Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of cancer with Dr. Denise, a JLCU of Combo Cancer Foundation in partnership with Plus TV Africa. I want to welcome you all to another exciting conversation on appreciating how radiotherapy influences cancer treatment outcomes. I hope we're going to have a lovely conversation and great to see you all again this week. So let's start the day and let's start a month. First time for most this month is Cancer Survivors Month. So for us to be able to make sure you get the message, I'm going to stay follows on our social media platforms as we share various activities from various organizations. So it's not just about us across Nigeria. Just check out Combo Cancer Foundation and we'll tell you what's going on. So good afternoon everyone and today we're going to be having a lovely lovely conversation with two very special guests of mine. Mrs. Anima Shaung. Hello miss. Hello ma'am. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. We can hear you and I can see you nice and clear. Looking very bright. And Mrs. Joy. But I'm going to call her Joy throughout the program. Hello Joy. Hello ma'am. Thank you for having me ma'am. Thank you for agreeing to do this because you know most cancer patients do not want to talk about cancer if everybody's like it's a so let's go. Fourth of June is the National Cancer Survivors Day in 2023 and it's an international event to raise awareness of cancer sufferers and survivors. The event is held on the fourth and Sunday the fourth of June 2023 this year but normally it's always the first Sunday in every year in June. So I want to welcome you to a nice conversation we're going to be having and let me give you some facts about it. According to the National Cancer Institute an individual is considered a cancer survivor from the time of diagnosis the balance of his life or hers of our life. Every survivorship experience is unique as they may face challenges during and after treatment with survivorship research adverse effects will be controlled treated and prevented. So today we're going to be having a very very interesting conversation with two very very important people to me one of them is a survivor like myself and so you see what I like to celebrate us and then I've got a very special lady in this house who has now told me my nickname I gave her is now trending so that's very nice Auntie Moji good afternoon. So who are my guests let me let me introduce them to you so first one is Mrs Moji Animashaw who is a radiation therapist and hospital administrator with with over 40 years of experience working in this cancer space this includes treating patients teaching HRP students and mentoring he's the past vice chairman of the radiation of radiographers in Nigeria of Nigeria and a trustee of association radiation therapist of Nigeria Moji is also a board member of the registration registration board of Nigeria wow thank you Auntie Moji for joining us this afternoon and I've also got my healer like myself the cancer survivor who is Mrs Joy a budae who had cancer of this saliva glands that's a very rare cancer I think but I'll find out as we go along Joy started her journey in 2008 when she discovered a painful tumor under the left side of her chin after two consecutive years of surgery she was diagnosed with cancer of the left saliva glands she went through 30 days of chemotherapy and six cycles of chemotherapy 30 days of radiotherapy and six cycles of chemotherapy and we thank god today she's also got a second chance as I would always say we always have chances for every day we have so we got questions going now aren't we so are we going to start these questions let's look at the topic very carefully appreciating how radiotherapy influences cancer treatment outcomes oh lastly let me first take this opportunity to thank Dr Tviatika who are going to be partnering with us throughout the month to celebrate cancer survivors across the across Nigeria friends families and the support love the times you laugh with us the times you cry with us and to those who have lost already on the journey may everyone so rest in peace question one nice to meet you both Joy can you share us quickly your cancer journey yes my journey started 2008 but at the time I adopted two years of consecutive surgeries I was diagnosed with cancer of this saliva glands and immediately the result came I was asked to go for radiotherapy because the tumor is the type that grows very fast they call it grade A adenoid carcinoma so the doctor already does to quickly go for radiations to shrink the tumor and to kill the cancer cell so we should really run to make money you know cut a treatment of cancer is very expensive but the time go for itself at that particular time so we're able to raise the money it was easy almost 100,000 as at that time that was early 2011 so I started the radiotherapy the therapy is always given to us every blessed day is a kind of machine treatment with the kind of rails that are directed to that particular site so I went through it for 30 good days and each day is just for a few minutes at that time machines in Nigeria let me put that way they're down radiotherapy machines so the only one that was working was at a co-hospital in Keja so I have to leave my house very early in the morning at early as 3am in order to beat the crowd so I went through that journey for 30 days it was it easy but I turned go that I was able to skate through it and there's a side effects that go with it but I turned go that at least I'm here to share my story today so I don't know if I should go home I want to thank you because I've never really heard of I don't know that word so please just understand that might be doctor I'm an educationist and I don't know medical terms and somehow I have decided to have it a brain blank on medical words that I did here you said something and Casenoma don't worry we've got a doctor we've got a specialist in the house so we've got who is Mrs. Anima, she's a specialist in this one so maybe she will help us to educate the public on what you are trying to say and her will continue so um anti moji because that's what I'm going to call you for the entire program as I said I named you that name and so I'm going to probably be the one that tells everybody anti moji go and speak to her all right let's go what is a radiation therapist and why is a radio a radio therapist important in treating cancer radiation therapist is the technician who treats the patient you have an oncologist who is the medical doctor who's specialized in treatment of cancers and that's the specialist who looks after the patient is in charge of the patient management but the radiation therapist is actually the person who does the treatment after it has been planned the radiotherapy after it has been planned um a radiation therapist you it's um in Nigeria for instance it's a bachelor's program you have to do a lot of physics a lot of math a lot of anatomy pathology physiology and I'm saying this because a lot of people don't realize that they just think that we come out of the research you have come out of the room and press the button but for us to be able to press that button because it is millions of votes being put in the patient you have to know exactly what you're doing so it's a highly specialized um area and profession in in in the um cancer in the cancer space so that's what the radiation therapist does so the doctor prescribes the medical physicists or the symmetries do the treatment planning how the patient is going to be treated and the radiation therapy therapist treats the patient so that's that's the team in a radiotherapy department I think um that's that should make is is clear enough I think that is um it's very interesting because uh like you're talking about the radiotherapy a lot of people have different experiences because if you if I think about um Joy who's sitting next on this on this program with us if you look at Joy now and think about the process of her treatment as a salivary gland then I think of my treatment using the gamma knife yeah can you can you explain both of them so I think the first one you've explained will be the generic no can you explain both of them okay the the radiation therapy like um Joy had said earlier is focused exactly on the area that you want to treat unlike like the not like the chemo which treats all the the whole part of the body anywhere there's blood the chemo will get to but with radiation therapy it's specific high dose radiation ionizing radiation to the to the area and the importance of radiation therapy is because it's meant to quickly kill the cells so they don't have a chance of survival number one and then they don't have a chance to go to other parts of the body which is what will happen if it's not treated so again Joy had mentioned that they said that it's a fast growing tumor some tumors are slow like prostate some are fast like the um salivary gland like she talked about so the important thing is to quickly treat them for Joy for instance she probably would have had to have a mask something to hold her head down to keep it steady and while she's having the treatment it'll be specific to the area and because of the area that they're treating you have to treat the cancer cells but then you don't want to damage the normal cells because to get to the cancer cells you have to have some effect on the normal cells which is why there are side effects thank you ladies for your contribution for the guidance and the information you're given with us and we look forward to continuing in a few minutes once after this break thank you stay tuned welcome back everyone as I'm continuing this conversation with Mrs Anima Shao and Joy Ibude I think we're having a fantastic conversation and I hope you're able to pick out questions and thoughts about the experiences of cancer patients as they go through radiotherapy um even though I've had it I didn't really realize this is what how it was and listening to Joy she had a very different experience so it's just that you know our experiences are always going to be different but the bottom line is we should thrive to be able to get through it so I'm going to go to the next question now Mrs Anima Shao based on the two the conversations that Joy and I or the experiences Joy and I have explained would you say that um what would you say are the key takeaway points that you want our viewers to make sure they understand because a lot of people do not take cancer treatment because they are afraid of like what Joy has explained or what I've explained but the truth is that both of us are still sitting here Joy is sitting here since 2011 is that when you said Joy right doesn't have my radio yeah and mine is 2016 so really we're still here and that should be able to get through to people why they shouldn't run away from it yes and I I totally agree with you your last point that you are still here um as human beings we we should be able to put in our best whether we're here or not is not really up to us our responsibility is to look after our body and if one gets cancer radiotherapy is one of the basic treatments most of the time unless it's a it's a radio resistant uh tumor that doesn't respond to radiotherapy but radiotherapy surgery and chemotherapy are the three and and and none of them is without pain none of them is without discomfort but at the end of the day the result is what we're seeing with both of you being here so the important thing is to work with the patients I feel that a lot of counseling needs to go into treatment um and I'm glad that Joy said that she was lots of things were explained to her before she actually started the treatment so when she got she got to that point she could understand the reason why um she had the pain in her throat why she had the swallowing and that it would you would cross that bridge and come out to the other end with nothing if you look at Joy's neck now you would never know that she is she has gone through radiotherapy I mean you look at I mean you probably had your hair cut and then Dr. Denise but nobody would know that now it's only a period of time it's even something as simple as malaria when you have malaria you feel uncomfortable but when you start taking pills I actually feel worse at some point first before you start feeling better it's only the that period for cancer treatment for the radiotherapy lasts longer than it would for malaria but any any any drugs has some kind of effect on people so there would be a a time when things look as if you feel worse and then you start feeling better so people have to understand that it is important when they say go for radiotherapy Joy is stand sitting here today because they said you have to go for radiotherapy quickly because the cancer grows very quickly and she listened if you if you sometimes the taboo and that's the sad part for me the taboo for patients maybe somebody who couldn't afford the treatment but they can't they don't want to go out and tell people oh please help me because I need to have treatment I need to have radiotherapy they feel that it's something they did wrong that causes cancer it's not so you have to be quick about getting your treatment it's absolutely important the diagnosis needs to be quick the treatments needs to be fast because every day those cells are growing they grow in the organ and then when the organ doesn't contain them they start going to the lymph nodes to the blood cells to different organs so it's very important that you have that radiotherapy to arrest it if that's the first thing that they ask you to do or if it's chemotherapy whatever treatment mode of treatment but today we're talking about radiotherapy in particular but you have to it arrests the cancer it stops cells from growing and you want to do that as quickly as possible so it's very important for people to remember that the doctor who's asking you to do this they know what they are talking about especially if you go to an oncologist and that's also another important thing that you have to when you come don't I mean you can pray pray as hard as you can Muslim Christian traditional pray use the doctor but also make sure that you go to a specialist don't treat cancer through a general practitioner don't treat cancer through somebody who is not an oncologist it doesn't give you the best fighting chance because they are the ones who are trained to be in charge of oncology patients just as well as don't treat don't get treated in radiation radiotherapy without a radiation therapist we have to educate ourselves so we can ask the right questions and people in other parts of the world that is not Nigeria and they ask they will ask you are you a licensed you didn't even ask because your license is meant to be there are you a licensed radiation therapist are you practicing you know do you have a current license are you an oncologist they will ask these questions it's your right to ask these questions so that at the end of the day you give yourself a fighting chance and once we do that that is really our own responsibility to give ourselves a fighting chance when one has a cancer diagnosis so radiotherapy an important part of it thank you thank you thank you thank you um miss Anima because i think that's one of i think that's one thing that is very that's a very key message that people need to understand if we're going to make a difference going forward and one thing i was going to talk about which i think joy has nicely covered was most people think is very painful um yes it is very painful we're not going to lie about it joy i think we're going to agree on this but it's not painful it's okay for me it was painful at the time of doing it so for that six hour period but within by the end of 48 hours i was back on my working around as if nothing had happened and like joy said she went for 10 days and before she realized that there was something going on and managed for the rest of the treatment only to go back and start to heal so we do heal from radio radiotherapy which is what i'm trying to get to the general public now i'm going to ask everybody all of us are going to answer this question because as i round up this is the key takeaways what would you say joy to the government if you are sitting in front of our new president today and he asked you what do you want him to do for you as a cancer patient what would you say to him oh i would say to our president if i'm given the chance to speak to him is to kind of set a scheme to assist our patients cancer patients out there those that have been diagnosed of it majority of them don't have the money to cope with the treatment treatment is expensive the food aspect area is also expensive because we kind of change our lifestyle as a cancer patient we can't eat everything anymore so we are kind of selective make majorly eating balanced diet every day and it's not easy so if there's a way the government can assist both the ones going through the treatment and those that have gone over the treatment at the time they assist them financially to meet up with any liabilities they are facing then i really appreciate that thank you very much so you see yours is very straight and easy you see so one of the key things that has been found globally is that cancer cancer is a very expensive treatment and it affects every single person across the world so anywhere in the world that anybody has cancer cancer by funding is actually a cause for concern and it's something that is being raised globally for all of us because i think all of us are going through it now i would say for my own it would be mental health and our psycho social needs why would i come from that point because a lot of people do not realize that as a cancer patient we go through mental health challenges only because we don't know what tomorrow what tomorrow holds and a lot of us may either have family or people that are dependent on us and we can't even fund ourselves fund our treatment to even start to think and that is why a lot of people fall off the bus because of the funding um Mrs. Anemarsha can you give us your singular thing that you want i mean if you were speaking to his excellency today can you give him a message for us yes if i was speaking with mr president today what i would say to him is that um he should the NGOs should be empowered and the mental counseling that you talked about the the the financial support these are all things that can be taken taken up by the NGOs and get it to the people to the point of contact in terms of maintenance in terms of addressing it to the right place at the right time i think NGOs should be especially especially in cancer care because of the the cost and all the things involved in it NGOs should be empowered to the degree that they are more like a support system for the for the for the government in in building all these fancy hospitals and NGOs should be empowered to ensure that people who need the treatment are able to get the treatment that's what i would say to him i want to say a very very big thank you to you ladies for joining me this after the today and working through or rather discussing this the radio therapy aspect of the cancer journey because a lot of the time um words that are said are based on not knowledge but what people say they think we're going through or how they think um we should be um living this experience so i want to thank you both very much for joining me this afternoon this afternoon this morning wherever you are thank you thank you thank you i really appreciate you and to all our viewers thank you for joining me and listening and participating and we're hoping that you will help us spread the message whatever sequence it is um mrs lamina shown said she said very clearly she said seek the right person to speak seek the right person there is your doctor there is your oncologist there is your radio radiologist there are all of them are there there is the psycho people there is that's why i call them please don't be upset they're medical people but no medical medical words are very very big but become a so i want to thank you all for joining me this afternoon this today together we fight together we win you can follow common cancer foundation on our social media candles um subscribe share and this uh videos will be on our common cancer foundation youtube channel for you to watch um mrs lamina shown um is also an NGO owner and i would like you to say the name of your NGO please sensorial cancer treatment foundation thank you very much so if you are around that area you need help you need advice you want to donate or you want to support that charity please look reach out for them reach out to them and meet and and see what you can do i want to thank you all for watching us i want to thank plus tv especially for giving us this space and for your continued support in creating cancer awareness and our cancer awareness program we believe together we fight together we win we'll see you soon and um have a lovely cancer survivors month all survivors let's all enjoy at least we get into this month and let's celebrate each other ladies thank you for joining me and thank you all have a lovely


Hello, everyone. My name is Carl Blythe. I'm the Director of Coral, the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning at the University of Texas at Austin. And I want to welcome you all today to our OER Hangout. We have kind of an informal discussion and a couple of tasks to get you into the wonderful world of open. I'm really glad that you're joining us today. The main idea here is just to introduce you to the wonderful world of open. What is an OER? What is open education? So another thing that we want to bring your attention to is that this is really an enticement to get you to take a course that we have, an online course that we just completed that teaches you a lot more details than we can go into here, but a lot of details about licensing and preparing OERs and that kind of thing. Okay, but this will certainly give you an overview of what we mean by open. Okay, hello. I'm Sarah. I'm the Project Coordinator here at Coral. And just to go through the agenda, we'll be doing the introduction, which we just did a little bit of. Then Carl will give you a warm-up task to do to practice searching for OER. That should be a pretty quick little task list in 10 minutes. And then we'll do some group work for 15 minutes, so everyone will break up into groups and talk to each other. And then we'll report back on that work, have some Q&A, and then some concluding remarks. And we'll be referring you to the OER course that Carl mentioned throughout the Hangout. OER, of course, is in the middle of our acronym. We are the Center for OER and Language Learning. OER is literally in the heart of what we do. An OER stands for Open Educational Resources, and it can be for anything. We want to make sure that people understand that we are here to promote language learning, but we do that through the lens of open education, which changes things. So at the, really, the central issue is about copyright. And we want to start off our discussion today by familiarizing you with Creative Commons and the icons that Creative Commons uses to break down copyright, because sometimes people get confused. These icons are very simple. That's the whole point of an icon. So there are four of them, and once you learn them, you'll be able to speak the language of open licenses. So the person there in the circle means attribution. So in education, for example, when somebody creates a material, whether it's a syllabus or it's a test, what have you, we want to point, and if you use that test or you use that syllabus, we want to point back to the person and say, essentially, thank you. That's what we mean by giving attribution. This is pointing back to the person who originated the material. Then that kind of symbol that looks like a, I don't know, a recycling sign. This means that when you see that, it means that you have to share the derivative in the same way that the license tells you to do so as the original. In other words, that symbol has to show up on your license as well. So the next one, the equal sign that says no derivatives or meaning that you have to use the material that you see in this same way. You cannot change it. You have to, when you start out, what you start out with has to be what you end up with, the equals. So that's kind of not particularly open because we want to produce, we want to promote the notion of open, which is an open exchange of ideas. We want to create materials that other people can use and reuse and take apart and the ideas just keep on going. And finally, the dollar sign and the slash through the dollar sign is pretty obvious. That means no commercial use, do not sell the original or derivative. There are other signs, obviously other monetary different currencies. So if you see a euro with the slash through it, that means the same thing as the dollar sign. So attribution, share alike, derivatives yes or no and commercial yes or no. Another way of thinking about then these different kinds of open licenses is it's not really as a dichotomy but much more of a spectrum. So in other words, there are degrees of openness and that's something that people need to understand. So if you see it to the far right, you see the C in the circle, that's what most people associate with copyright. That means all rights reserved for the author and the publisher. But the whole point of OER, the whole point of open education is to share your rights with others. So you've created something and you want to give it away, you have to decide which rights you want to give to other people, other users. So at the other end of the spectrum, the most open of all is something called public domain. And when you come across some content on the internet and it has this label public domain, that means that you are free to do anything you want to. There are no limits. In fact, sometimes we don't even know who created it, we don't know who the author is and so point to or to attribute it to. But creative commons licenses, those are all the CC in the circle, creative commons. And you see that the most open license of all to the left there, that just requires you to give attribution. So if you notice, every single creative commons license carries attribution. So that is what we call the CINACONON of CC licenses or open licenses. You have to share. And this is simply saying, think of it as good manners. Somebody created something for you. You want to give praise and thanks, your gratitude for the person who created it. So you always have that in every single creative commons license. The next in the green zone then is the share alike. So here you can say, okay, I'm pointing back to the originator. I've created something a little new and I want you to do the same. Okay, so that's what it means to share it alike.  Now, the other, as you see, it gets less and less open. And that means that you're simply putting more constraints on the users of your OER. So you don't want them to make any kind of profit from them or you don't want to make derivatives. We at Coral want you to stay in the green zone because we want to promote openness. We think that your ideas will prompt other people to have ideas. Okay. So another way of saying all of this, we've kind of, this is a different array of the licenses. But typically, we want you to stay, as I said, in the green zone. So we tell people that we're creating materials to be shared. And we also want them to, for their own purposes, maybe to use them for commercial purposes. So the most open license, just the attribution license, is the most open of all. And that's what we prefer to use at Coral. The next one over to the right there is attribution share alike, or ccbysa is how you kind of, you name them by referring to the icons. And so they can be shared, but only with the same license. So again, in the red zones, you can't make derivatives. You can't use it for commercial purposes. We're not really promoting that. And finally, another way of thinking about this is, what is an OER? What is the purpose of an OER? There is a discussion about what constitutes an OER. And what we're essentially saying is that an OER is a product. It's educational material that other people can use and reuse, can edit and change. So that means that if you're saying that you can't make derivatives of it, no, no, no. Right? We want to make sure that all of our OER allow people to change and make derivative copies. So again, basically this slide is avoid the red zone at the end there. We don't promote the use of non-derivative licensed. And finally, another question that comes up all the time is when people are making materials for other people to use, because that's really what it's all about. The question then arises, well, can I use this piece of content here in my own OER? If you focus on the first two, the ccby and the ccbysa, those two licenses, you will always stay legally safe. You can create materials that other people can use in a legal fashion. So to simplify it, we say just stay at the top two, ccby and ccbysa. They are OER and they are always safe for you to use. We put licenses on all the materials that we create. This is Coral's materials page on our website. On here you can find resources in 20 languages created by faculty and teachers with the support of Coral. Each material has a Creative Commons license on it, so that gives you more freedom to reuse the materials and to make modifications if you'd like. These materials are very from supplementary materials to full curricula. There's some videos on there that you can use in your classes and lesson plans and all sorts of different things. So we encourage you to check this out if you haven't already. Another way to think about OERs or what exactly do you do with this out? There is talk in the open education community of the five Rs. Not four Rs, but five Rs now. The idea that you can retain the copy. There are actually commercial publishing companies that will sell you a license to a product that's online. An online textbook, let's say, but it suddenly disappears at the end of the semester. So that's a right. You're right to retain a copy. So most of our OERs, of course, you can use them. You can download them and you retain the right to use them as long as they're on your laptop. Then, of course, we're also really talking about the notion of reusing. So going in and changing and making changes because you like the textbook but you don't want to use one of these chapters. You can simply remove it. Redistribute. That means making a copy. And everybody makes copies of different things, but that's usually a violation of copyright. If it's a C in the Circle textbook, for example, produced by a commercial publisher. So you want to make copies, but then you want to distribute them, send them out to your classroom. Well, with an OER, that, of course, is not a problem. You're allowed to make copies. You're allowed to share them with as many people as you want. The idea of remixing is if you imagine taking two OERs and creating what's called a mashup or a remix. So it's not just changing one OER, but it's actually taking many different OERs and making a new product, a new derivative. That's remixing. And finally, revision is important because most textbooks, if you buy a print textbook, of course, you can't go in and edit the copy. But let's say you want to go with an OER textbook. You might want to put in what I call Easter eggs for your students. Little hidden surprises. You can change the names. You can actually take their names and put them in a textbook in a lot of different ways that you can make small changes but have a big impact. So those are what we call the five Rs. They allow people, we give them permission to do all these different things, to retain, reuse, redistribute, remix, and revise. On our website, we have a page devoted entirely to the discussion of what is an OER, what are open educational resources. We have videos for you. What we want to do here is introduce this little warm-up task for you. And this shouldn't take very long, but we want everybody just to get their hands dirty a little bit by searching the Internet for an OER and directing you to creativecommons.org, which is a very important website. And once you go to this search.creativecommons.org, it's essentially a page that's been optimized with all these different search engines that can find open content on the web. You can search this in any language. So you simply type in, let's say, a phrase or a word that makes sense to you. If you're a French teacher, you may be looking for images of the Eiffel Tower, whatever it is. Then you find a piece of media that you like. Then carefully look to see if you can find the license. It's because we just had a really crash course on licenses. What license does it carry? And then we'll talk about that in a group chat. I want you to tell the group what media you found and then what license does it have. Remember those four icons? You can just say CC by SA and whatever it is. I just want to show you before you start that we have an example here. And so if we're typing in graffiti or something in Spanish and this comes to me, note that the license here is CC by NCSA. So they don't want you to use this particular image, immaterials that can be sold. It's for non-commercial purposes only. So let me give you about seven minutes to do this. And remember to write your answers.  I think that's good enough. If you've had a chance to, as I said, just get your hands dirty. This is a warm-up task after all. But the main idea is that some of you did encounter some problems and that's actually good because what I want to do is say, first of all, that not every piece of content on the Internet carries a license. Sometimes it's ambiguous. And what we want to train people to do is start to pay attention to licenses. The other thing that this little warm-up task is meant to do is to get you to use something like a Creative Commons search engine. In other words, there are many different places for you to go to find open content. But people often haven't filtered the search to look for the open content. So if you're using Google as your search engine, you should make sure that you are filtering for open content. Otherwise, it's going to give you lots of closed content or copyrighted content. That's the first thing to say. Even something like Flickr, when you go on Flickr, there are millions of images. But of course, they're all mixed together. So you need to make sure that you have chosen the correct filter, the CC license filter. And finally, some of you have found other open licenses. And that's true. This is the Internet after all. So CC licenses are becoming more and more popular as a standard for open licenses. But there are other licenses out there. So this warm-up is really just meant to get you to focus on open licenses. And if you can't find the license, if it's ambiguous, then you need to do more digging. So now we're going to move into our group work session. And we'll break you up into groups. And what we'd like you to do is you'll find yourself in different groups. Introduce yourself to the group. You'll have a new chat box there. So type in the chat box and introduce yourself. Then quickly assign a spokesperson. Here, maybe somebody will go ahead and just say, I'll take over. I'll take over this task. And then you'll need to complete the task somewhat together. So we want you to exchange information within your group about this task. So for this portion of the Hangout, now we're going to report back on what we did with our groups. So you can report back on, describe the task that you did, talk about any points of confusion among the group members, and mention any takeaways from the group that you were working with. So our first group was searching for OER. When we were the searching group. So Shannon, can you let us know? Okay, can you hear me? Yes. Okay, so we decided to look at the repository in Merlot. And generally, like the organization, there's a lot of stuff on there. There were a couple times where I got pulled out of the languages area, and I didn't expect to. So it would take a little bit of a learning curve to get used to the filters. But the biggest thing that we found was that at least a couple of the resources that we randomly chose were actually not open. They were commercial products. So we were reminded to always double check the license when we get things from these repositories. So I want to make just to follow up real quick comment. Sometimes commercial products and commercial companies will create teasers, parts of their materials that are open, but essentially it's a commercial product. So they'll allow you to use maybe a little quiz or like a conjugation activity, but 99% of the material is closed. So, but that's okay. You can still use that little bit that they've made open. But yes, I was really proud of my group that they sorted it out and they actually looked at the license and they said, hey, wait a second. This is actually a closed product for the most part. So we learned our lesson that even in OER repositories, some things aren't open. And the only way you can know that is by checking the license. So good job team. That's great. Thank you. And so the next group was the licensing group. And Natalie, I think you were working with that group as their spokesperson. Margaret was taking notes for our group for group two. And we were talking about licensing and attribution. Our task was to list the benefits of creative commons licenses and to explain the rights attached to for the CC by license. So the rights attached to a CC by license are the right to copy, the right to distribute copies, the right to make derivatives, to create your own work on the basis of another work, the right to sell the CC by licensed work for profit, the right to receive credit if you authored the work. The benefit of creative commons licenses, we've came up with the following points. First, you're protected when using someone else's resources. Creative commons licenses protect you from copyright infringement as long as user follows the author's terms. There is no legal knowledge required. Authors can easily license their work for different purposes by inserting a CC licensed image or text without having to come up with legal text themselves. The creator of materials is always attributed. That is the basic rule of creative commons licenses. Fourth, increasing the distribution with the help of others makes it much easier to find and share materials.  Giving something away for free will increase exposure and will spin ideas into new creative works. This spreads a work even wider than an author alone could ever do. It is about finding an audience with the help of others. Creative commons licenses are becoming more popular. Many media sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Vicky Media comments and Flickr include tags and filters that make it easy to identify creative commons content. That concludes the benefits of creative commons licenses. Now moving on to points of confusion. When you're looking for OER, you don't need to choose a license. You just have to understand the licenses. Only an author of an OER needs to choose the license. A lot of people were confused about this in our group. And maybe one day they will create their own OER if they are new to the OER world and the comments. At first you just need to understand the creative commons licenses. Group number three, we talked about remixing and revising. So I'll read what he wrote. So our group worked on improving a reading comprehension task about tomatoes. Our first impulse was to add images, which we did. So there was some confusion about a warning regarding personality rights. So that was just because there might not have been permission from the person in the picture to use the picture. Other multimedia ideas were floated as well. We also changed some of the locations to areas more relevant to students. For example, the US instead of Canada and Washington state. People mentioned that it would be good to have an audio component so students can hear the text. There was some discussion of interactive activities to help students learn from the text. Ideas for adapting the lesson to different contexts included cultural differences, immigration issues. Identify some dishes that use tomatoes relevant to the students you are teaching. Integrating food as part of cultural identity. OER for cultural specificity. And our takeaways in this group were that there were lots of ways to adapt an assignment like this, making it more visually engaging, more accessible and more relevant to the students context. So thank you, John. That was a great summary. Again, if you have questions about what we just went over, you can look in our OER course. That's where all the reference links and the tasks you are working on were part of the OER course. So you can always go back there with questions and of course contact us if you don't find answers in there. So where do we go from here now that you've gotten a little bit of an introduction to OER or maybe you already have been working with OER. So some ideas for what to do next. You can share an idea with a colleague. You can join a community. You can try putting a CC license on something you create. You can search for repositories for content for your class or you can have your students create their own learning materials. So some of those are pretty simple. Some are more complicated like having your students create their own learning materials, but these are all just a big variety of different ways to be open. Here at Coral, we have some summer workshops. So you can stay in touch with us by attending our summer workshops. You can sign up for our newsletter if you're not on it already. There's a link to sign up right here. You can also earn a badge on our learn network. As we said before, you can also use our OER course to find out more about OER. So now we have five minutes for Q&A. I think Natalie's been collecting from questions people have asked throughout the webinar. So we can answer those questions. And then if you have more questions, please type them in the discussion window. Yeah, a couple of interesting questions that came up. One question I thought was really interesting. So a PDF, sometimes PDFs will carry a license. And the question was, well, then can I revise it? Yes, depending on if it says that you're able to make a derivative. So you could use an optical scanner on that and turn it into a Google Doc. That's fine. You can go ahead and do it. The question is, well, it's not in an editable format. Well, you can turn it into an editable format. That's exactly what, by giving you an open license, that's what they want you to do. So even if it isn't editable, you can make it editable. So let's see. You can't find the license on a website page. That's often a problem. And sometimes we search around and search around. And if you can find a contact number, you'll have to send them an email message. This, unfortunately, is where we are today. And the internet people will put media up online and they want to share it, but they haven't made it explicit. So we're just talking about best practices in open licensing. So we want everybody, when you make a material and you want to share it, you need to put a license on it to let other people know exactly your intention. So if you can't find a license, that material is ambiguous. And you will have to either not use it in your OER or contact the person for permission. Some people have said they've noticed other licenses out there that replace CC licenses, like GNU, free documentation license. Yes, there are other licenses. Creative Commons, as I said, is becoming a kind of a standard open license, but there are other brands. And sometimes they're not as easy to read as the Creative Commons license because they don't have the icons. But try to find some kind of verbiage that gives you the permission that you're looking for. Let's see. Another one question. I use a lot of visuals in my ESL class. I use time to find copy-free images and documenting light attributions. Yes, this does take time. And that's why it's important for people to, I would suggest, instead of you're creating your own OER, at first you might just want to go to a repository and use kind of ready-made OERs that have, that everything is already done for you and you find materials that are somewhat of a shortcut. So Coral has a lot of our own teaching materials that we've made in different languages so you can start there. But making your own is time-consuming. You need to find content that is open that you can use and then you need to put it together and then you need to license it. And it's true. That takes time. Making your own materials takes time. Let's see. The YouTube I found in CreativeCommons.org had no mention of a CC license. Is there a way to filter for YouTube videos? There is. On the YouTube video site there is a way for YouTube to filter it. And it will give you different kinds of YouTube licenses. I can't show you on the site but you can type in YouTube and ask for help. There is definitely a way to filter YouTube videos. As a teacher, oh, there is one that's really great. Am I protected by fair use laws? That's a great question because teachers assume that they're protected. Well, general rule of thumb is, yeah, you're typically protected but just because you shouldn't assume that you're protected. Fair use means that if you're using a copyrighted material and you're using it for explicitly educational purposes at what are called transformative purposes, like if it's a song that's used for entertainment and you're using it for teaching a language, that transforms it. But you're usually not allowed to post it or make other derivatives of it. So if you're just playing it in the classroom for educational purposes, that's usually going to be okay. The problem is when you're using materials, when you're creating your own hard copies or your own OER. Some of you are now thinking already about making your own materials and in fact language teachers make materials all the time. And we want you to get credit for that. In other words, we give you badges. We'll give you a badge. In fact, we have a whole community of OER makers, our open educators who are promoting the use of OER, making OER, reviewing each other's OER. And we would really like you to visit our site, which we call Learn, Learning and Teaching with OER, by going to this link and seeing what your colleagues around the country are doing. Click on their links and find out what they're doing and you probably will tell yourself, well, I could do something that, or I'm already doing something like that, in which case we want you to join the community, get credit and get a badge. That brings us to the end of this, our OER Hangout. And as I said at the very beginning, this is just kind of a brief introduction to the world of openness and open design and open teaching. There's a lot more and we've just scratched the surface.


Personal Finance PowerPoint Presentation. Dental insurance and dentures. Prepare to get financially fit by practicing personal finance. Insurance is part of our long-term risk mitigation strategy where we use the adage of measure twice, cut once, going through a formal process, looking something like setting up the goals, develop the plan to reach the goals, put the plan in action, review the results, repeat the process periodically. We're now looking at the dental insurance and dentures. Most of this can be found at Investopedia. Does dental insurance cover dentures, which you can find online? Take a look at the references, resources, continue your research from there. This is by Matt Danielson, updated August 31st, 2020. Does dental insurance cover dentures? So we've been talking about insurance in general and prior presentations. We moved on to the medical insurance, which can be a little bit more complex given the fact that the medical insurance industry in and of itself is complex. Because of the regulations involving it and the insurance related to it, the dental insurance kind of has some more components of it that are similar to the medical insurance. So now we're drilling down a bit deeper on some specific items with regards to the dental insurance. Most full dental insurance policies include some restorative coverage, usually meaning that up to 50% of the cost of dentures is covered. So we talked about some of the different categories with regards to most dental insurance, noting that the normal kind of wear and tear or the types of procedures on the dental are usually kind of easier to define than just a medical field in general, where you can of course have a problem, you go to a specialist, but you don't know exactly what to do sometimes. Whereas the dental, you can usually kind of categorize them out. So we went to some of those categories in prior presentations. This is usually gonna be one of the ones that could be a more expensive area and where you've got that 50% of the cost here. So regular deductibles and copays still apply. So the actual cost to the patient is always a substantial amount. What does dental insurance typically cover? Dental insurance has a typical annual maximum coverage cap amounting to a medium of $1,500. Now remember, this is kind of different than what you might think of for traditional insurance, like life insurance or property insurance or liability insurance and to some degree medical insurance where you might be saying, hey, there's some event that could possibly happen out there in the future that would be very financially devastating, although it might not happen like my home burning down or me getting sued or something like that. So I want to have insurance to cover me in the event that that big thing kind of happens. So you got the deductible oftentimes and you think about over the deductible, the insurance kind of kicks in up to a fairly high amount possibly covering like the property if it was for a home or something like that. With the medical insurance, you have a similar thing with the out-of-pocket maximum. With the dental insurance, it's a little bit different because they have a fairly low amount that the insurance oftentimes will be paying before you have to pay over and above that amount, which can clearly be lower than what a substantial problem that could be covered for the dentistry could have. So you got to keep that in mind when you talk about more kind of expensive procedures. So 1,500 is the medium kind of like the mean, but like in the middle, you know, the average, but no, it's the medium, the one in the middle. It covers procedures strictly related to health and wellness and it has a three-tier structure known as 18050. Preventative care such as annual cleaning, x-rays and sealants is covered 100%. So here we've got the categorizations. So the preventative stuff is the stuff often covered. And then the basic procedures such as fillings, extracts and periodontal treatment for gum disease are covered 80%. Major procedures, that's the crowns, the bridges, inlays and dentures are covered 50%. Depending on your plan, root canals can fall into either the basic or major category. Most plans focus on preventative and basic care and not all procedures are covered. So limitations of dental insurance. Most insurance companies have a waiting period for new patients, though there are some that don't. So in other words, if you're looking for some of these bigger kind of things, remember that you can't really wait until the problem happens and then get the insurance that defeats kind of the point of traditional insurance, meaning you can't get car insurance after you got in the car accident to cover the car accident that's just got into. It's kind of similar with the dental insurance, but they don't wanna get into the preexisting conditions and screening and that kind of stuff. So they do something a little bit tricky here. Basically wait until the insurance will kick in for certain procedures because typically if there's a problem with the dental kind of thing, you're gonna need to get it fixed fairly soon or else you're gonna be going through pain and it's gonna get worse through that timeframe. So that's how they do it. So this waiting period usually applies to non-emergency procedures such as dentures and typically ranges anywhere from a few to 12 months, though it can be as long as two years for some companies, annual coverage limits, which can be as low as $1,000 despite the medium mentioned above, which was 1,500 I believe, can result in a situation where a loss filling or cavity earlier in the year has already eaten up a large portion of that year's dental allowance. So we talked about the fact that it might be covered only to 50%, but you could also have things that were covered to some degree by the insurance company hitting that fairly low cap, the amount that the insurance will be paying out fairly quickly given the cost of the dental procedures. So this would likely result in dentures being covered at less than 50%. So we have to be strategic about when you plan for certain procedures. Some employer dental insurance packages have an option for lower monthly costs but may offer little to no coverage for restorative procedures. Patients must foot the entire bill for dentures in these cases. If it is possible to wait, it may be wise to switch providers during open enrollment to an option that includes denture coverage as the savings can easily outweigh the higher monthly costs. Discount plans, discount dental plans are not insurance. They represent a group that has negotiated discounts and fixed prices for specific dental procedures at a limited number of dental professionals in the area. So those lacking dental insurance altogether and those with limited coverage insurance may find savings of up to anywhere from 15% to 50% compared with regular prices. Your discount is given at the time you have your procedure and you must pay at that time because annual coverage limits generally top out at $1,500 while dentures usually start at $2,500 for an upper or lower plate. You will end up paying a large amount out of pocket when using dental insurance to get the dentures. So no matter how you cut it, you got that 50% that you might be looking at that you have to pay. And then you've got the cap that is fairly low that the amount that the insurance company will pay out. So you gotta take those into consideration when doing your calculation. So discount dental plans have no waiting period or annual coverage limits. So if you can find the right plan, you may do better using one of them to pay for dentures rather than using dental insurance according to dentalplans.com. Before signing up for a discount dental plan, make sure that the coverage meets your needs. Also check that the participating dentists in the area do not have prehabilitative long waiting lists for new patients.


My name is Dr. Laz and I teach at the Quest Center in Hollywood, Florida and that's a center for special needs. So I work with individuals with profound special needs. I would say in almost every case of someone, a student who I've had with special needs, they've always been able to do more than I thought they were able to do. Maybe all too often what I've seen is that they tend to be put in a role that's sort of very passive. And so the project was really geared towards helping these students, these individuals, to become more active participants. Come on, big guy. Let's go. Ready, buddy? So, listen, every time you hit this switch, you're going to be operating your drums. Okay? So, let's just sit here. That's working. And look, when you hit this switch here, I'm just going to show you. When you hit that switch, that's going to activate your drums. All right. You ready? See if you can get your, move your leg on it. Nice. Awesome. Good. Try it one more time. You got it down. So we hooked up adaptive switches and so suddenly these kids are now participating right from the wheelchairs by using a knee switch or a head switch. Nice. Good job. I think the goals of the program in two words were motivation and participation.  The NEA Foundation Grant was absolutely critical to this whole project. I mean, it gave us the tools to work with the students and to bring these awesome educational gold mines of the expressive arts and place it right on their laps. The critical piece, I think, is really opening up that door and where suddenly the child or the student says, wow, I can do this and it's awesome.


The What's Neat Show is sponsored by Lombard Hobbies. Your value hobby shop for over 40 years of modelers helping modelers. Big inventory, value pricing, fast shipping, and great service. Additional support is provided by Walthers Trains. Everything you need to build a great model railroad. Check out their website at walthers.com. And by Bachman Trains. Now that's the way to run a railroad. Check out their website at bachmentrains.com. And thank you for helping us support the best hobby in the world. This is What's Neat for April 2022. I'm your host Ken Patterson and this month we do have a great show in that Jennifer Kirk shares with us how to use solder, how to solder wires, how to solder track, a great mystery to a lot of folks. Jennifer makes it simple and easy the way she explains it this month in a 10 minute segment for the video. Also this month, Mike Buddy stops by and he shares with us how to make windows for your vehicles and your buildings using simple scotch tape and packing tape. It's very effective and Mike gives us a very comprehensive how to this month on how to do just that. Also this month, our great editor, Joe Fugate from Model Road Hobbyist Magazine shares with us the new format of the magazine, how it's all laid out, much easy to navigate. A really good interview from Joe this month. Also Larry Harrington from Bachman Trains in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He shares with us some of the new products that are just recently announced from Bachman. Really exciting this month. Thank you very much Larry for that. I'd also like to say that Walthers has introduced two new products this month. SD 50s, very beautiful detailed locomotives and also 60 foot automotive box cars, auto parts cars. This Mike Buddy's gonna love and this is exactly what you need when you make that automotive consist for your layout. I'd like to remind you to please watch the What Sneak This Week show that we shoot every Saturday night, sharing with you all the new products in the hobby, great interviews, great guests, walking you through the week to week new news that is in this, the best hobby in the world, the hobby of model railing. And so with that, let's continue on with the rest of this April 2022 What Sneak. Hi there to you, I'm Jennifer Kirk and today I want to talk to you a little bit about an easy way to tackle soldering. Soldering, of course, is the joining of two metal objects together, using a melted metal, the solder, as the glue. For a lot of modelers, talking about soldering might as well be talking about some kind of weird voodoo or witchcraft, but it doesn't have to be that way. And in this video, I'm gonna show you some of the common applications in modeling for soldering and the really easy way that you can tackle these and get the job done really, really well without breaking a sweat. In this demonstration, these are the products that you're going to need. And you'll find that soldering is so much easier using these than what you're probably used to. Most importantly is the solder. And I recommend the DCC Concepts S179 solder. This does not have any flux within it, so it gives you a good clean bond. Use it in conjunction with the DCC Concepts No Clean Flux. And this does exactly what it says on the bottle. It doesn't require any cleaning afterwards and is safe to use on any of the electronics. To apply this, you're gonna need something like a small paintbrush, just enough to be able to get the flux exactly where you need it. Also really useful is one of these wire strippers that makes stripping the wire ends so much easier. And when we join wire to wire, I recommend the use of these heat shrinks, again from the DCC Concepts range. These make for great protection for any exposed soldering where a wire is joined direct to another wire. And you'll see this later on in the video. Whether you model in DC or DCC, no matter how hard you try, you really can't avoid at some point to have to put droppers to your track just to make sure that you've got good electrical continuity. Now perceived wisdom might be that to avoid damaging the track and you don't want to melt the ties here, is to use a lower wattage soldering iron. This is actually the worst thing that you can do. Now the reason for this is if you use a low wattage iron, it's gonna take a lot longer to heat up the piece of metal that you want to solder to. And all that time, that heat, is just being sucked out along the rail and it means that you have to take longer and longer to apply that energy in. And all the while, these plastic ties are gonna start to melt and that causes a lot of damage. If you use a high power iron, something like a 60, 70 or even 80 watt iron, you can actually get the heat that you need into the piece that you're soldering to really, really quickly. You can get the soldering done and dusted before the plastic ties have had time to melt. So a higher powered iron is actually a really good way to make sure that you don't risk damaging your track. It's also quicker and easier, so you'll find it a much simpler process. I'm gonna show you now the wrong way to do this. And this is with this type of solder, really easy to get from your local store. It's got the flux already self-contained within it and I've got a pre-tinned dropper wire here. And I'm gonna try and solder this to this track. And what you're gonna see is that even with a reasonably high power iron, it's gonna be tricky to do. Now I've pre-tinned the dropper and I'm gonna try and tin the track. And as you can see, the solder is struggling to actually adhere to the rail. And I end up with a dirty blob that really doesn't look very neat at all. I can then solder to this. And quite frankly, what we're getting here is a complete mess. It's proving tricky to get the metal to join properly.  You can also see that those ties have started to melt. And that really doesn't look good at all. The bond too can be quite weak. And you can see there, that's just pulled straight off the rail. We haven't got a good clean bond and we've actually got a huge blob of solder. But there is a better way. I'm gonna be using this No Clean Flux from DCC Concepts. And with that, I'm gonna use the DCC Concepts S179 solder. And this doesn't have any flux in whatsoever. Normally, flux can be quite destructive. And you have to be quite careful not to make a mess. But this No Clean Flux is really good. It does exactly what it says on the bottle. It doesn't require any cleaning whatsoever. I've got a fresh dropper wire here. I'm gonna get a little brush and I'm gonna very carefully start work with the flux where I want to solder. Just dip it in. And in fact, you might find easiest. So just dip the wire into the flux. I've broken a little piece of the solder off just the ease of using in this video. We've already got the flux there on the wire. Then I'm gonna just melt a little bit of that onto the iron itself. When I tap that to the soldering iron, you can see it just wicks up that solder instantly. That wire is now tinned. We go back to the flux and where we want to solder, I'm gonna choose just there. I'm gonna run a little bit of flux onto the side of the rail. And now what I want to do is to just tin that side of the rail. Got another tiny amount of solder onto the iron and then very, very quickly. It's tinned. It's much neater. We're using a lot less solder and you can see there. It just instantly adhered to the rail. What we can do now is go back to our flux. I just want to put a little bit more onto where we're soldering. Gonna dip the tinned wire in here. You can use the brush if, for example, this is coming up through the baseboard. And then again, just tin soldering iron and then very, very quickly. That's the two together and solder. And what we can see there is we've got a much neater join. Moreover, that is very, very strong and you're much less likely to get dry solder joints or joints where the wire just works loose over time. So much better. The next situation that I want to talk to you about is maybe this where we've got some wires and for whatever reason, we removed the plug that was on the end where you could have wires that you've cut and then you need to solder them back together. In this instance, I'm looking to attach this stay alive to its companion decoder. Now normally, this would have a loom on the end that just plugs in. But what I want to do is to put that back to the decoder and this is really, really easy using this method of soldering. First up, what we need to do is just take a little bit of the plastic insulation back and just very carefully just take a tiny amount. You don't need a lot. We then need to go to the wires onto the decoder and do the same. We now need to tin again using the no clean flux and the S179 solder. And because this no clean flux is safe to use around electronics, you don't need to clean it afterwards. You don't need to worry if any of it gets onto the electronics or the circuit boards in the locomotive. It won't cause any damage whatsoever. And it's a really quick and easy process to be able to tin them, little bit of solder and it's literally as easy as just pressing the soldering iron up to the edge. And you can almost see the solder wick off the iron. It really is easy. Now that we've done that, a really good way of just protecting the join from any risk of shorting is to use these heat shrink tubes. Again, these are from DCC Concepts and each of these tubes is quite long. So what we can actually do is just using a pair of scissors, we can cut just enough to cover where the solder join is. And then we're gonna solder light colors to light colors. Again, a little more flux just to make sure all is well. And then this is the bit that's really easy to get wrong. Just need to thread these down. Otherwise, once you've finished, you won't be able to slide them on afterwards. Back in a little bit of solder on the iron and then light color to light color and you get a good, strong join. And there we've got three good, strong bonds. Heat shrink tubing just slide up over where the bond has been made and then using the soldering iron, you can just get this to shrink back down and it will grip the join, won't slide free. And that will just really reliably protect it from any risk of shorting and thus protecting your electronics. And there we have it, good, strong join and we can now really easily plug this in with the greatest of ease. The final situation where you'd need to solder that I want to talk to you about is here, where you need to solder a Steyer Live or a smart power pack directly to the decoder. What you can see here on the decoder is we've got these three tiny little solder tabs. You really don't want to be applying a lot of heat for a long length of time or you risk damaging the rest of the decoder. But that's where this flux method of soldering really does come into its own. Here we have the smart power pack and again, these wires come pre-tinned. What we do need to do, however, is to tin these tiny little solder pads. It's really important that you don't bridge these together. With the liquid flux method, this is really, really easy to get a small amount of solder just where you need it to be. Getting as much of the flux off the brush as we can then very, very carefully apply a tiny amount to these solder pads. And because this flux is absolutely safe to use on electronics and doesn't need clean up afterwards, it's perfectly safe to use in this situation. So we're gonna get a tiny amount of solder, add that to the iron and then very, very carefully tap, tap, and tap. And this is all that you need. We've tinned each of those tiny little tabs on the decoder and we haven't got any bridging in between. As you saw as well, we only applied the soldering iron for a fraction of a second so there's no risk of heat damage to the rest of the components. Next, it is simply a case of reapplying a little tiny amount of the no-clean flux. So in the right order, it's simply a case of this dab. And it's as simple as that. And you can see, we've got a good, strong bond with minimal bare wire showing beyond the edge of the decoder board. We can then repeat that after each dab with the solder, just check and make sure that we have no bridging between those tabs. And there we have it. A really good bond, no bridging between the terminals and it's as easy as that. This decoder is now ready to go in the locomotive and program with this smart power pack reliably attached. I hope you really found today's video informative and it just goes to show that soldering doesn't have to be mystical witchcraft. With the right products that we've outlined today, you too can get some great results. It's as simple as that. I'm Jenny Kerg, wishing you happy modeling. Until next time, bye for now. For this segment of What's Neat for April's What's Neat 2022, I've got Larry Harrington all the way from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from Bachman Industries. Larry, welcome to the What's Neat show. Thanks Ken, glad to be here again. It's awesome to have you Larry. Now you've got some new exciting things that you want to inform the What's Neat viewers about which I'm really excited about and I look forward to hearing. Well, first of all, I want to remind everybody we just came out with our 2022 catalog. So we actually have hard copy prints available now. So there's several ways to get this. You can, your dealers may have them. We just started shipping them out a couple of weeks ago. So they may not have them yet but they'll be in their dealer's hands soon. If you can't wait, you can go right to our website and order a hard copy and also you can also digitally download a PDF or view it on the flip book online as well. That is very cool. And they can also pick those up at train shows, can't they? Correct, yeah. Any show that Bachman attends will have, we will have catalogs with us. A lot of the shows have been canceled still but we are attending large scale show in Annapolis at the end of this month. We'll have catalogs there. We'll also be at the Rocky Mountain show in Colorado. We'll have catalogs there as well. It's fantastic. So Larry, tell me, what's new and exciting out there in Philadelphia? Well, we just got recently had received two of our newest items that were announced in NMRA last year. Those are test shots for first of all, the 50 foot express reefer. Nice. So it's a very nice head end car for your passenger trains. So it's got very good detail all around. There's the top catwalk area. This is all new. That's pretty exciting. All new. This is completely new tooling except for the couplers. Everything else is new. So there's the under frame detail. Nice. And there's the other side that we didn't show yet. So this will be available in four road names. We have Canadian Pacific, New York Central, Pacific Fruit Express and Railway Express. It's in the catalog. You can see the images on our current catalog. So take a look at the actual paint schemes. There are illustrations at this point but we haven't received the painted samples yet but once soon as we get them we'll be sure to share them as well. So always check out our social medias, Instagram, Facebook. We do a really good job of getting the information out there. That's pretty amazing. On the table I've got a lot of your Thomas products because they're so colorful and people love them. Thomas is a great inroads to the hobby. I mean we see people that start out with Thomas and go on to scale modeling or some of them continue on Thomas forever. They make their own little island of Sodor and you can do it in three scales now with large scale, HO and end scale now. So that's a great way to get into the hobby and we have a lot of new exciting products and Thomas coming out but I'm sure that'll be another show. We can talk about this. Absolutely. I love the end scale one. We show that off all the time on the podcast. The second item I wanted to show you is this is really nice car. This is the 55 foot coil car. Very nice. Yeah, this has got a lot of detail to it, including the coils. So we've included all the six coils for the, we have the painted versions over here and the unpainted over here. They all come out so you can have a realistic unloading or loading scene, sequence at your steel mill. Very nice. Very nice detail all around. Take the coils off here and show you the bottle. Otherwise I'll have a big mess. There's a lot of planning that goes into designing a car like that. Yes, there is. We've been working on this for a few months before we even approved any of the drawings. So this comes in four road names. It'll be in BNSF, CSX, Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern and the retail on this is $69. No, that's retail price. That's our suggested retail. Just like any other, like when you go to the car dealer you get a suggested sticker price. Well, the street price usually comes out to be significantly less than our suggested retail. So that's the two new items I have to show you this week. I'm really excited about them. It's nice to expand our HO rolling stock line. Everybody a lot of times gets excited about locomotives but it's important to have something to pull behind those locomotives as well. You are so right. You are so right. I love all the various products. I went through that Bokman catalog. You guys sent me an advanced copy of it and it's absolutely beautiful. The cover came out nice and there's so many products inside in all different scanners. Yes, someone did a good job on the photographer. That's awesome. But we added the, I don't know if you noticed it's the Philadelphia skyline in the background. So it kind of gave us our local stamp on it. So it looks really nice. Also in this is our new concrete tie track. Yes. I talked about that on the previous show but it's something to note. We're starting to expand that significantly in our product line. So we have a couple of new announcements in the catalog for that as well. That's fantastic. That Bokman easy track line, it allows you to do anything you want all the different various turnouts and crossovers and straight tracks and various radiuses. It's quite a line. And when you go to the hobby shop, it takes up an entire wall at the hobby shop. It does, it does. Yes. And now it's going to take up two walls with the concrete track now. So are you guys planning on doing turnouts and things in that as well? We do have turnouts planned. We started considering the concrete ties as more of a scale model or track. We started by doing, we did the typical 18 inch curves but we also did wide radius right away. We did 22, we'll probably add to that as well. And the first turnout we did, instead of doing a left and right standard turnout, we did the number four because that's more common in model rail writing. So for the realistic layout. So number four will be added to the concrete tie and also the haze bumper as well. That's fantastic. Give us that website where people can visit and look at all of these wonderful products. It's www.BokmanTrains. It's B-A-C-H-M-A-N-N, trains.com. That's awesome Larry. So is that what we have to talk about for this month? That is. That's awesome. Thank you so much for informing the viewers about what's new. We always are excited about it. We look forward to seeing you at the next train shows. We'll be there. That's awesome. And that is this segment for What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat, I've got Mike Buddy here today in the basement. Hi everybody. And Mike is gonna show us a very in-depth way to create windows for your vehicles. Now we've touched on this before in shows, but today we're really gonna get down to the nitty gritty. Right. I'm just gonna show you, you know, easy vehicle to start and they're progressively difficult, but the principle is the same for all of these cars. Something I started doing on my Matchbox cars when I was a kid back in the 60s because they didn't come with windows and it bothered me. So, and they lasted a long time. I still have one car at home. I should have brought it. And it's got the ribbon to the Scotch tape windshield in it. But anyway, if you wanna try this, it's also good for like structures and cabooses, some, you know, flat, plain square windows. It's not perfect because it's not three-dimensional, but what you're really trying to do is fool the eye. You know, if people will notice a lot more if there's nothing in the windshield, then they will, if there's a flawed windshield, you know. That is so true. That's exactly how we did the guest, or the fire department building when we had all the fire apparatus and vehicles running in previous What's Need video just a few months back. So Mike, we're gonna see what you're gonna do. All right. Well, like I said, you can start this with some simple square, flat windows just to try it. And I do get questions all the time about the, does dust stick to the back of whatever you're trying to do. If you put it on all sides, it's basically sealed. You know, dust rarely gets in from the bottom. So that's one way. But here's, these are some finished cars over on the left side here that I finished. This is a Chevy Step Fan from Greg Dixon with DeKal's from Stan, you know, Yedlovsky for a Snap-on Tools truck. And I did the windows on this with Scotch tape, like I'm gonna show you on this one. All right, I'll start right here with this red Step Fan.  So what I'm gonna do is line this up with the bottom of the windshield frame. Take a toothpick or, you know, paintbrush handle, pencil, I don't know, I just use a toothpick because they're handy and they're easy to find. Burnish around the top, and this has a center post. You can use that on the sides. Bottom part, I really don't usually mess with, the top and sides are good enough to hold it down. So take a sharp blade and trim as carefully as you can, leaving enough to hold the window in place. Cut my finger open or something. Okay, now I'm gonna trim across the top of the frame here. I don't know if you can see it. You know, you might be more comfortable with a knife. I just grew up using single edge razor blades, so I'm just more comfortable using those. Peel off the excess. Trim this left driver's side again here. I think I got that off. Now you wanna be careful not to stick the tape on too hard on the sides because many times I've lifted up the paint around the edge and you know, that's always frustrating. So I don't know if you can zoom in on that, but it's not perfect because it's not perfectly flat, but you know, at least there's reflections and that your eye just, you know, passes over that because it looks like it's supposed to look. So anyway, other vehicles with a little bit of a curve at the bottom, you would use the same technique but cut a curve at the bottom of the tape. Now this isn't really, I better get this off here. This isn't really that curved so I don't have to make that much of a curve but I'm just kind of winging it here. I'm just gonna pick up the body. Now I might have made this to curve too much. Yeah, you don't wanna pull the tape too tight because then you get a concave, your windshield's caved in, so you wanna kind of round it off like this one. Yeah, this bottom really isn't right, but I'll go ahead and trim the sides so you can see what it would look like. So you're burnishing it with the razor blade this time. Right, yeah, that's a habit I picked up but I figured I probably shouldn't show that. It doesn't look very safe. Yeah, now this bottom really should be trimmed but I'll go ahead and do the sides and the top so you can see how it looks. Feels like I'm cutting through the paint on this. I might lose the paint on this metal casting. Oh, that came out halfway decent. If you work with it a little bit, you can get it on there a little more smoothly. This is a little too long at the bottom so if I lined up the bottom, it would have come out a little bit better but just practice makes perfect with this technique and this car has pretty much of a curve in the bottom so I'll do that one. I'm gonna cut the tape in here because it's almost like having a third hand and having the tape pulled out like that. So I'm gonna cut a curve and not be enough but I'll go ahead and try it and I gotta pull this out so it doesn't get stuck. Okay, I don't know if you can see how that piece of tape has a tiny curve at the bottom, especially as my hand moving around so much. Okay, I'm gonna try and put this down on this gold car, match the curvature to the, I just broke one of the wheels off. I'm not making it look very easy, am I? It's perfect. Okay, I need to bring this edge up just a little. It'd be very difficult to make curved windows using styrene, wouldn't it? Yeah. Clear acetate. Yeah, because I really haven't found a glue that holds it well enough and it's not really as flexible as this tape is to match the exact curve that you need. Probably there are some situations where you can't use the tape like some older vehicles have an overhang or over the back window or the front window. You know, you really need to have it held down on three sides for it to look, you know, this good.  If I do, I'll make it into a beater. John Tyson told me about, I first told him about this technique a few years ago. Then he told me, he refined it in order to prevent the paint being lifted when you pull off the excess tape. What John does before he paints the vehicle is takes fine sandpaper and scuffs that area up all on the sides and the roof. Then same thing on the back, wherever you're gonna put the tape. And then with primer and paint over that, it held good enough so that it worked out. I've done about five cars using his technique of sanding before I painted and that really worked out well.  I made a master from the classic metal works, 78 Impala. I had a siren, I built a roof and everything and made a master so I could cast resin copies of it to fill my auto racks. So, this is what they turned out like and I needed a way to do the windows on them so. Show me that car again. There you go. Yes. Nice, Mike. Okay. So, I'm gonna try this the same way. I haven't had much luck doing it real well but this car turned out halfway decent. Okay, I'm going to do the curve again at the bottom of the windshield. This car is a little easier because it has concealed wipers. Sometimes the vehicle models that have windshield wipers at the bottom there, it causes a little bit of distortion when you try using this method. It's not perfect but to me it's better than having nothing in the windows. Takes a little bit of work in the tape around here. Pulling the tape off without losing any paint. Okay, now I need to pull it a little bit tighter. Anyway, I had to do, I don't know, I've probably done about six by levels full of these station wagons and I used the same technique for the sides and the back glass. And again, you know, it's not perfect because they're flush fitting which on these cars and windows we're sunken in a little bit and you'd be able to see the pillars but it's an illusion. Again, it's all an illusion that we're trying to create. As is anything we're doing with our model railroad, you know, we're trying to create our little section of reality and what it is that we like to do. So, I hope this helps you guys. I get questions a lot about this on the Scotch tape windows and it does take a little bit of practice but if you know you can practice and if you don't like it just tear it off and do it again. So it's cheap, it's easy and I think it's fun. So, you know, give it a try.  That's why I decided to do these this way I didn't want to try and vacuum forming them. But anyway, I hope this works for you. If you guys try it and it works out I'd like to see some of your pictures. So, that's what it is for What's Neat This Week from Mike Buddy. Thanks for watching. For this segment of What's Neat, I've got the publisher, our favorite Joe Fugate all the way from Portland, Oregon. You'll know him as the editor and publisher of Model Railroad Hobbyist Magazine, a wonderful online magazine, otherwise known as an E-Zine Joe. Welcome to your own show that we do for you every month called What's Neat in Model Railroading. Well, thanks Ken. I'm thrilled to be here. We were looking back and it's probably been, what, over 18 months since I've been on here. So it's long overdue. It was a good day. A lot of things have happened in your life. You've had fires, you've had ice storms, and you have published a whole lot of great, great magazines every month. Well, thank you Ken.  Was it 2012? It was. You started with us? I think my first article might have been in the spring of 12 or the fall of 11. And then that's when I approached you to do the monthly in the magazine still photograph and write about whatever photo project or project I had down here at any one given time just to create a monthly segment. Because as I recognize, I've been published in so many of the magazines with 450 plus articles, 175 plus covers in the Model Press, but I did see that it was going to the internet. And I thought that you might be the way to go. And sure enough, you and I struck it up and it worked out beautifully. What happened was, as you well know, I bought a video camera and I discovered that you could say so much more in four minutes of video than you could in an eight page article with 10 photographs, which turned out to be true. And it's amassed itself from three minute videos at the start to a 30 to sometimes an hour long video every month where we get our hands dirty, how-tos, special guests. And it's mostly the show where you build stuff. Right, yes. Yeah, when you discover digital video, things changed. And then to me, the other big milestone was when you started the weekly podcast, video podcast. And that has really changed things.  And very often, when I ask them, how did you find out about model trains and or how did you find out about model or hobbyist? They'll tell me, Ken Patterson's what's neat. And that's no joke. So that, your video presence on YouTube is huge. So, thank you. At the RPM show that we did here in the basement where we had Chris Palomarys, George Bogatuck and Robert Steers and so many people in the room last July down here, I think Chris Palomarys summarized it very well when he said that we've given a platform for announcing new products in a timely manner, whereas the publications can't do that because they've got the printing deadlines and there's this delay in time. Whereas we can give a platform with the new products and new guests, the immediacy of the platform is, I think, really what helps make it work. Yes, yes, yes. Definitely true. So there may be some people who don't know a lot about model or hobbyist, don't know exactly who we are. So I'm gonna do a screen share and let's just talk a little bit about who we are. So let me get the fire up the screen share here. So start sharing. So at this point, you should see the model or hobbyist forum. We recently moved to new forum software that's very good on a smartphone or a tablet as well as on a PC. And so this is our forum page. Let me go back to our main homepage here. And so this is the model road hobbyist homepage and you can do mrhmag.com, mrhmag.com to go to this. And we publish a magazine, free magazine every month. We also publish a magazine called Running Extra. The idea there is ads only pay for so many pages in the free magazine, but we have other great articles that people are submitting. And so what do we do? And so what we decided to do was actually add another 100 pages to the magazine that's not free, it's $2.99 a month, which is a steal compared to what are you paying for a 80 page paper magazine these days? It's like seven, eight bucks maybe. So anyway, for three bucks, and if you subscribe, you can save up to 80%. And also just mentioned, when you subscribe, you also get as part of your subscription access to all the back issues as part of the subscription. So it's like $29.99, $30 bucks, and you get the next 12 issues, plus you get all the back issues, which is like approaching 40 magazines at this point. So huge, huge library of knowledge, both in the free magazine and the Running Extra. We've been doing Running Extra since 2018, and it's extremely popular. We also have our Train Masters TV. Let me visit that real quick. So this is our model railroading video site. I call it Netflix for Model Trains. And there's hundreds and hundreds of videos on here. You know, you can just, I'll just do like the layouts section down here. Let's find this, okay. So I do see all. This is layouts, okay? This is just the layouts category, okay? Video after video after video after video, and there's hundreds. See, I'm still going. There's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of videos out here on all kinds of topics. That's amazing. Yes, and it's not free.  Monthly is $4.99. By the way, I'll mention you can also get the Train Masters TV app for Roku, for Android devices, for Apple iPads and iPhone devices. So you can get the free app and then you can sign up for Train Masters TV and you can watch it through the app on your mobile device. You can watch it on your Roku big screen. And like I said, hundreds and hundreds of videos out here and we're adding new videos roughly every one to two weeks, we add a new video out here. That's a lot of editing and your production values are quite good. Yes, we try really hard to make it high quality because I figure if you're paying for content, it needs to look better than your typical YouTube fare. So we work hard to make sure that when we're working on small details, we try to get in really close so you can see what's going on. Good lighting, professional narration, high quality editing. So yeah, we try to try to make sure that you're getting your monies worth when you sign up for Train Masters TV. So just a quick talk about the forum. Pinned at the top, you can see we've got Model Railwood Hobbys January 2022 and you can go in and you can read it online. And so the- This guy's photography is amazing. That water shot that you were showing about five minutes ago was amazing. Yes, well, that's actually a, we did an article called The Perfect Storm. That's it. That is amazing. And so this is actually a stock photo. We cheated a little. This is a stock photo because it's about a layout. It's about this fellow who took his layout and basically tore it apart. And it was, he talks about the Perfect Storm that led, it's an end scale layout that he had. What led to tearing this, you know, a layout that was almost completely finished.  And so what led to his dissatisfaction and then the need to completely just, you know, rip and replace a bunch of stuff. So it was the Perfect Storm. That's a very interesting subject matter too. That would be podcast material. Hey, Joshua, you got tired of your layout. What changed? What changed in your mind? Yes, we had some fun with this article because we put together this cover. That was fun. So, you know, this is a prototype railroad scene that's been enhanced with Photoshop to add the lightning and the dramatic lighting and everything. So yeah, I kept thinking, how can we make the cover really fun with this? And so I like his title of the Perfect Storm. So I thought, let's really have some fun with this. So yeah, so we've got, that's a MRH. So let's go back to, this is the form. So you can go to the form and every month that the top pin will be the latest issues. So this is the latest issue of running extra. Let me go to the top here. Okay. And you can purchase this, either single issues or $2.99, or you can get the subscription special. So the subscription special is $2,999, starts with the December, will change this to January, starts with the January 2022 issue. So that's 12 issues for $1,999, plus you get all the back issues for just another 10 bucks. That's amazing. So yeah, so I know when I go to the grocery store and buy three publications, I've already spent $25. Yes. So we also have the MRH Store. Let me take you there real quick. So it's store.mrhmag.com. The forum is forum.mrhmag.com. So this is the store and then we sell all kinds of downloadable videos, DVDs. We sell paperbacks. So go to the paperback section and so these are the paperbacks that we sell. You can also get eBooks. Also the store is where we sell all the running extra. We call it monthly eBooks because they're ad-free. And there's just a ton of these here as well. So yeah, lots and lots of stuff available from MRH. Fantastic, fantastic. Give me your picture back. Okay, just a minute before I leave, I need to give my wife credit. That's Patty because she's the office manager. She does all the pay stuff. And so if you like order a product from us and talk to us in the office, she'll be talking to her most likely. But she's also lives, like or not, she lives the hobby as well. So here she is weathering a structure over on the right. Bottom right, she's actually been an ops crew member on my Ciskey Line 1 ops sessions. Over on the far left, she's running trains at a convention. So yeah, she does a lot of stuff for us. That's amazing, Joe.  That's a very wonderful thing. Now that I've got you back on screen, I do want to ask you this question. And it's been in my mind. I don't know that I've ever asked you this before. I want to though. You started this magazine many, many years ago. And prior to that, you were in fact a model writer and you were well versed in technology. But what was it? What was your passion to move forward and create such an epic publication like you've done that has an online presence? Well, it actually started in 2004. I was fascinated with digital video. So I wanted to, and I love to teach. And so I thought, well, how about if we marry my interest in teaching with doing some digital video on the hobby? So I actually created my Ciskey Line video series. Talked about my layout. I did a series of five videos. It shows different aspects of the layout. The design, the construction, the DCC and wiring part, the operations, scenery. A couple of videos on scenery techniques. And that's been really popular. But then I got to thinking. I came up with the idea originally that I called model railroad or online, which is basically take the model railroad or magazine, put it online. So I talked to Combok and they said, you know, I said, you could make an online magazine and make it free and have it ad supported. And so they thought about it for a month or so. And then they came back to me and said, well, interesting idea. But we don't want to undercut our flagship product, which is the paper magazine. Understandable. And so they basically said no. Right. And so I went off and said, well, I'm going to do it myself then. And so in 2009, I launched model railroad obvious magazine free. It was like 150 pages with ads. And just gone from there. And as things went along and you got more into video, I started thinking, you know, we need some sort of video platform to do this as well. And could we make it free? No, because first of all, as you know, can model railroad or model railroad hobby vendors tend to be pretty old school. It was even difficult at first to try to convince them to advertise in a digital magazine. But they finally got it. And so then, you know, moving to video, could you convince hobby manufacturers to make video ads? First of all, they wouldn't know how to do it. And so then they would need someone to do it for them. And then for us to do it and make it cost effective, they'd have to pay a price they probably wouldn't be willing to pay. So bottom line, it just didn't seem like a free ad supported model train channel would work. So we went with the paid membership model and we launched Train Masters TV. Right, Barry Silverthorn used to do a great job on that. He's moved on and now you've got other great people working with you. You've also got Jeff Schultz. He edits my pieces every month. You've got James Regear, who is one of our podcast members down here on the show that now works with you. Name some of the other wonderful people that you work with to create this great magazine. Well, we have James Regear, which you mentioned. We also have Mike Dodd, who does a lot of the copy editing. I mentioned my wife already. We have several prototype modeling columnists. We have Nick Moff. We have Mike Rose, who has an audio podcast too. We love Mike. Yes. We have, I don't know, I'm going to blank out here. We have Yosemite Valley, Jack Burgess. And we have Tony Thompson, who does a lot of SP modeling. And we also have Marty McGurk, who used to work for Model Railroader. And he's modeling Northeastern New England railroading. So yeah, we have quite a collection of people. We also have Les Halmos, who does a lot of the ad work for us. And then his sidekick, JF. And they have traveled to conventions a lot, because it's at the conventions where we generally can talk to advertisers the easiest about being a part of MRH Media, which by the way, in 2016, we renamed the company. It was originally called Model Trains Video. And then we added the magazine. And as time went on, it just seemed like the Model Trains Video name was too limiting. So we incorporated in 2016. So we're now a corporation. And we're called MRH Media, what we named the corporation. Fantastic. Guys, if you want to see more of Jill Fugate, he will be on the What's Neat This Week podcast. You'll find him in the first week of February 2022, that issue, that episode that's coming out. And I really enjoy having a conversation with you and allowing you to tell the modelers and all the folks that view our show what it is that you actually go through. And I think you've done a good job of that, plus conveying all the various types of things that you do offer the modelers. Well, thanks, Ken. What I tell people is I'm just a model railroader just like you and love the hobby. And anything I can do to help my fellow modeler, that's what I'm here for. That's awesome, Joe. I really appreciate you being on the video with us today. And that is this segment of What's Neat? All of the products seen on this episode of What's Neat are available from Lombard Hobbies in Lombard, Illinois, or order online at LombardHobby.com. Walthers Trains, supporting hobby retailers across the world since 1932. Check out their website and learn more at walthers.com. Bachman Trains, now that's the way to run a railroad. Check out their website at bachmentrains.com.