for allowing the opportunity in the framework for this particular project. Subject, the objectives are to go over my course project successes and revision revisions strategies and that there's opportunity for Q&A would love to be able to and build it in there within a few minutes. So I'd like to start with this quote by Bill Hooks. I celebrate teaching that enables transgressions, a movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement that makes education the practice of freedom. And this quote really resonates with me, especially as a participant in this OFAR cohort. And I want to thank one of my colleagues who provided me with this wonderful graphic, her favorite graphic that represents sort of the essence of anti-racism and freedom in the slide deck. So moving forward, I just want to provide a brief video as we are working on building and talking about anti-racist pedagogy and embedding that practice in our institutions, we have pushback in our community and here in San Diego this week. And hopefully you can share, can you hear my video? Are you able to hear the video? No. We're not able to hear it, we can see it. Okay, let's see. I think. I know there's a trick to having the video sound come out, does anyone remember what it is? I've forgotten now, we haven't done it. And I also forgot as well. I think if you click on the little arrow next to the screen share button at the bottom of your screen, I think there's advanced sharing options. That might be your sound. Yay. Thank you for reminding me completely. And I don't know why I do this all the time. Hopefully this is not interrupting in my few minutes. So thank you. This 77 million dollar proposal. The district says it's an ethnic studies plan but parents say nope, it is a critical race theory plan. Take a listen. It just blows my mind that there's that money can go to so many other necessary things and this is something that should be common sense. And it's something that we knew growing up that was common sense that kids, kids don't care about color. People shouldn't care about color. And now this is something that I know that they're trying to bring in. With details tonight, good evening Teresa. So as we are moving forward in our community color system and and elsewhere, we have in our primary education pushed back on ethnic studies, cross cultural studies under the guise of critical race theory. So there is work that needs to be done and I appreciate again the participation in this. And this is just San Diego for this week regarding the Unified, the San Diego Unified School District wanting to move forward with providing information about different cultures in the K through 12 system. So I wanted to share just some context, a note that one of my students sent to me last week since the semester just ended. And I'm just going to read a little overview because the context is a little bit detail. She'll be starting her online criminal justice program at SDSU. And so she added that she really enjoyed the course, the structure of the course based on the anti racism lens that they had to review. And at the very final note, she wanted to share with me that I was her very first black teacher ever. And she could not tell how much she appreciated learning and me being a role model. So this is not something that is strange. I get these types of emails and notes every semester from my students. So to show that how important it is for our students to be exposed to our diversity and thought diversity and representation and diversity in who provides that lens that information to them so they can compete in the global market. And in the administration of justice, when they are required to work in a diverse workforce, it becomes even more imperative that they know exactly the community that they're going to be working to protect and serve. And so the issues and challenges that they experience in the workplace is something that we need to work on while they are with us in our classroom settings. So just wanted to give that little bit brief context. So my project, I've never considered using an open pedagogical style. So this is something that I've learned as a participant in this cohort to use and have students co-create materials so that other students can benefit in the future and not to create disposable assignments. Every semester I provide students a list, detail, examples from previous student work, but never allowed students an opportunity to be able to co-create the material as we move forward. So before I move forward, some of the things that I attempted to do in the beginning was scaffold and provide lessons and examples in terms of how they were going to formulate their project. I made the assumption that all of the students had the racial literacy and the understanding to be able to build upon once we hit that week six mark. Many students were unprepared so then I had to provide a little bit more framework and more context for them to be able to be successful. So it did not go as smooth in the timeline that I expected to go based on the fact that every student came in at different levels, different trajectory in their own path with dealing with anti-racism, especially in law enforcement. There was also pushback from students whose family members are in law enforcement who, because these are students who are interested in being in the field, were not interested in interrogating some of the challenges in law enforcement because they only had one perspective in terms of how law enforcement interacts and engages with the community that they work. So part of building this course was to let students know that their premise, that their worldview would be challenged and the goal was for them to at least learn from each other, interrogate their own frame of reference, their lens from which they have learned and they were brought up so they can expand their horizons a little bit more. So that took another week because we had to basically deal with some of the emotions, some of the triggers, some of the visual responses, some of the material. So I wanted to unpack that and I did not want to rush through the process and leave students with raw emotions, especially in a virtual online platform. So I really took the time to have the students express themselves without having them feel that burden of leaving the classroom and not having to express their true thoughts on some of the course material. So as a result of my participation in this class and this cohort, I now include a land acknowledgement on my syllabus. I do a lot of training. I'm a co-coordinator, professional development organizer on my campus and in every training that I do, there's online acknowledgement but it was never embedded in my syllabus. It was never added in my course curriculum. So it was Megan that actually added it to her syllabus and that gave me the idea. So I emailed her and thanked her and said, hey, I'm going to start doing that in my syllabus as well. And I use an open pedagogy framework and moving forward every class that my students that I engage with are going to be involved in designing the syllabus. I will give them the opportunity to the first week to be able to co-create and provide input. I use the colonized frame of reference and that's something that I actually learned through in addition to this cohort through the ASCCC student rostrum. In my design of my course, I explicitly note the requirement for critical analysis through an anti-racist lens. So the students are aware of the onset that this is not going to be just a multicultural lens. It's specifically dealing with anti-racism and how anti-racism plays out in institutions. I'm going to skip this Google Drive and come back to it a later time. Thank you. About two minutes to finish up. Okay, fantastic. Thank you. So terms and conditions is something that if you are in supervision probation parole is what we do in court system. And that is what our terminology that I was using in my classes to establish what I learned in OFAR are norms. So now I'm changing the terminology because my students are in an appropriation parole. They're students. So I change the terminology to norms and structure them to let them know that the material isn't settling. It's going to settle what they know. They enter the classroom now with the understanding that the prospectors have understood that the world would be challenged. They're informed that they're deeply in transbelief would be challenged. So that expectation is already laid out and they're allowed to then add their own perspective and norms to build that community in the first two weeks of class. So my project involves my students co-creating lesson plans for six weeks. I do have a copy of one of my students' work through they opted to use a fluke snack. I'm not sure if you're able to see it, but they wanted to use this creative mode to be able to show how they created their lesson plans using an anti-racism lens for six weeks. This student opted to use a CCC common license where are some opted to basically just have their material be shared. I'm sorry, I'm going really fast just within the classroom and not in the public domain. So this link will be provided for any of you who would like to see some of the students' work who opted in and not opted out. Wow, I can't wait to see that Sharon. That's really impressive and thank you. Thank you and I am not sure. Let's see if I can go back. There we go. Yeah, and if you can share the link now or when you're comfortable, that would be great. Absolutely. So what I'm going to do, of course, when I provide the PowerPoint, there is a link there as well for Genboard for us to collectively communicate as a cohort to be able to provide the materials broadly. I am doing a presentation at the OER, OTC conference next week. I am also doing an OER presentation on our campus during our Convocation or Flex Week and I've done an ASCCC presentation in our spring on plenary session on anti-racism, on anti-pedagogy. So I really want to thank you and I went really fast in providing this information to you through my video. So thank you very much. Thanks so much, Sharon. That's exciting. I'm hoping to see you next week at the OTC conference. Thank you. All right. Next up is Susan Iwanicki and I hope I pronounced that correctly. Suzanne, I'm sorry, Iwanicki. She's a general biology instructor at Pasadena Community College. Take it away, Suzanne. Right. Give me just a second here to do some screen sharing. And we are running a little later than expected so trying to keep these to about eight minutes if you can. They're so great. I don't mind staying here but I think some people may have, may need to move on. So trying to target eight to ten at the most. Okay. So just a super quick overview of the class. So it's Bio 11, General Biology. It's a non-majors class. I implemented my action plan in all 21 of the class sections that were going on in the spring. So we all use a common curriculum. I'm one of the coordinators for that class so I was able to implement it very widely with all of our instructors. So that means there was about 600 students that were served through Bio 11 in the spring and that participated in this OVAR curriculum. About 50% of the sections are taught by adjunct faculty so they were part of the review and revision process of the curriculum as well. And just a note that we started to redesign this course back in spring of 2012 really focusing on contextualizing the content. And in the past several years we've started to explore the intersection of biology and social environmental justice a lot more. So participating in OVAR really allowed me to sort of build on that and expand on these previous efforts of the past nine years. So my action plan primarily involved redoing the Canvas modules for two weeks of the course. These span the human physiology unit as well as the cell and molecular biology unit. In week nine we were talking about the epidemiology of COVID-19 and I brought in conversations about the social determinants of health, the physiological impacts of chronic stress and how that related to COVID-19 racial disparities. And then in week 10 we talked about COVID-19 vaccines, DNA, RNA, how the vaccines work. We talked about Kismetia Corbett and her role in creating the COVID vaccines. And we also talked about open science and public health and that allowed me to introduce students to the topic of Creative Commons and why we wanted to open the license what we were creating. One of the sort of aha moments that I had was in conversations with some of the other faculty members about how we really needed to bring in some trauma-informed pedagogy. And this was a mid-semester addition to this content because we had realized we were all receiving messages from students that were dealing with a lot because of COVID. And so we didn't want to just jump right into this very heavy COVID related content without really acknowledging the emotional gravity of the pandemic and the experiences that a lot of the students had been having. So we added in a content warning at the beginning before we talked about COVID at all. It told students the different topics that we were going to be covering and it gave them the option to opt out. So if they didn't want to do anything related to COVID, they had that option. And then we also created reflective spaces. So gave students a space to sort of talk about what they had been experiencing related to COVID and deal with some of those emotions. So I'm going to very quickly talk about one of those reflective spaces. It used the I am from activity, which was written about by Mike Klein in the book, Teaching Race, that's pictured on the slide here. Originally it is based on a work by George L. O'Lion. And it is where students complete the I am from phrase as many times as they can in 10 minutes. So it's a reflection where they're really thinking about the complexity of their identity. And then we asked students to think about how their identity influences their actions, their beliefs, and their interactions with some of the course material. So we read this PBS News Hour article that talks about the relationship between chronic stress, COVID-19, and how that relates to the racial disparities. And students then talked about their identity and how that influenced their interaction with that material. And for some students, they chose to engage very deeply. They talked about their own experiences with microaggressions, with racism during the pandemic. Some of them talked about how in the future it's going to impact their work in healthcare now that they're aware of some of these health disparities. So it sort of gave them a space to reflect as deeply as they felt they needed to in terms of their own personal experiences with COVID and how their identity was influencing what they were learning about in the class. And that sort of gave us a groundwork for when we got to the COVID-19 vaccine material. And for part of this unit, students created a video reflection that they had the option to then openly license. They had two options to choose from in terms of their video format. They could either talk about why they were going to receive the vaccine or if they had received it, what their experience was, or if they still had questions or concerns, they could talk about those as well. So these videos are about 15 to 60 seconds long. And I'm still working on collecting them from all of the instructors our semester just ended yesterday. But the hope is that students that chose to openly license their videos, we will share these on the website and then send them out to the community as well to potentially be used in community outreach for COVID-19 vaccines. This is based on a subset of data, but about 70% of students chose to openly license their videos. You can see the breakdown in this figure. So most students chose the most restrictive license. They preferred to use that attribution non-commercial, no derivatives license. But 70% was a good amount. And I have a short video reflection just to share with you. So you sort of get a feel for what students were saying in those. So I'm actually getting no sound. Let's see. It's good now. Oh, it's good now? Yeah. Okay. First round. And I would say at the beginning of last year, I definitely was hesitant thinking there was no way that they could make an effective vaccine or even a safe vaccine that quickly. But I was very uneducated in the process back then. And I feel very enlightened after learning how the process works and what goes into it. And the people who are behind it. And yeah, I'm much more confident in my decision now. Hi. Okay. And then just very quickly at the end in terms of some of the students' reactions to the course overall, there's a few quotes. I had no idea I would enjoy biology so much, but I really felt that everything I learned was valuable and made me feel better equipped to live in this world and to be a better member of society. This class has made me fall in love with science all over again. And your class made learning science fun. I have also learned how to apply the biology content we learned into my everyday life. So future plans are to continue using this content. We're going to modify it so that it stays relevant in the fall and it will stay as a continued part of the curriculum, as I stated, to work on disseminating the openly licensed videos, getting those onto the division website, and out to the community. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Susan. What a wonderful example of, you know, taking the pandemic and bringing it into your classroom and giving students a forum. Wow. Amazing. All right. Next up, I think is Lars. Yes. Well, I'm sorry. I think Lars, Cheseth, if you're ready, Lars. Lars is a math professor at Okamino College. Sorry. You can share your screen, Lars, and tell us about your work. I will. All right. So let's see here. So I just want to start by saying I, boy, I wish I had gone first because I feel a little bit like Charlie Brown in a room full of linuses. If you understand that reference, that's probably, says here, a certain age. And so I wanted to talk a little bit today about what I did this spring. And I have to say, very similar to what Sharon said earlier, this was the right thing, but it wasn't really necessarily at the right time for me. I have loved the challenges that I faced this spring, but I also, it was one more fantastic challenge ladled onto a pile of challenges. I'm in my second semester of ever using Canvas. I really trying to move into OER material for my students has been very difficult in statistics since we are, we have so many technological challenges. I currently need four different softwares to allow my students to do everything that's required in our class. And so this was, this was a bit of a challenge and adding to the fact that I'm at a three hour difference with my students. I'm in the east coast there on the west coast this spring and taking care of my parents during COVID. And the fact that this spring I had 24 days during the semester where I had no internet. I have, I have not, I certainly have not the sort of smooth and refined and polished presentation for you today, but a lot got done. So I had already started in my statistics class trying to deeply contextualize everything that we do in the class. And I had decided about a year and a half ago that my theme would be myth and measurement, African Americans and US government. And then OFAR came along and I learned a lot of things, especially about and most inspired by open pedagogy and the idea of a non-disposable assignments. So I just want to talk a little bit about the accomplishments that are sort of, that go beyond, wow, I just figured out the technology to, why is that not going, to sort of the deeper thing. So what I was able to do this spring is really embrace the idea of open pedagogy with my students. And together we fairly successfully took a draft of my curriculum for descriptive statistics and reshaped it centering it on anti-racism and black voices. So how did I do this? We'll talk about that a little bit. And then we also used sort of this idea of open pedagogy and discussion to take my first draft of my rubrics in the class and expand them, enhance them, create examples for good products that sort of meet the standards of the rubrics. So that part was very enriching, enriching, enriching, sorry. And the third thing that we really did was we started to draft some anti-racist principles for the ethical practice of statistics. Now no such set of principles really exist out there. I don't think we have a finished product, but we do have a great draft to start working on this same project or to pick up the work next semester with my next students. So originally in OFAR I had intended to put together some sort of website to share with the community. Collectively the 77 students that started with me this spring and the 45 that finished, we don't know how to do a website. And we weren't going to learn when we were still struggling with technology and Canvas and connecting and all of that. So instead we really focused on creating that feedback loop and that discussion regime or tradition to really listen to the students about how the curriculum is working. Is it helping us to understand the concepts and statistics? Is it helping us to understand racism and is it helping us to give space to voices that are usually not heard? So I want to talk a little bit about these three bullets and that's all I've, there are a lot of other lessons learned, but those are the three I want to focus on today. So what I was able to do, I think fairly successfully with my students, is to really create and rewrite my curriculum for descriptive statistics. So if you've taken a statistics course or the intro to stats course, it's usually divided into two parts, descriptive statistics and inferential statistics. And we were able to really put together a good set of experiences and assignments and assessments to really look at descriptive statistics. And we largely used Ivory Tolson's bad statistics as a resource for the first unit, which is learning about how to talk about statistical narratives, learning how to be critical of a critical consumer. And then for unit two, we used, I'm going to use a very primitive visual aid here. I'm going to hold up to the camera, the book that we use, the Philadelphia Negro by W.E.B. Du Bois to really design units two and units three about quantitative variables and qualitative variables. And I stumbled on this resource kind of accidentally when I was in my quarantine, when I had flown from California to Virginia in January. And it turns out that this is a really excellent move because W.E.B. Du Bois at the turn of the last century was especially, was sort of one of the early adopters of what is now considered sort of traditional descriptive statistics in his work in sociology. And so he and his students were learning about how to present and argue and create narratives, statistical narratives about groups of people, even as my students are learning the same thing. So it turns out that this book is quite an excellent example that students can use to see how descriptive statistics are created. So that worked out quite nicely. And yeah. So then I want to talk a little bit about the, some of the assessments and the rubrics. So I wanted to share with you a few of these. So for unit one, we also turned to W.E.B. Du Bois to the students turned to this page. And W.E.B. Du Bois, there's an excellent collection of his, the graphics that he and his students created for the Paris World Expo. And I'm going to hold that book up to the camera. I plan to put images in, but I just finished grading yesterday and I really did not get a lot of time to put this together. So there's my primitive visual aid. And so students select these plates that were created by students for the World Expo in Paris in 1800, I believe. What does it say? Yeah. And they have to review it. They have to analyze it. How does this reflect good statistical practice? How, what is innovative about it? What information is contained in that? And it was, it was fascinating the results I got from students. Another one that we have is, I'm just in the interest of time, I'm going to skip to You have about two minutes. Yeah. Thank you. We have redlining and housing discrimination. And let's see. I'll skip that last one. And just go on to some, just a really remarkable, oops, that's not what I wanted to do, a remarkable moment in the class. And that was about halfway through the semester, we, we had a discussion about where are we going to go with our project. This is the meeting at which we kind of abandoned the idea of doing a web page this semester. But we had to talk about what people actually learned. And one student said this, I used to think that statistics was just math. So it's always fair and impartial. I know now that it is never neutral, that statistics by its very nature and its design, carry certain biases that we, if we're going to use it, we have to acknowledge and we have to try to mitigate. And the whole class really gathered around this. And that's when we decided we were going to spend much of the rest of the semester, even as we're doing the work that we have to do in the class, developing these anti racist principles for statistics. So, and this was basically their thought they saw in my syllabus, these enduring becomeings or the enduring understandings for the course. And they said, Lars, this is no good, you have to insert in these understandings, the idea that you can't use statistics in a meaningful way, unless it's guided by principles. And that's where we decided we were going to have them guided by anti racist principles. And I don't, that's where I stand on this presentation because I'm behind. So this is kind of a draft of a presentation, I will be turning in something a little more polished a little bit later, but that's really all I have. And if you have questions for me, please send them. But that's all I have to say right now. Thank you very much, Lars. And I know that's tough when you, when grading finished yesterday, you're expected to turn around and do this. And we appreciate you sharing what you could. And yeah, I would like to hear more in the future. Yeah, it's, it's, it's a draft. It's a draft. Oh, I have to stop sharing. Where's my stuff? Yes. There we go. I get that. All right. Wonderful. And next up, and I believe our final speaker is Megan DeAngelo. She's an ESL instructor. And Megan, I apologize. Oh, you're at Citrus College in Southern California, correct? That is correct. Wonderful. Welcome. All right, yes. I'll share my screen. And as I bring this up, everyone, I, I wasn't commenting in the chat, but really inspired by all of your work as, as previous in the just seeing how everything has turned out and your perspectives and attitudes about what, what we could do and what is available for the future. It's awesome. And thank you for sharing. All right. So I was doing the work with the OFAR action work with my pronunciation one course at Citrus College this spring. And you'll see down here at the bottom that this course is required to use not by me, but by bored over me, that clear peace speech from the start, which is a a pretty great pronunciation book to be as far as its pronunciation guides that just purely that aspect of it from Cambridge University Press. So, but it is a textbook that as you see comes from a big name publisher and, and there's not a ton of options and none that I found in OER yet. But I do hope in the future that, you know, there will be more for us to work with from other sources. But for now, adapting this course, similar to many of our courses in this department, which I wanted to mention, I am in a the continuing education department, which is a non credit department. And I think I may be the only instructor from OFAR, it seems like that that is in non credit, which is a little different approach in a way to the college work, a little different population of students, you know, tend to skew much more and perhaps also hadn't had formal education in, or had had formal education in another, in another country and having dramatic shifts in their life now and trying to do things in English. Many of you get those students in the credit departments too. But they already have English, they had to pass a certain level of English competency to get there. And so a lot of our courses are geared toward preparing those students for perhaps even a credit ESL course. But also, many of our students are not going into academia, they're, you know, working on their English and these other skills for other reasons. So an interesting aspect to our department and also all of us are adjunct instructors and tend to have to be adjunct instructors because of the way that the university's prioritized funding for tenure instructors and often do not apply in the, in for the non credit departments. So we often are working at more than one school or to put things into full time, different things like that. It's kind of wild. So I'll remind you back of my, I had my timer set and then didn't start it when I started. So I know you're keeping an eye on it too. And so I wanted to just remind you of where the plan was and kind of speak from there of where where I got to. So there were many, it was like many of our plans, very ambitious for this semester. And many of you still rose to that challenge of ambitiousness. My own personal life, I feel like really took precedence in this semester. And I wanted to speak to that briefly. But these were the things that kinds of things that I was planning on. And a big focus was on revamping the land acknowledgement and then working from there, which Sharon mentioned. And I was really And thank you for reminding me of that kind of influence there, not influence, but just the idea of bringing your land acknowledgement into your syllabus as well, which you would are even working into your other work. And so that was really where my plan was focused on revamping that making that land acknowledgement in my syllabus much stronger and then moving from there to beyond the land acknowledgement to discovering and uncovering a lot of the indigenous knowledge and culture and from the different parts of the country and world and starting with right here in Los Angeles County, which are the Tongva people. And so from there, that was the, and there was, you know, you see a lot going into that. Actually, right after the application for this project was due. And I found out about the application to the project right before it was due. So and I didn't know I was pregnant, but I didn't know my partner's father was going to have the right then and and just impact our lives in a lot of ways. It has that does. And then the continued happening of COVID and that impact on our family. And we did get to welcome an incredible Rodney, Jr. In a way, we did end up naming him after my partner's dad. We welcomed him. That was five weeks ago. This picture is one week ago. And so that's amazing. But I did you know, end up really having to focus a lot more on family and home than I had been able to see for C.  And just the, you know, how those things are what help keep white supremacy entrenched and the these these structures remain in place because so much of the way that it's set up means for us to just grind and grind and, you know, have no way of having extra energy to attuning to making change. So kept passing forward and also kept attending to family. And I'm always amazed at the the mamas and papas and folks who were working hard, were working hard in all these ways. So some of the things that we were able to do is bring, this is an example of an activity that where there was a lot of pronunciation practice, but we were connecting it with images that were outside of our book. Our book tends to have very white male-centric drawn images. So we collected a lot of images from the class and from me that were, you know, not just that, that people could see themselves more in the in the images. We also did have, I did give a re-working of the land acknowledgement in my syllabus. It looks somewhat similar to the one before, but now a little bit bigger and the text has been expanded. And Megan, just like a minute to finish up. Okay, great. Thank you. And we spent a lot of time, a lot of time, we spent time in connecting with the different lessons with moving through pieces of this exploration of the indigenous culture here as well as other places and used a lot of that information to put into practice the pronunciation skills that we were learning, such as syllables and different vowel sounds and syllable stress, things like that, words that we were using in our discussions. So there's a few of the words. Thank you. Thank you for that, Megan. Cool. So yes, so there's a bit more that I could discuss. And but thank you for this time and thank you for all the work that you're doing. And I will be continuing with this work with the future pronunciation courses as well as the citizenship course that I'll be teaching next and sharing with my department for them to build off of some of that and continue to contribute to that store of information to be used in future classes. Thanks for this. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Megan.  So thanks so much. Sorry, we... Well, that is the end of our presentation. I think we just have a few final slides. So let's see. This is not going to come in at the right spot, but let's turn this over to James to finish this out. All right. Thanks, Una. And boy, thank you, everybody. What an inspiring, inspiring, inspiring two sessions, two groups of presentations we've had. Thank you, Megan. And thank you, Lars, for being honest about your challenges. It's been a heck of a year and a half. No doubt about that. And we applaud, you know, I applaud your ambition. Both of you have hugely ambitious projects. So keep going with those projects. And we've got this connection with one another now. You know, you've developed your own connection with everybody else in this program. So please take advantage of all those connections and do let us know how your projects develop. So a quick reminder of things coming up. This summer, if you want more OER, the Cal OER conference is coming up the first week of August. And this will be the first ever statewide dedicated OER conference. And it's one that crosses, specifically, encompasses the community colleges, the CSUs and the UC. So we're really excited about that. In fact, later today, I'm meeting the rest of the organizing committee, and we're reviewing the proposals and scoring the proposals. So we'll get the notices out pretty soon. I know Sharon and Hasna submitted their proposals. So I'm excited to see that presentation. Also, a wonderful conference coming up. Open Education Global lasts the end of September, beginning of October. Open Education Global, which is the parent organization of CCC OER, hosts the international conference every year dedicated to all things open education. It's a pretty mind blowing experience, learning about the different versions of open and OER and open pedagogy all over the world. We'll just blow your mind. So really hope you can participate in that. And I just want to jump in and say it's $25 for all California Community College members. So when you register, choose the I'm a member option because you are a member through the Chancellor's Office. Yes. Thank you to the California Community College Chancellor's Office for making all of our community college members. Yes. And then finally, the middle of October is the Open Education Conference, also known as Open Ed, primarily U.S. and Canada topics. But it's been expanding beyond that over the past few years. A good, good last year was a very strong shift in emphasis for the conference toward social justice topics and intersections with open education. So I really encourage you to consider submitting a proposal for Open Ed. I think that would be great to share what you're doing. You certainly all of you are doing work that would be really inspiring to people outside your own colleges and outside of California. So please do consider submitting your those proposals next Monday. So you have a whole. Oh, they're due Monday. Yeah, better evening. Yeah. Getting close. Next slide, please. Sorry. I'm I in charge. And as as a reminder, as a reminder, if you'd like to learn more about open education or tell others to learn more about open education, besides the knowledge that you've all absorbed and demonstrated through this program, the primary source for community college focused information is CCC. Oh, we are who is fabulous organization. Also here in California, we are fortunate to have strong support from the statewide academic Senate, the AS triple C OER initiative is a great source of California specific information. And then really the primary source of news in all things open is the CCC OER email list. It's it's pretty pretty pretty amazing. But do be warned is it quite an active email list. So just be be aware what you're getting yourself into. But it is the the place to get the news next. Any questions, comments, but we want to keep an eye on the clock too. So thanks to everybody for sticking with us. Any questions or comments before we say goodbye for now? I'm going to move to the next slide just to share something and James, if you'd like, you can share it. But we're still open here for questions or comments beyond gratitude, of course, to our wonderful presenters and just this wonderful program that you've all engaged in with us on anti racism. It's it's been an amazing experience. Indeed. And here on this last slide, you see our contact information. And you see a link at the bottom of this slide to a video that's under five minutes that a really talented editor put together as somebody somebody we're very fortunate to collaborate with put put together a synopsis video of the many, many videos, video interviews that some of you helped out with. So thank you very much for that. And is this ready to share? Is the video ready to share with networks or with with email lists and colleagues on campuses and so on? Probably hold off. I Liz and I were going to check and make sure that it's captioned, but it will be captioned shortly. I think, I mean, I think, you know, with respect to our wonderful eight faculty who volunteered to be interviewed, there's short clips from each of your, we would have liked to have included all of it, but it would have been over an hour. So there's short clips from each faculty who spoke about their programs. And we thank you for that. So please. So it's safe to say, you know, certainly view it yourselves, share it with your friends and family. But if you want to share it more widely, say via an email list or on social media, maybe wait a week or two, just so that. Yeah, I probably wait on that one. We will be posting it on our website, a whole program. I mean, sorry, a whole page or two around afar. And that's probably where it'll it'll be embedded. It's currently unlisted, but we've given you the link. So great. And then, and then finally, just a quick word about Marvin asks a future of afar, the offer program. So we don't want to be presumptuous, but we will say that that Una and I have had a very positive meeting with the Hewlett Foundation. They are very impressed with the the outcomes of the first of this first year. So we are very hopeful that we will secure the support of the Hewlett Foundation for a longer time frame. We don't want to get ahead of ourselves and say something that we can't we can't be sure is going to happen. But we're pretty pretty confident. So we will certainly utilize our the email list, the email list to share the announcement. If it does come to fruition that we're able to offer another round and ask you for your help to share that with your with your networks. Anything else on that? And I think that's yeah, no, thank you, James. We we're hopeful for another version of another round, but still still in the planning process. Yeah. And we I guess the only other thing I would say is the the feedback of all the participants has been invaluable. We hear the feedback. I know I expressed this last time we have heard the feedback about a longer time frame, not everything smushed into one semester, making the course a bit longer than four weeks. Having having all of the communication that we bombarded you with teed up to start with so that you can do a bit more planning around what we ask of you. So we've heard that feedback. We really really appreciate your help to make the program better. With that, we're going to say thank you so much. This is just an absolute joy for me. This is one of those moments when I just sit and pinch myself and say, oh my gosh, I get to do this. This is part of my job. Holy smokes. How lucky I am to be here and be inspired by all of you. Thank you to all of you for all the work that you're doing. Have a wonderful summer to everyone. Bye bye.


Children's books such as Peter Rabbit will come to life at the Brainerd Public Library's New Storyland exhibit. The interactive exhibit was built by the Minnesota Children's Museum and brought to the community by Bremer Bank. The books, Where Spot, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and The Snowy Day are transformed into a three-dimensional play area. The exhibit is aimed towards children eight and under by focusing on sound awareness, letter knowledge, and vocabulary. Early literacy is a huge component of what we do here at the Brainerd Public Library. We're kind of their first responders. Parents are just getting into learning what education is, and this is a huge piece of making that be possible and introducing them to the books when they get here too. So it means a lot to us to have it. The Storyland exhibit will be open to the public until February. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.


Alright, well everyone, we'll go back to lunch, Christina Hill is going to be our next speaker, but before we get started, AJ has some announcements. That was the first half of the day for everybody. Such great energy. A couple things coming up. If you lost anything, you've had some crazy things that lost the phone already, and it's kind of just so amazing for people who don't even care anymore. All awesome and fast stuff is at the hub desk. It just up those stairs right on the left, right cast for registration. So, if there's anything, if you lose anything, check there first. Second, don't forget about the after party tonight. It's one of the coolest parts of our camp period, and hang out with everybody. Geek out at the museum, man in Sao Boa Park, it's a really cool museum. I haven't even been there, I've just been dying to go, so I'm excited. It's going to be really, really fun. And that, have a great session. Alright, she is the creator of the website creation workshop. It has been passionately teaching WordPress and non-techy small business owners, experts, coaches, and consultants. Before becoming a WordPress entrepreneur, Christina worked as a digital artist, for a number of promotions, and she did 3D CTV, and then as a senior technical director for the feature films division at George Lucas' Industrial Light of Magic with no credits for Star Wars, Jurassic Park, and E.T. in the re-release. She now lives in San Diego, California with her husband and daughter. In this session, Christina Hills will show you some easy tips to make working with images much easier for you. Best practices for featured images on how to get to show correctly when you share with social media, and you will walk away with practical tips and tools that you can use whether you're a business owner, freelancer, or just starting out with WordPress. Now let me welcome Christina on how to make our WordPress sites come alive. Alright, so just a little background. I've been teaching WordPress online in my program called the Website Creation Workshop for 10 years. And it's mainly done through webinars that I do do in-person teaching as well. And as he read before, I was an online entrepreneur. I worked for George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic. I worked on Star Wars, E.T., the Extraterrestrial and Jurassic Park. And it was a great career. I loved it, but I wanted to be home with my daughter. So that's when I became an online entrepreneur. Alright, so we're talking about pictures today. And people like pictures. Because pictures are like candy, right? When you see a gorgeous image on a site, it really draws you in. And for those of you who are health nuts, I've got some great hair, right? Not too many sweets. But anyway, great images give your website that wow. And great images are easy for people who are not super techy. You don't have to be a coder to have really nice images on your site. So today what I'm going to give you is seven things you can do to make your site come alive with pictures in WordPress. So let me just jump right in. Number one, find great images for your site. So I'll run into people and I'll say, oh, that's cool image. Where did you get it? Oh, I got it from Google Images. No, no, no, no, no, don't do that. Just because you find an image on Google doesn't mean you're allowed to use it. Now I will go to Google to look for images to give me ideas of what to search for. So I might put words in like freedom or happiness or kind of adjectives because Google Images might trigger my mind to think of something. But Google does have an advanced image search. Are you all familiar with the advanced image search? Yeah, you just define the exact link. I just Google advanced image search. And then you can put in your keyword that you're looking for and you can click the dropdown, free to use, share, or modify even commercially. So I will sometimes do that, but you still have to be careful with rights and I'm going to be talking about usage rights. Now when it comes to images, if you use your camera, you don't have to worry about ownership rights and giving credits and all that because you took the picture. But we don't all have time and maybe we're not the best at taking pictures. So you want to use stock photography sites. Now how many of you regularly use stock photography sites? Okay some of you, you're not trying everyone. When you go to stock photography sites you always have to look at the image rights because you don't want to take or use a picture inappropriately that you don't have the rights to. So I'm going to go through now some common image license types. I'm going to cover royalty free, rights managed, editorial use only, public domain, and government websites. So let's start with the first one, royalty free. So royalty free means you can use the image multiple times without paying a royalty. For example, eye stock, shutter stock, thick stock, and there's many others. And this is the most common one, this is the one that I use. There's also rights managed, am I going too fast? No, okay. There's also rights managed. Rights managed is when you're granted a one-time use of the image. So if you want to use it on your website, you pay a fee, if you want to use it in a product placement or an ad, it's much more expensive. It's usually for bigger companies. And the pricing depends upon how you're going to use it, but you pay each time you want to use the picture. I never ever use rights managed because I don't want to have to think about that. I just want to use the picture whenever I want. Typical licenses for celebrity and exclusive photos and Getty Images is an example of a company that does rights managed. Editorial use only. You have to be careful with this. If you find an image on a stock site and it's editorial use only, you're supposed to use it only for a news-related story. Use to support text in your news article and it's not for advertising or selling anything. So typical editorial use only is a celebrity or a trademark, logo or service mark. I've gone and said, oh, wow, this is a great picture. I'll use it in my blog post. Then I find out it's editorial use only. And the reason why I stay away from it is because later I'll forget that it was editorial use only. And I'll wind up reusing it. And I just don't want to get myself in trouble. So I just steer clear from that. Public domain. Public domain is great because there's no copyright restrictions. It's in the public domain so you can use it. And now it could be public domain because the copyright expired or it was forfeited by the creator of the owner. So public domain images can be used free without any limitation, but you just have to be really careful is it really public domain. So sometimes I go to Wikipedia to find images, but you just, because lots of stuff in Wikipedia will list that it's in the public domain. So just be careful. I don't usually use a lot of public domain images just because I don't want to do the labor of making sure and figuring out from the website. This is really public domain. So I like stock sites and I have some resources for some great stock sites. Now government websites are generally not subject to copyright in the United States. And there's no restriction on reproduction, derivative works, distribution, because you know our taxes paid for the government so we can use their images. But you can read more at USA.gov slash government dash works. And remember I'm going to give the slides at the end. But the government has some really nice NASA pictures, you know, Cosmos pictures. So those are the kind of pictures I might get from a government website. But my understanding is if it has a .gov you can use the images. So here's some places you can get stock images and again I've listed a lot of resources and you'll get these at the end. I typically, when I'm looking for a picture I'll start with free and if I can't find it then I'll go to a paid site. So sometimes I'll have something in my mind. I do a few searches on the free stock sites. If it doesn't come up right away I'll go to the paid site. Now probably if I spent more time I might find it. But we're trying to do things quickly and get stuff done really fast. And I've got two plugins that make this easy that I'm going to tell you about. The first one is Pixabay. Is anybody already using Pixabay? Yeah, Pixabay is pretty good. What I like about Pixabay is at pixabay.com is they make the licensing really easy to understand. So that's probably the main reason why. I don't have to hunt and click and look at any photos. It tells me right there free to use even commercially. And they are donation based so it's a good idea to, you know, if you use Pixabay a lot give them 10 or 20 bucks every so often. But they have a plugin which is amazing. At WordPress.org and you can just search for Pixabay. When you install this plugin inside WordPress, then you can search right in WordPress, find the image, and then it downloads it into your media library. So it's really, yeah, really really nice. The other one that does the same thing is from Unsplash. Has anybody been to Unsplash? If you want very poetic, designery, beautiful magazine style images, Unsplash is a great place to go. So it's called, they call it Instant Images, One Click Unsplash Uploads. So again, it's free, you can install it, it makes it easy so there's a search right inside. Now some people, if you want to cut down your plugins, then you would go to Unsplash, do the search, download it, so there's just a few extra steps. But this makes it really nice, especially when you're building and you're not really sure, you know, what you're looking for, so it's nice to have that speed to get images into your site. Alright, so we're on number two of the seven tips I'm going to give you today. Number two is about sizing your images for WordPress. And I'm going to talk about the difference between big versus heavy. So what is big? Big is dimensions in X and Y and pixels. So when you're creating an image or you're paying somebody else to create an image, you'll always want the original as big as possible. Because you never know in the future how you might use it. So over the years, as imagery's gotten bigger on WordPress, I've had pictures I got years ago, but they're too tiny, and now I can't reuse them again. So, and you never know, you might create an image, but then in a few months or a couple of years, you want to use it as a header image. So always, always, you're originally wanting to be really big in dimensions.  So big is dimensions, and then heavy is the weight. The weight being the file size. So this big image, which is 2408, 2508 is 392 kilobytes. When I make it smaller, the weight, the heaviness of the file goes down. And the reason why we want files to be light is our sites will load faster. So reducing the image weight is called compression. You want to compress your images. And it's not hard to do. When you compress it, so first one was big in size, then it went to 800 by 980, and it got smaller in weight, naturally. But then when I compressed it, it went down to 56 kilobytes. So when you compress it, it's going to load even faster. And as you get more and more images, you're going to want your site to load faster. Because a fast site is a sticky site when people stick around on it. So I've got a couple of ways you can do this. This is how I do it. I compress my images outside WordPress with a free site called Tiny PNG. And I love this site partially because I love the panda and you drag your files and then the panda is super excited. And then you can download it. And I've done eyeball tests. You cannot tell that it's a different file. Visually to the human eye, it looks the same. But internally, the computer has collected pixels together and made it much smaller. So it's a much lighter file size. One of the things that I see with my students when I'm teaching them to build sites is they're not compressing their files. The site is loading really slow. And you just don't want that to happen. So this method, I just go to Tiny PNG, put up and it's free.  But you can do it with a plugin. So here are four plugins that will compress your images. And if you want, so once WP Smushit, Short Pixel Image Optimizer, Imagify, and Tiny PNG also has a version. You install this and it will go through your media library and it will compress your older images. So you might want to do this if you've had your site for a while. The reason why I do it manually is I'd like one less plugin to have to have on my site. And it's just a good habit to get into. I found my picture, I'm going to compress it.  So instead of pristineandhills.jpeg, I'll put pristineandhills-tny for Tiny so that I know I've already compressed it. So that's just a habit thing. You know, a lot of success with WordPress is just getting in certain habits of you do things a certain way all the time. You know, especially if you work with clients, you want to do things a certain way. Now, how do you work with clients? Okay, I have to move. Now, I've been talking about sizes and compression and I just put this slide in because I just wanted to point out when you upload an image into WordPress, it's going to automatically make multiple sizes for you. WordPress just does that. What I was talking about is your original image. So if I'm going to put this picture on my site, I'll kind of eyeball it and I'll have a ruler tool that I'll show you. But I wouldn't upload a giant picture even though the photographer took a giant picture because I'm never going to display a giant. So what I've been teaching you applies to your sort of main size you're going to use. So you want images with the right size, dimensions, and small weight compression. Alright, so number three, I'm going to talk about organizing your images.  So let me just point out with the media library. Some of you might know this already, some of you might not. There's the grid view and then there's the list view. So there's two different ways to view your media library. When you add an image, this is best practice, always add it from inside your page or post. Don't just go to the media library admin, even though you could. By putting it, by uploading it from the place that it's going to mainly live, it makes it easier to find it later. So you can go upload it to this post and you can see where were these images that I used because you might write another blog article, you might start another site, and it just makes it easier to find. It doesn't take long to just add media from inside. And the most common place to be, you're about us. So if you have your about me, about us page, upload the pictures of you or your company or your team or your storefront from the actual pages. It's just a little tip to make things finding easier later. So in that list view that I talked about, you can see where an image was attached to. So it says attached to which post, but then underneath you can see, you can see it fine, it's unattached. So you could attach it later. Again, it's just a little thing, just makes your life a lot easier. Now talking about pictures, you want to give your pictures good filenames and titles. This is important for you and it's important for the search engines. So when you take a picture with your camera, it's going to probably have a name like image and some long number. Like that's not a good name. That doesn't tell you what it is, doesn't tell the search engines.  So Google understands this is Christina Space Hill, Space Photo. That's very descriptive for the search engines and then also for you when you're looking through, what is this picture? So you have a good name and a good title too and it usually grabs it from the name of the file. Christina, do underscores work too? Do underscores work as well? No. No? I'm not sure. I always do dashes. I find them easier to read personally. So I'm not positive about underscores. Google sees them as part of a filename but doesn't see them as separators. Okay, so underscores, no, dashes, good. Alright, I've got a plugin to tell you about. It's one of my favorite plugins to keep the media library organized and this is called the Enhanced Media Library Plugin. It is a pre-plugin. I've been using it for years. You can find it at WordPress.org. Again, I'll have my slides at the end. And the way this plugin works is you create media categories. So just like your blog post has categories, you create your own media categories to put your images in.  So in this example, I have logos. This is for one of my students. She runs a mastermind. She has speakers and sponsors, tea events, and she runs a network luncheon. So that's how she hasn't organized. Everybody's going to be different. And you can make up however many number of categories to work. Then what you do, once this plugin is turned on and activated and you've created categories, and don't stress. You don't have to think of all your categories up front. You can kind of do it as you go, if you, oh, I made a mistake, write out a typo, you can change the name of your category. It's really for your own organization. So you can add an image. This will show up in the media library, once you have this plugin turned on. And then you can check one or many media categories. So this is where it becomes cool, because here, once you've got things organized, you get this dropdown. When you're looking at your media library, the plugin adds this new dropdown. So I can look for logos. I can click the dropdown, and it will show me all the logos that I have for this site. So this is really helpful, if your logo changes, or, you know, you just want to find where it was, or you've got different versions. And then here, I've changed it for a different category for my speakers. So that is the Enhanced Media Library plugin. Again, one of my favorite plugins. All right, so the next tip I'm going to talk about is leveraging the featured image for your blog or your website for social sharing. How many people are using the featured image?  I love the featured image. The featured image came out around 2010, but now, now, with more and more people using social media, the featured image is more important to be paying attention to. So, depending upon your theme, some things use the featured image, some things don't. Most of them now do. Older themes don't use the featured image. And what it does is it pulls up a picture. So this is my blog. This is an example site. Here's the blog. This is one of my favorite articles, and it's pulling up the featured image. Plugins can also use the featured image, like this is Jetpack's related posts. There's other related posts, plugins. They will pull the featured image. So what the featured image is, there's a setting on the side when you're inside WordPress, the featured image. So the concept is, for this article, what would be sort of the main image that would represent this article? So that's sort of how you want to think about it, and that is then you set the featured image. The featured image doesn't actually have to be a picture in here, but it's kind of good if it is, because if people see your blog post somewhere on the internet, it's nice to have that visual connection of I saw this picture and now I'm reading the article and I'm seeing the picture again. So the featured image is really fun. Does the featured image function be preserved in Gutenberg or used in some other way, or we're not touching that right now? We're not touching. So he was asking about the featured image in Gutenberg, and I think I might want to save the rest questions to the end, but I'm not dove into Gutenberg yet. I'm kind of waiting for the dust to settle with Gutenberg. Like, okay coders, you guys are awesome, go figure it out and when you've got it figured out, then I'll learn it. So that's my approach been to Gutenberg.  So I'm assuming they would retain that. It wouldn't make sense for them not to. So I mentioned that the featured image shows up in social sharing. So here's an example from my Facebook fan page and my LinkedIn. So when I share, that image pops up and it makes it more enticing. It's going to help draw people in to read your articles and your content. Sometimes the featured image is wrong and it could be wrong because you forgot to set it. You know, that happens to me. It appears. So it's missing. Or I shared an old article that I wrote years ago and I forgot to set it. Or you want to change your image. I mean this is what's great about WordPress is you can change things as you wish. And that's the nice thing about being able to do it yourself not having to wait for somebody else when you want to make a change to your site. So sometimes it's missing or you want to change it or you pick the wrong one. So here is a great URL that I use all the time and it's called the Sharing Debugger. And it's developers.facebook.com slash tools slash devo. Don't worry about writing that down. You'll get the slides at the end. What it does is when you share on Facebook Facebook stores a sort of a snapshot. It caches your site. So if you change it you need to tell Facebook hey I changed my picture go fetch a new image. So you just put you copy and paste your URL hit debug and it might give you other code or stuff and it might give you some other errors. I just ignore that and just click a button that says refetch. So very easy you change your featured image if you're going to share it on Facebook you can just come to this Sharing Debugger tool for coders even if you're not a coder and it will grab the new image for you so that if it was missing now you'll have your image. You know there probably are I don't know of them but there probably are. I had to look into that. That's a great question. It's really easy to use. Here's a plugin for you. I love this plugin. It's called recent posts with thumbnails and if your theme doesn't do this so this is a snapshot of my sidebar where I have some recipes and it throws in the featured image. Again so now my sidebar instead of just having words it has pictures really drawn to pictures like I'm having. Alright so I'm up to number 5 of my 7 tips that I'm going to give you today is creating professional graphics with Canva. How many of you have already heard of Canva? Some of you, not everybody. If you haven't used Canva you are going to love it. Canva is created for the non-designer to get designary looking imagery that you can put on your site and you won't believe how good it looks. And the way it works it's free at canva.com you can open an account and I had a free version of Canva for years before I finally decided to upgrade. So and I think upgrading is worth it but you can get a lot out of it if you're free. The way it works is you pick your design type like your shape so it could be an Instagram post, is it going to be an ebook cover, you know, what kind of image, blog post what kind of image do you want to make? Then here's the power of Canva once you pick basically okay it's going to be a blog post there are pre-made designs so you just drag your design over and then you can use the picture in it if you want or you can change your picture and you can change your text and it's just a nice starting point because I hate starting with a blank canvas I freeze up but if I see a design and this one I don't remember what the original looked like and had like some flowers and some other quote I'm like okay I can put my picture in and I put it in there Do you, I think we have to have the paper in the background photo No, I don't think so So Canva also has so they have these layouts which are basically designs it also has stock imagery so you can search in here and find images so if you want a sunset or a starry night or a forest or whatever you want you can do a lot right within Canva and their paid images are only a dollar so it's really cheap it's worth it so here's some examples you can create ads blog post graphics here's some before and afters so this was the template inside Canva so I took that template copied it into my own I said use this template and then all I did was I changed my words I changed those pictures with my own pictures this one I decided to make this pink color and now I have a professional looking flyer and I printed that out and took that with me to an event so it really saves you time and you don't have to be a designer so here's the key with Canva if you're going to use a design stay pretty close to the design because you've had a designer figure this out if you go changing it really crazy it can start to look ugly if you don't know what you're doing so the best