Well, hello everyone. Thank you for joining us for this webinar, that's a partnership between Merlot, beside a great glass of wine sometimes at the end of the day. It also stands for multimedia educational resources for learning and online teaching, and our partner Nearpod. And today's session is titled Unleash the Power of OER. OER is Open Education Resources with Nearpod and Merlot. And the focus we're going to begin with here is around, these are tools that many of you have initiatives around achieving diversity, equity, and inclusiveness. In a sense, how do we better serve the diverse learning needs that our students come to our classes with? And how do we design engaging and inclusive learning activities so we can achieve those equitable outcomes? And we're going to get started in a minute. We're just letting people join in. Everyone's kind of running it. If you're on the West Coast, it's 12 noon. If you're on the East Coast, it's three o'clock. And on the East Coast, you may need the afternoon cup of coffee to get going. And on the West Coast, you might be trying to get your lunch in. So we'll just start in another minute with a presentation. And while we're just warming up the crowd here, my name is Jerry Hanley. I'm the Executive Director of Merlot and Skills Commons. For those who may not be familiar with Skills Commons, it's Open Education Library, free and open for you to use. And it's focused on career and technical education in workforce development programs. So it could be associates degrees, certificate programs in manufacturing, health care, agriculture, IT, construction, lots of other workforce areas. And joining me from Nearpod is Amy Young. And you can see her there. And it's just wonderful working with Nearpod. I think folks, you're going to be amazed as to the power and, importantly, the usability of this tool to create that custom curriculum where your expertise comes to the table. And then our wonderful, magnificent, awesome, Jane Moore, who's been in Merlot, when we started crushing the grapes way, way, way back when. So Jane, welcome to say hi here too. Hi, everyone. This is Jane Moore. And I'm here in my capacity as the editor of the Merlot Teacher Education Board, which named Nearpod, our classic award winner for 2022. And I am speaking to you from Glen Ellen, Illinois, where it's gray and miserable outside and glad to be with you in this warm environment. All right. And Amy's on the East Coast, right, Amy? Yes. Hi, everyone. I'm in Raleigh, North Carolina. So it's pretty rainy here too. But we didn't get all the hurricanes and tornadoes they said we get last night. So And I'm in Southern California, Long Beach. And it's a beautiful day today. All right. So let's get started. We talked about the title already. So Amy, if you want to hit the next slide. There we go. So for those of you who may not be familiar with Merlot and Skills Cosmic, this is going to be a 30 second overall description. So if you're looking for educational materials that you can bring into your teaching and learning, Merlot has over 90,000, I'll call it academically oriented resources. And they are free for you to use. And most of the websites that you have, you can reuse, remix, retain and redistribute, and sometimes revise them. Okay, because we're providing you a catalog of all these educational resources that have been curated by the community in Merlot. And that's over almost 200,000 people around the world who are really contributing to this. Skills Commons is a free and open library, as I mentioned already, focused around workforce development materials. And in this library, you can actually download the files to reuse, remix, revise, retain and redistribute. And all those are the five Rs of open education resources. So folks, those are the places if you're looking for ingredients to serve up a learning meal for your students, this is a good pantry to find a lot of materials. And the next slide. And when you're thinking about how do I bring all these ingredients to address the issues of the diverse needs of my students and how do I make the content that I'm teaching, whether it's in chemistry, or whether it's in sociology, or nursing, or anthropology, or the arts, that understanding the diverse backgrounds that our students bring really affect their ability to understand our concepts, our skills, and how do we also design an inclusive way of learning and assessing these things. So your ability as a faculty member, you know your students better than anyone else. So how do you empower faculty yourselves to customize and create a context for the course content that is relevant for your students? Then when you have the content and organized into curriculum, how do you design those learning activities? How do you make sure they're interactive and engaging to help those students learn those skills and knowledge that are most relevant for them? And then finally, how do you ensure all students can achieve those equitable, they have equitable access to the learning resources so they all can succeed? And these tools, online open education resources are the ingredients, but you also need more for how do you in a sense mix it up in your learning kitchen to make those learning experiences, serving the diverse needs, achieving those equitable outcomes by having inclusive pedagogy for your students. So next slide. Now one of the critical factors of really enabling all your students is to make sure all the content that you're providing that they are affordability. The the virtual campus in the Florida virtual campus has done research over a number of years showing that about two-thirds of the students don't buy at least one textbook because of the cost of that and consequently about 43% also don't take more units because of the cost textbook. So if you have an initiative that are trying to make sure all your students are succeeding, they're being retained in your programs that they're advancing toward graduation in a timely manner, affordability of that content of your course materials can make a big difference in the success of all your students. And in Cal State I'm a recovering administrator for the California State University. I used to be the assistant vice chancellor for academic technology. Closing those equity gaps or achievement gaps is really important and affordability makes a huge difference. So next slide. So this is where when you're thinking about open educational resources where do I get the ingredients for the content that I can bring in and make it an institutional strategy. So Merlot for the last 12 years has been really advocating affordable learning solutions that how are these technologies learning solutions but now more affordable and so by bringing in Merlot's free and open educational resources, practices, strategies for teaching as well as services you can then begin to design your course curriculum with affordable learning resources and we also provide professional development programs to help you begin to look at the alternatives for your instructional materials and choosing ones that are right for your students that are relevant for their experiences and what's also important about an institutional strategy is that it's important to recognize the innovations, the course redesigns that your faculty are making so that you support them and really sustain that and enable to produce student savings and just so you have just some understanding of the significant impact that's possible here in the California State University. We have 23 campuses educating almost a half a million students, 500,000. In the year 2021 we save students through the affordable learning solutions over 77 million dollars in one year by looking at using low cost and no cost alternative teaching and learning resources so you can make a difference and bring affordable learning solutions. Now next slide. Now when it comes to affordability now how do you can really contextualize this for the diverse nature of your students in the California State University for example? 20 of our 23 campuses are Hispanic serving institutions. 15 of our campuses are Anapesis or their Asian American Native American Pacific Islander serving institutions and then so we also have in the U.S. we have historically black colleges and universities and with a wonderful support of the Hewlett Foundation we've built a portal to enable not only to bring free and open materials but also to bring materials that can be more relevant for specific diverse populations of students. So next slide just hit the button there and one of the things that that we've created is an HBCU cultural collection of resources of open education resources that provides you wherever you are this is again free and open for everyone whether you're in an HBCU or not have access to this collection and next slide and what we've done in the Merlowe Library now is we are helping users recognize the origin of the resources that are in the library that you can then when an author has created things they bring the context of their institution the purpose that they have in creating these materials and so if you hit the next button all right you can see here that the person who submitted this material Robin Blackman comes from a historically black college and university so now when you're looking at materials in Merlowe you can say was this submitted by a faculty member from an HBCU or a Hispanic serving institution or an NNPZ institution or a tribal college or university so we're helping you identify resources that are frequently recognized by people who are working in these diverse contexts next slide and in the cultural collection you can first find people who are working within HBCUs in in all the different discipline areas on this page next slide and we've also kind of we're inviting people and particularly with our program with the HBCUs to identify materials that are related to biographies for example when you want to bring into your classes representatives of different racial and ethnic and social groups and gender all these aspects how do you find those resources well the HBCUs have built a collection that help you find kind of the scholars in a variety of areas in their biographies area we also make it easy for you to find with a click of a button what are all the materials that have been authored by faculty within math and science right and mathematics so you can click that button and what will pop up will be those materials related to authors of math and statistics who come from his historically black colleges and universities the next next button here and the other thing we've also done specifically around strategies to support the diversity equity inclusiveness in educational programs we've also built this collection of you know the DEI in education and how do you ensure technology serves those needs or the research activities and then we also have within education and the workforce what are resources that help you address DEI within those environments so we're trying to reveal make it easy for you to discover resources that you can blend into your own programs that are serving the needs of our diverse students so you can design inclusive strategies for their learning and skills development and achieve equitable outcomes and finally you can see at the bottom we've also really made visible within this collection all the resources that are free and available at the national museum of african-american history and culture so again for this webinar merlot has a variety of academic resources and working with minority serving institutions and in this particular case with historically black colleges and universities we are trying to make it easy for you to bring those resources and enable you to integrate it into your courses more effectively so next slide and this lastly there's a lot of language here and i apologize but one of the things about the powerpoint these will be available for you to review the video will also be and so when you're thinking about ways to really provide more inclusive learning you can think about how do you look at these disciplinary concepts and how for example with the hbc use make them more relevant and meaningful to african students how do you bring as i mentioned before bringing in artists and scholars and researchers from the african researchers and scholars community and include those as resources and experts into your program how do you design assignments that are more meaningful how do you think about pedagogical strategies that are really responsive and really respectful of social cultural and racial expectations in your community and finally working with librarians and how do you an academic technology staff thinking about referencing and access to african-authored resources so these are the type of ideas for you you can begin to think about how do you design your courses and what merleau is trying to do is first making you those easier for you to discover those resources that you can bring into your course for free right how do we ensure that we have the the affordability issues addressed for our students so next slide now at this point what i'm going to emphasize in all the five hours of open education resources in my experience over the years reuse retain and distribute we're doing pretty good at that but when it comes to remixing and revising that is that what you do as a faculty member to try to customize your educational content for the curriculum that's most suited for your students we've had lots of challenges and that's one of the reasons why partnering with nearpod it's you have the ingredients but now how do you have the kitchen the utensils the tools the you know the appliances to really do the remixing to of all these ingredients so you can really deliver a really quality education for your students so when you're thinking about remixing and revising with oer you need tools to do that and nearpod and what we're going to show today i'm going to pass this over to Amy now to really explain how nearpod really empowers you to customize that because by remixing it you can then create your custom solution for the students that you have in your institution so Amy i'll pass it over to you thanks so much fairy hi everyone my name is Amy Young and i'm with the higher education division of nearpod and i'm going to do a quick overview about what nearpod is a little bit of the background and then we'll jump into the platform so you can experience it from the instructor perspective and then also the student so nearpod essentially is an engaging and interactive presentation platform that encourages student participation regardless of where they're located and instructors can use the feedback from the interactive activities to adjust to the class need nearpod can be used in a variety of different teaching environments including face-to-face, online, hybrid, a group setting one-on-one and also the high flex we know that's a new challenging environment for a lot of instructors as well and it can be synchronous or asynchronous so it's very flexible. Nearpod's also device agnostic so students can access your lessons from their laptops their their iPads their iPhones wherever they can access the internet they can get to their your lesson or cloud-based and they don't need to download a program or an app they don't even need their email address to get in so it's very simple for students to access and it's also we integrate with most LMSs via an LTI link and we really encourage instructors to use the resources that they're already using for their lessons as well so if they already have power points and instructor or and maybe some google slides and whatever they're using for their lectures they really can pull in all of that but then using your pod to make them more interactive and then we also have additional supplementary material that you can add in and also add in materials from Merleau and other different resources as well. So the name Nearpod actually represents the importance of close proximity for learning and it started to help improve collaboration amongst peers and help them exchange ideas with each other all while the instructor is actively facilitating that process. Nearpods started in the K-12 market space and they were extremely successful and grew very quickly in fact one out of every four students in the U.S. and K-12 uses a Nearpod course at least once a week and as we continued to grow we expanded into different markets one being the enterprise market where a lot of companies use Nearpod for training for their employees and then naturally grew into the higher education world where we have over 200 colleges across the U.S. now having a site license with Nearpod. We realized that there are multiple point solutions out there available for engagement such as Flipgrid and Ed Puzzle, Kahoot and PlayPosite and many more and what Nearpod did is they evaluated the most effective and widely used of those tools and then put them all in one single cloud-based location so instead of having just one to focus on and go deep into that you can have access to a variety of engaging options to choose from to make learning more engaging and it also could present a cost savings as well considering schools don't have to purchase multiple tools and we have over 20 ways as you can see here to make learning interactive. You can upload videos and embed activities on top of then Nearpod works great with drawing on the screen and we also have open answer questions polls drag and drop and matching and as well as FET simulations which if you're not familiar with on FET they're a nonprofit organization that offers no cost simulations mostly focused on math and science and we'll jump into some of these you can actually see them live too shortly. So while the majority of higher education instructors use their own lessons and then enhance them with our interactivities to make them more engaging there is some desire for some prepared supplementary interactive lessons for instructors to work with as well and so because of that we wanted to offer an impactful and useful solution to our customers to really help bridge the gap between what standard OER textbooks seem to not be able to offer as much as the traditional paid textbooks do in terms of ancillary materials. So what we did was we partnered with OpenStax and then we created 350 interactive supplementary lesson presentations that align to the seven most popular Genet textbooks with OpenStax and that is biology, chemistry, AMP, physics, psychology, sociology, and American government. And we're going to jump in to Nearpod so I can show you these you can access them within Nearpod but they're also accessible on our commons drive and so any instructor right now can go to the commons drive and download these PowerPoints and Google Slides and edit them any way they want and use them so we really wanted to stay true to the commitment of offering what OER really is and I think we put in the in the comments or the chat area the link for that website as well so you can go to the comments and download them now if you'd like. So before I jump in to my account with Nearpod I just wanted to make sure everyone realizes that any instructor at any time can create a Nearpod account for free. It's a freemium product and instructors can make lessons and use them with their students. And what happens is up to a certain point a storage point and instructors can use the product for free and then as they've determined if they really liked it they'll move on to likely at most universities and getting a site license if there's more than one instructor who's interested in and using the program and that opens it up to unlimited storage and some other sort of features as well. So I'm going to exit out of this presentation I'm going to bring you over to my Nearpod account. So this is what it looks like when you log in there's just a standard folder storage system here you can make folders and subfolders and you can color code them as well but if I was brand new to the program then I wanted to just start a lesson I just click create click on lesson and if I have power points that or google sites I wanted to upload I could just do that right here I could do it from my drive there's different options and I'm going to pull in my power points here and as you can see they're processing maybe I'll label my lesson I can decide how I want to make them interactive so maybe I'll look for some content as my files are loading which here they came I only have three power points here but this is where I can add the content so I can click on add content and here's all of those activities to pick from so maybe I want to add a psychology video so I'll click on video and I can search our video library I can go to youtube safe search and upload videos lots of different options but I'm just going to search in our library today and scroll down and see here's some crash course video on cognition I'm going to click on that and I'll look at it maybe I'd play it see what I think now these this video happens to have different activities built in so the students have to answer these activities before they've moved on now I can remove these or I can add more or I can edit them so if I want to click on it and look at the actual question I can delete it if I don't like it or change it as well so if I think that looks good I can save it and here's my video it always goes on to the bottom and maybe I decided I wanted that to be into the middle or right after my introduction slide another thing I might want to do is add another activity for the students to do maybe a drag and drop and so what I can do here is I can upload any image and then the students will have to slide over the text label to match up on to the image but for sake of time maybe I don't have time I want to see what's in the library so I'm just going to come over here and maybe I'm looking for brain labeling let's check that out and oh yep that saves me some time that's exactly what I was looking for and now this will be part of my lesson and the students are going to have to slide over the labels so I'm going to save that and then maybe I wanted to have it right here so it's easy of that I press save and there's my lesson now if I wanted to show you all a little bit about our library and this is where we also keep the open stacks material so if you click on the near pod library here you can search by subject matter and also by grade level and I'm going to click on publisher and you can see we have over 15,000 curated interactive activities and lessons for instructors to choose from and I'm going to scroll down here to the open stacks I wanted to show you all what this looks like these are all of the different disciplines we discussed that we have open stacks lessons for I'm just going to click on chemistry just going to idea of what it looks like and they're all organized by chapter and by section and if I wanted to preview one I just click on it and then I can view it see if this is going to work for me okay I see some matching activities here and if I think that yes this is going to work for me I will add it to my library and now I'm just going to go back to my library and and I'm going to actually edit it so I want to show you how you can edit it and change it so I can duplicate the lesson that I just downloaded if I wanted to have an original or I can edit the original if I wanted to so here's all of those slides from that open stacks lesson and if I think some of them might be a little too much or it's just not necessary or things that I'm going to be teaching on I can click on any of them and delete them maybe these two I felt like were not relevant for my class I can reorganize any of them and I can also add in new content so maybe I you know I remember that there were some really cool things in Merlot that I saved in my bookshelf so I'm going to actually go over to Merlot get into my account and then I can see my book part collection I made one just for chemistry for myself so I really liked these labs and a periodic table that was live that was interesting but for today's purposes I really wanted to look at bring in this video so all I have to do is copy and paste the video over into my new pod presentation so I'll just click on video click on the youtube search and put in the URL and there it is and now I can add it and I can start to look at it if I want and review it or I can just immediately start adding an activity so I'm going to add in an activity here and just maybe do a multiple choice question and then you know obviously you would put whatever pertains and made them the most sense to whatever you're asking and I can move the activity anywhere I would want it to be and I can add more and and more I basically can have as many as I want or as little and instructors can turn on and off the activities as for their lessons as well if they decide they don't want to or they need to move quicker so there's the video that I added and maybe I want to move it up here towards the middle and then I can also add in some different options as well if I wanted so maybe if I wanted to do a fat simulation as I mentioned that earlier about the organization that makes these free simulations and it's really neat because the students can manipulate the parameters oh I wanted to show it to you it's going to load and so they can mess with all of the different information based on what they're looking at and see what the results are going to be that's just a really neat way for students to be able to work within some simulations right within your presentation so one thing I wanted to also show you was to give you a little bit of a preview from the student perspective as well and so I'm just going to jump into a lesson here I'm going to close out these two just so I don't confuse anyone so as an instructor when you are going to launch a lesson you have an option of doing a live participation or student pace the student pace is really great in terms of making sure that the students have to answer the questions before they move on so the students can't just click on it press play and go call their friends they have to answer these questions before they move on and the instructor can control that and take that option away if they want to as well for our purposes today I'm just going to do a live participation and if you are in a lms you wouldn't need to enter a code or a link and but you can see you can do this without being in your lms I just provided a link to my students through the chat and normally I would do that through our zoom or through our webinar but for today's purposes I'm just going to do it for us and so you don't have to join so I'm joining right now as a student this would be their experience if they were in campus or a different online message just log right in so this is the first part of my screen and I'm going to toggle back now to the left browser and you'll see that I'm going to be able to be the one controlling these slides as we move forward so we're talking about graphs here and your pie can be used for any discipline I'm going to talk a little bit about graphs and math and then we'll switch over to health science just to give you a different perspective on different types of disciplines and how some of the activities can be used so as you can see here I have the student view or the teacher view when I'm a teacher so I'm going to jump over here to the student and take this poll so maybe the first thing you would do in your lesson is find out how comfortable the students feel with the subject matter and I'm the student and I don't really feel that comfortable so I'm able to see that Bobby has answered and he doesn't feel very comfortable with what that is and I can with the subject matter he answered C and so I can see that you know maybe I want to share the poll results and obviously it's going to be a whole 100% right here because we only have one student in the class and I can share all the results so the students can see where this class stands and I can also remove and hide student names here on the bottom of the instructor that way if students are participating but they're a little hesitant because they don't want to be wrong I can always remove that and also as I'm going through my presentation as well what's really nice is if our you know lesson is just so riveting and we just couldn't finish at all I can say okay students you need to finish these slides on your own and then they can finish the lesson or maybe if an emergency came up they can do that as well so it's really nice to be able to toggle back and forth so maybe the next thing I would do is play a video and I can you have the students play it or the teacher plays it and I'll just play it for us here obviously you guys aren't in the class and so same thing as I mentioned before when you press play they're going to hit this interactive question they both represent the output of the function so we're actually and then on the student screen they're going to have to answer question and then they can move on and continue to actually going to rewrite this function this is an example of a drag and drop and so I have the equation I'm asking the students to just match it up with whatever graph they think is the correct answer and they submit and what's really nice about these sort of image type of activities is on the instructor side I'm able to see every so if I have multiple students here I'd be able to see all of their responses in the image which is really nice and if I feel that no wow that was they got all these answers right it's perfect I can share it with the class if I want to here's another one of those FET simulations this is just using FET for graphing so you can kind of see how that works and this is the collaboration board so students here can really just kind of talk to each other and chat and they can make recordings they can pull up gifts they can put images and such is a really fun way for the students to be able to talk to their peers and exchange ideas and so I'm just asking to the class you know how do you normally teach and so maybe I would send in that I teach face to face I can like someone else's comment I can say something about it or I can you know add a gift here or an image and really can have some fun with it for your class like and instructors can also make it so they have to approve any postings as well this is our virtual reality field trip resource and we've partnered with a company called 360 cities and we offer over 350 000 of these and they're really neat because the students can take the image and move it around 360 degrees and really just take students to places that you might not be able to take them inside of your classroom all of our activities can be timed and this is a timed activity obviously it's counting down and this is just going to be a matching activity so I'm just going to match the word to the image if it's right it'll be green and if it's wrong it'll light up red and this is the results on the instructor side here this is the 3d images we have these as well and the students can zoom in on them also and out and this is the drawing side again um we you can actually load up a little bit of a maybe it's a website you want the students to go to or an image here obviously explaining the different types of fractures and then the students now need to identify and classify the x-ray and so what I can do is I can you know circle the fracture and then I'm going to take my taping tool and label what I think it is and submit it and I am the teacher then I'm going to be able to see what the instructors or the students submitted and what's neat too is over here this little notepad with the pen it actually allows students to take notes on each slide if they want and they can be sent to them via email or their google drive after and it's um it it's really neat because it's a word document that opens but it shows them all of the slides but also all of the activities they see all of the images and their answers to them so it's just a really great way for them to revisit the lesson and also at the same time look at their notes and see how they performed on the activities and then this is an open-ended question I'm asking the students to read this article up here about what they can what people can do to avoid bone fractures and they can record the audio or they can type in their answers and then this is just a little quiz I'm asking my students we can have multiple questions but for today's point purposes I'm just gonna have one and again instructors can share the results that they receive with the class or not and and what's really neat about the quiz is is we also have a gaming activity called time to climb and maybe if it's a fun Friday afternoon you want to do a little competition with them um the students really like to you know get into that and encourage each other and it can just be a gaming activity that's timed based on um also their how correct they were and how fast they answered the answers whoever gets to the top wins so I'm just gonna go in and just show you that obviously as we were going through the lesson me as an instructor I can see in real time the students how they're performing so I can change or be like you know what this is not no one's understanding this material let's stop pull up my whiteboard or do another activity um but as I'm finished I can also go back and look at these reports I'm just gonna go into this lesson just because I have more than one student here so we really want you to be able to see a little bit of the perspective of multiple students in the reports and I can see by activity how these students performed and then I also can see how they performed by just by their names across the board for each activity in their score so I'm actually gonna jump back into my slides because one other thing I wanted to let you know about and that we have received I feel like this the instructor feedback that we receive at Mirapod is very encouraging and most of them like every time we speak to a new customer um tell me that they don't know how that they've taught without Mirapod before and it's just really encouraging exciting to be able to hear instructors be so motivated and happy with the solution and um one way that I just wanted to let you know about in terms of how we've been able to kind of prove that Mirapod is improving students experiences in their courses and is that we've received a couple studies over the past couple months one being this one I wanted to share with you from Phoenix College where they looked at their anatomy and physiology class and they had over 2000 students and they had two sections using your pod and two sections not and they kept their tests the same they try to keep everything as consistent as they could so Mirapod was the only non-constant or the only constant there that was different and they ended up comparing the student the student success at the end of the course and so if you can see on the bottom the sections that had 61.7% were the sections that use Mirapod and so they had almost 62 success rate and in the sections that did not use Mirapod they had a 42 success rate and so it was almost a 20 different in the student success rates of the students who were using Mirapod and what was also really interesting is they measured different races ages ethnicities and were able to show that every time no matter what it was there was always an increase with the sections that use Mirapod and so I just thought that was really interesting and wanted to share that with you as well so I'm going to pass it on now to Jane who is going to talk a little bit further about Miralo and your pod together thank you and and thank you Amy and before we go go to Jane I just want to and and Amy and and Jay just to set a little context here before we go now everyone when you looked at Amy think of what you just did what Amy showed you is like you walked by you know a buffet of all these different foods that you can taste right and and you didn't get to do it all but you can see the complexity and the variety of tools that are available for you and just to come back to how do you customize it for your students to achieve their learning outcomes by being relevant to your students lives the remixing part do you see how Amy was able to easily move the tiles around to reorder things remixing is really easy look about how you were able to add in interactive questions whether it's multiple choice or open-ended but you as the faculty member can look at where you think your students need to be really assessed in what they're doing and importantly you're also asking the students like her first question was how confident do you feel getting you being able to ask those questions that are right for your students in the context in the language that you find would be best for them it really enables you to bring your expertise as a faculty member to create a learning experience that is right for your students and really variable and where you can follow you know universal design for learning principles to enable that experience to be successful and and hopefully I got a chance to appreciate that and now and our teacher education board as as Jane mentioned in the beginning looks at all the materials and so Jane I'll let you talk a bit about you know the teacher education evaluation process and what does it mean to be a classic award winner thank you Jerry um classic award winners are chosen from all the materials that a board has reviewed over the previous year and is particularly in teacher education because we represent teachers from many many disciplines we look for a material that is useful across all disciplines and Nearpod certainly is that in fact I can't imagine why you would question our classics award winner after seeing that demonstration we also look for um authors that are responsive to users and Nearpod has certainly been that next slide so one of the things that we noted when we looked at Nearpod was that before the pandemic Nearpod was already there doing wonderful things for teachers but when the pandemic occurred what we noticed was that Nearpod immediately went into action and integrated zoom features and it's constantly evolving based on what teachers need in their classrooms I have a personal reaction to to Nearpod because I have a grandson who has a brand new teacher she was trained during the pandemic so she has not had a lot of classroom experience with real kids and I was thinking that what's so wonderful about Nearpod is not only does it give teachers content it gives teachers lessons in pedagogy because the interactive activities are ways to show new teachers in particular and all teachers who appreciate it the fact that there are great ways to engage students so overall we just gave Nearpod five stars out of a possible five stars for each of our criteria and I really encourage you to look at Nearpod read our review on Merlot and use it yourself you will be so amazed at what you can do thanks thank you Jane and and again when you're thinking about how do we remix and revise um easier than our normal lives are like right um and and this is where when when Merlot as a community of people we have our editorial boards and we have many users um we looked at this it's you know Merlot provides you the ingredients and then you need the kitchen to kind of mix all the stuff up and the recipes to to have it turn out well so hit the next button please and um and so um so when we look at all the materials we have in Merlot and you can see um and uh there's a question in there about once you can use Merlot to organize your materials and and then easily using their integration to add all those Merlot resources right into your platform and uh and really helping an instructor find the content Merlot can help you do that and then with Nearpod you can turn that into a curriculum that you as a faculty member want to teach and recognizing that what we're doing in Merlot is trying to expand the collection of materials to ensure that you can find the relevant materials for your diverse population of students and help you design a more inclusive engaging learning experience with Nearpods you know active learning activities so and and one of the important things um that uh about Nearpod is and and I think Amy you might you might have said this already but you it they have a freemium model that you can go to Nearpod and freely use its application right now there are some storage limits that you have certainly but Jeff that's again when you're looking about a full learning solutions an individual has free access as an institution which I would strongly recommend you can have a very affordable licensing strategy and the Nearpod folks can talk to you all about that too as well next so in the takeaways I'll just say Merlot we can help you discover the content that you need Nearpod helps you remix and redesign your course curriculum so together it's all about empowering you because you know best the needs of your students and what would really engage them uh and empower them to have the equitable opportunities to succeed in education and finally we're coming to the end here is the last slide is I think a thank you um and if you're not familiar with Merlot and skills cobbins there's the URLs and Nearpod to find all the OER with their partnership with open stacks and feel free to contact us if you have further questions and want to know more about what we're doing to help really empower you in using open education resources so you can design the affordable learning solutions for your students so with that I think we've had some questions and we have our wonderful staff at Nearpod so if there are questions that you want us to answer if you want to let us know what they are Amy Jane and I are here to answer them when we have just probably about five minutes before we finish up I saw some questions regarding the grade book and exporting grades and I just wanted to let everyone know that we when you're in the reporting tool I'm just going to hop right in so you can see um you can download to a cfc here and share your grades and we don't have where the grades will just populate into an lms unless you're using campus let's be greater we can have that set up so I just wanted to answer that question for you all and if you need any more detail on how that works or more information just let us know okay and there was one question Christopher asked about accessibility Christopher I hope I wrote it out in the in the chat there and then there was another question around the hbcu it's www and maybe if you don't um Monica or um um Amy or whoever has access to the chat that's uh for the hbcu is www.hbcuals.org and you can get to the cultural collection there along with lots of other things about running an affordable learning solutions program. Yes and um Chris I can send you over our VPAT information which talks about the accessibility of the program um we will be screen reader compatible this summer with JAWS and and we also have the Microsoft immersive reader I don't know if you saw that or if you're familiar with that um just one point I just wanted to show you that in case that was of interest to you but when you're inside of the of a lesson let me see if I can get in real quick to show you this button here the book with the sound students can click on it and then they'll automatically have access to the Microsoft immersive reader and they can have the text uh be read to them they can also put it in 56 different language they can use a picture dictionary of anything that there might be pictures associated with and they can do line focus and and break up the different types of speech as well so um but if you did need more detailed information in terms of accessibility um please email us or I can reach out to you directly with our VPAT document. So are there any other questions that we saw come through Dary? Yeah I didn't um you know the issue or there was one about pricing and we talked about again folks you can test drive and explore using nearpod yourself nearpod.com and you can sign up get an account um and have some fun um and really explore to see how how you can bring your talents to customizing their curriculum for your students and I yeah I didn't see anything else um and if folks um if you don't mind um if you want to just use the chat uh as we're closing out here just to put your reflections um and comments about was this a useful presentation where we on target with topics that are important to you um if there's um uh but or if we need to say other things because um you know what we're planning on doing another one in the future um and uh again your your opinions matter okay so if you can just let us know um how we can do it better um we would appreciate you and uh and if you let us know that uh we did a pretty good job we'd appreciate that too okay and we'll just Dary I see a question about uh simulations and quizzes in Merleau do you want me to show on my screen how they would kind of search for the different and advanced search for sure sure okay uh so there's different ways to search in Merleau you can browse here by materials and um and scroll through disciplines and material type here on the left and you can see there's presentations simulations specifically um and so you can break it down different ways um one thing I found really useful was the advanced search options or if I was specifically looking for a PDF or a video I really could break it down there right here as well so I can look at my maybe I was looking at the college division I wanted a video and pick my and then if you scroll up either put the topic up there the keyword and pick what you want yep yep so you can pick all of this and then you'll be able to search and here's where you click the bookmark to add it to your bookmarks so that's really how you can search and break everything down through the large library of what they have um I think I saw a question can you directly import a quiz into your pod um it won't if they have a quiz um I don't think we have a platform where you could just like copy and paste the questions and answers um but I wanted to show you real quickly how that works in terms of creating a a quiz for your students you just go into the activities click on quiz and you can add in any image or media here and label what your quiz is and then type in your questions and then your answers and then add more but I haven't seen the option of being able to maybe like take multiple questions copy and paste it and then it builds a quiz that way in our system yeah and and I think just everyone um near pod is very responsive I think this is what Jane mentioned too and um there um so your feedback you know your comments that you type in Sierra and Monica and Amy and near pod and just Jane and I from Merlot we look at all these and we say okay how do we make your life better people who know me know my motto is give a gift and not a burden so um and with that we really appreciate the time that you've spent with us today and um we're at the top of the hour so um again thank you so much for joining us thank you Amy and the near pod folks thank you Jane for joining us and all the participants out there thank you for taking the time today and you'll be receiving uh an email thank you along with the recording and the presentation so you'll have access to all the details that we covered today all right thanks again and um have a good rest of the semester everyone thanks everyone


Sbmbaz, ishiko Gitao, najotimo mwimbia sana, but it's Season 2 of Anastoto. We have one of the cast, Karibu Senefao. Thank you. You're doing well. Yeah, I'm good. You're looking amazing. Thank you. Nupineza tombia, kwa yule labda haja. I know you're in Season 1. It's Season 2. Labda, you can tell us the role you played in Season 2. I played as Vida in time. Season 2 is the climax. Yeah, yeah. Of course you're in Season 1. One thing that you learned in Season 1 that probably you were working so much on improving in Season 2. Being camera shy and being confident around so many people. You were camera shy? Yeah. Was it hard? It wasn't hard. It's just like that was my first experience. Yeah. And it took me time to get used to it but with time the kind of people I work with, they create a conducive environment for me to be confident. Maybe you go back a little bit to Season 1. Your highlight of Season 1? My highlight in terms of everything generally. Season 1 was, I actually did my very, very, very, very, yeah. But Season 2, I gave it my all. No, this same round it wasn't like hard for you two? It wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't hard at all. Considering the cast are so friendly like all of them, yeah. How do you can tell us? One level tumbo and actorzama. We have also people who look up to you. What can you tell them? What I can tell them to believe in God's grace, God's mercy, yeah. We can put everything in God and things will fall in place regardless of the situation. Expecting to see Faw in more and more films? Obviously, obviously, more and more, yeah. Thank you so much for yet. Thank you.


So what is this tree planting project? What is it going to do for farmers in Malawi? So I believe that this tree planting initiative is very, very important to Malawi and to the whole world. We are increasing the number of macadamia trees in Malawi and later as the trees grow old, this will result into food security because they will be consumed from the nuts but also income generation. The tree planting initiative in a way will promote sustainable agroforestry where the farmers will intercrop their trees together with annual crops. In doing so, they are not only increasing their resilience to climate change but also increasing the biodiversity. So Kate, why do you think this tree planting initiative is important, especially to the UK? Well, I guess one of the main things is the UK has very, very low forest cover so if we can get more trees in the ground we can help combat climate change, we can help create more habitat for biodiversity and we can help contribute to creating spaces for people to go out and take exercise and improve our mental and physical well-being and help improve our environment. So I think there's lots of different benefits in there so it'll be really interesting to see how that grows over time. Do you think that these will also motivate other universities or other individuals to start planting trees or to think of initiatives like this? Yeah, I think that would be great. Imagine if all universities planted trees for their post grad students we solve our lack of urban tree cover really quickly and that'd be a lovely idea.