001i think you're still unmuted i would just meet yourself until we're ready to get started i did unmute i can hear somebody's un muted sounds that's that's me i think i'm trying oh great so mike set us up but he can't stay on the call so we are technically live right now so i would just mute yourself and turn off your camera until noon i don't know okay i don't know what i'm teaching though yeah it's very stressful but we're gonna get through it i'm very confident um but we are live just so you know so hi folks if you're just joining us we're just all getting ourselves situated here um i'm going to introduce everyone my name is ella stocker i'm the high school librarian and i am the distance learning specialist for the
002high school and also for summit academy uh jay sri krishna i'm going to give a little way of jay shree is the tech teacher for pelham elementary and is the distance learning support person for pelham and then molly boy is our distance learning support specialist for the three amherst elementary schools and is also a special education teacher at crocker farm so um we are going to get started here we're hoping to have at least one other person join us so hopefully we'll we'll have another face to show you at some point in here um oh great and allison is here so we'll be able to uh get allison on in just a minute as well so let's see if we can do that right now as we're sort of getting ourselves situated i don't know
003if we can show out either jasher molly do you know how to do that um so i think mike can do it on his end and it's not here um so and i'm not sure how to get all right with some google me information then and then i wonder if maybe we can get him to let allison in covering for mike at the moment so all right i will get us started then in that case so i am going um to be going over google meet which is the main platform that we will be using for uh meeting with students this year this is sort of the video conferencing platform that we'll be using so i'm going to share my oh awesome there's allison meet right now and then we'll look at allison so let's
004do sorry my entire screen there we go all right so folks seen my screen [Music] set all right all right it's just taking a minute to go here sorry about that here we go so this is an introduction to google me for caregivers um i'm going to be walking you through what google me is how to join a google meet from google classroom from meet.google.com which is the website version of link um and then also sort of looking at what it looks like to join from a link this might be in a document as well um and then we'll be looking at navigating how to mute and unmute yourself um turning your video on and off presenting your screen and how to use the chat so if you have any questions that come up along
005the way please feel free to put them in the comments and we'll be sure to get those either at the end or uh molly or jay who might interrupt me and let me know um there's an important question so we'll be keeping an eye on the comments so first of all what is google me so google me the tool for group video calls it's very similar to zoom or skype if you move those um during distance learning google me is going to be the primary way that features in pre-k through 12 are we will be in class probably with their students while we are remote so it's a really important tool that we'll be using every day in our class um what do you need to do before you start using google me you need
006to make sure that your student or if you are a student watching that you can log into google using an arps account this is super important because you will not be able to get all the features of me that you need with a personal without a personal account you need to have that google account for school your arps account if you're not into your google arts account you need to let someone know whether it's a classroom teacher or one of us you need to let someone know right away so we can try to get that fixed before tomorrow if at all possible um ella some people can't see the screen i let's see [Music] you can see the screen i can't no i can i can see your you can presentation well good news we
007haven't looked at anything that super crucial yet we've just been looking at the text so far so let me try this again i'm going to share again if i can go forward thanks for bearing with us everyone uh let's see let's go let's go right to a chrome tower let's do this all right if we get confirmation from anybody that this is working in there because it's working better we still cannot see your screens and i'm sorry this is terrible it doesn't it's tearing it right with myself oh wait whoa now i see yay so this is the kind of a technical we're gonna have to give each other some grace in this distance learning process as we all learn how to do new things and this is a new platform for me today so
008thank you all for your patience um so this is all i've gone over so far is what's on this screen so we haven't missed that much um i'm also going to shoot now patrick join and google me from google classroom so it says create but it could save join so when you open google classroom you will see at the top of your google classroom banner that looks something like this it might not be this peel color it might be blue or purple or green or it might even have um of your teacher in there but it will always have at least one of these two things either this google meet nickname or a link to a google name and it'll always be in the banner that's where they live um some teachers will have one
009of those two things in fact most teachers will probably only have one they'll either have a nickname or they'll have a meat link so what i'm gonna show you right now is how to work through it through this link right here um and then i will go back and we'll show you how to do it through a google meet nickname so the first step is to do it through um this link right here this is a click of a link i obviously can't click it because it's an image so i can't actually click an image but um if we were in google classroom i could click that link and what it would do is open this next screen that would look like this there's me um and these are all the information that you would
010be seeing if you were logging into a google map for the first time you would see here um now button this is how you would actually join the google meet um right here you see the option to join and use a phone for audio that's a really great option if your internet connection isn't particularly strong you can actually use your phone um as the audio for your google me um which is just a really helpful tool if you are struggling with having not enough internet bandwidth at your house um and you can also make sure that your mic is on and your video is on um and that they should be clear and not read when you're starting a call unless you've been told to mute yourself starting a call in case you would want
011this to look red there's also some information about how to dial in if for some reason the webcam on your computer isn't working or you're having really really slow internet that day and you're unable to get on using the internet you could call in but we strongly strongly want students to call them a video call option available so that is sort of a last resort if you can't get in any other way we would have students call in from the phone so i'm going to move on to the next slide this is now how you would google meet with a nickname so you'll remember that in that google me banner at the top of your classroom you would see this link what we just did right now is click that link for the last section
012this is the google nickname option so um i'm not going to get into the details of what a nickname actually means but it's just a shorthand for a way for students to get to the same length that this is so just tell them the same information and you would want to copy this link right here so you will highlight it and copy it to get into uh google me and then you would actually want to open up a new tab somewhere in your your browser and type in meet.google.com or use the the waffle drop down your students will probably know what the waffle is um to find meat and get to it that way but you'll want to actually go to the meat regular meat page and you'll see this option join or start meeting
013and you want to click on that right there that's highlighted in green hello yeah can you enter can i interrupt you for a second i'm sorry i see many people have said that they are not able to see our presentation still i would suggest them they could please refresh their page so that yes they can see what is uh moving what is synchronously moving along we will make these slides available on the distance learning site so for some reason you're not able to see them right now um you will be able to go back and look at them later so i want to just assure people that if they can't see them currently they will be able to see them after this meet this is over so um that's the other just these will be
014available later to them um let's see here this next slide so once you get to that meet.google.com page you will see a uh and you click joiner start meeting you will see a text box will pop up where you can then paste that that nickname that you copied from google classroom so that's sort of the it adds an extra step whereas if you just can click that link in google classroom you won't have to do this this stuff in the middle but otherwise it's exactly the same because once you put that nickname in and click continue you will come back to the same page where the join page will look the the green join now button you'll always have the option to use your phone for audio you'll always be able to mute yourself or
015turn off your camera before you enter a call and you'll always have the option to call in from a phone if you need to and then the last one i want to quickly go over and then i'll stop sharing my screen and we hopefully everyone will get back to the same page um is that you can also join a google meet from google calendar you may have been sent a calendar invite to your student's classroom or you may have been sent a calendar invite from a teacher to go to a parent teacher conference or an iep meeting or something like that so in google calendar um you will be able to access google map really easily from a calendar you can actually go to calendar.google.com or you can get to it through your calendar um
016to the the waffle in google and so your students will have the same option um and from there you just want to find the event that you're looking for and you're going to just click the actual event itself and what will pop up in the event details is the option to join with google me and you would just click that right there and again you come to the same join thing site so it's very this last site where you get to this joining page is the same every time so regardless of how you get there you'll always land in the same place so i'm going to stop sharing right now so we can hopefully maybe resolve some of these sharing issues that we're having with sharing our screens i apologize that we're having this technical
017challenge at the moment i'm also wondering um we can hear you yes can you hear me okay okay i'm just wondering if this is an opportunity so tara acker is asking if students need to use their chromebooks or can they use great question um you can absolutely use any computer that has internet access to get to google me one of the reasons we recommend that students use their school computers is that your teachers will be giving them materials that we know are accessible using a chromebook that may not be accessible if you're on a mac or on a pc um most things are accessible everywhere it shouldn't really impact 99.9 percent of things but it does introduce the possibility that something would not be usable on a on the device that you're on so we
018recommend using the chromebook or the ipad if you're in pre-k in kindergarten um but that's that's the reason why we recommend that yeah another question is um what is the relationship between google me and google classroom because some people are wondering about if their child will be using the google meet versus google classroom so i thought maybe we could talk about that that's such a great question as well um they are very closely related but they are a little bit different so google classroom is used as like sort of you can almost imagine it like it is a bulletin board in the classroom it has the assignments that are upcoming it tells students what their homework is it tells them what readings they have to do when their next test is all that other things
019that would be on a blackboard or a whiteboard at the front of a classroom whereas the google move is more like the actual platform phase itself it's where you're meeting with students together it's how we come together as a group of students and a teacher in the same virtual place the way we would come together in a classroom so it's they're very closely related they sort of serve two sides of the same point and i think it's important to note that all students k through 12 will be participating in google meet this is our function for being able to allow for staff members to interact with our students children in grades third through 12 will be using google classroom as i i mean i don't work at the high school so i'm an elementary school
020vice principal but um that would be for third graders and above who will be using google classroom the younger students have an um a way to post work and get assignments in uh seesaw that will be the k through two version of how to get assignments in post work yeah thank you for explaining that i as a high school person i sometimes forget about that because it's not in my day-to-day world and i'm not getting any emails about it so i appreciate that reminder as well i was seeing one more question from molly jw as so how do we find the right classroom and i really find it as a very good question because there would be at least a few for your students if not many so um there are classroom codes that will
021be sent to your students and when they join in with their classroom codes it will just connect you to the right classroom and so i think you do not have to worry about on that account and teachers would lead you through those steps so yeah at least and i presume this is true for younger grades um that teachers have already started emailing their students and folks who are on their class rosters with the information for how to join their google classroom so that tomorrow they'll be ready to go um i would encourage your your students at home to check their schooling meals or to help them collect their school emails but they're they're still pretty young because that information is likely in their email already oh can i just add so the younger kids actually
022don't have emails um so it would be it would be in the parent it would be in the caregiver's emails thank yeah i'm sorry go ahead listen i just wanted to say i know at wildwood we're trying to make sure that wayfinding is easy i see molly jw a little worried about that tomorrow morning meeting and not sure if you're not sure please reach out to your school staff because we are working hard to try to make this an accessible space for children so that there are multiple ways to get into a session yeah i i totally agree with that such a many people working very hard so if you for some reason have not seen an email either from your classmate teacher or from an administrator in your building with that information please do
023reach out to your retirement class computer so we can make sure you have that information and kindergarten starts on friday we don't want to forget that if you're thinking that you should have had something by now the kindergarten classes won't be starting until september 18th good to know all right we have any other all right i think that's pretty good so i'm just going to pull one other quick thing i'm going to try to present my screen one more time and just show you what it looks like to actually be in a google meet um so you can actually see what it looks like when you're in the call itself so i'm just going to get that set up real quick um it's going to take me just a second and then we'll be able
024to share this and fingers crossed we'll work actually yes okay great okay so this google classroom or google i'm sorry yeah i confused them you know as well this is what google meat looks like when you were in google me now if i was in call with my whole class i would be able to see all of them in small little boxes together if for some reason your child will not see all their classmates at once or they're only seeing their teacher you can always change the layout so they can see a different layout and the way you can do that is in this bottom right hand corner where you see these three word of goodness anytime you're in any google product so google docs google slides google sheets google meet kabul you name it
025and you see those three little blocks what it means is there's more information here and i can look for some more settings information so go ahead and click on those three little dots and you'll see some options pop up um not your students may not have all of these options available to them because there are some that are for teachers only but they will have the option to change the layout so they can go ahead and look at that and they'll say there's a tile i'm actually in the tile option if i had other people on this call i'd be able to see all of them on my screen at once but you could also ask just to see the person who's speaking that's the spotlight version um so there are some other people as
026well so that's just good to know about the other thing that is really important for your students to know is that they can mute and unmute themselves and i can i'll do it right now i can mute myself or i can turn off my camera if i need to um i know there are some students who are very concerned about being on camera their whole class i really want to assure you that like you are not required to be on the whole class time there's going to be a lot of time for students to do you know independent work with small group work where they won't be on with their whole class but we also really want to get to know them so it's really really important for us to be able to see their
027faces if they feel like they can do that so i wanted to encourage you to reach out to your teachers again if your child is having a lot of camera anxiety for some of our older students um to reach our teachers and see if they can find a solution there's a way for them to come with a compromise work for the teacher and the student together um i also want to just really quickly point out where the chat feature is this is another really handy thing if the audio is not working very well on your computer or you'd prefer just to ask questions in the chat you can always post a chat right in this chat icon it just looks like a little speech bubble with some lines in it and you can just type
028anything right in here we want to remind everyone that the chat is um everyone can see it there's no private chat so if your students are typing in there and they are having a after having a side conversation your teacher can see that inside conversation too so it's a good reminder for students that everything is happening in the same space um teachers also may turn the chat off for part of class there may be times they want students not in the chat so just be aware there may be times there is a chat function available to students but it will be likely some of the time as well so the other thing i just want to quickly point out is how students would present their own screen if they wanted to i think this is
029mostly going to be for middle and high school students i don't know how much presenting of screens the younger students are going to be doing well they do have the option to present a screen i'm not going to do it right now screen presenting um like my computer might like spin into a spiral but you have the option to present your entire screen just one window of the internet browser you're on or just a specific tab most of the time you're going to probably want to just do the chrome tab so it's just just that one option um but again this is something your teachers will walk your students through when they have to do this so this is mostly just for you to know that something that your students might be doing so i'm
030gonna stop sharing my screen right now so feel free to ask some questions go ahead okay um i'm just wondering if you can show them how to turn on the caption oh yes great thank you so much for reminding me you can also turn on captions as molly just said some clothes with captioning so i'll do that right now and you'll see it'll just take it a minute to catch up with me oh and i can't my mic is off so um you will see as i as i see there are words appearing at the bottom of my screen so you can actually see and hear at the same time um what i'm what i'm saying or if you having trouble hearing you'd be able to see what i was saying um obviously it's not
031totally perfect i'm sure it's going to misspell some words at some point usually it misspells my last name so that's just something to be aware of but that's an option as well and and potentially a really helpful one for some of our students thank you for reminding me about that molly and ella do you want to uh walk through them using the nicknames you want to show them how to go about nicknames yeah i can show that that is um part of how you would get in through your google classroom if you are um actually don't want me to all exit this one so you can see what it looks like so here's that joiner started meeting link that you would get to that page on meet.google.com and if you have a classroom meeting or
032a nickname for your google me which some classes will be using this is where you'd want to put that google nickname they're usually going to be something really simple and easy to remember like your teacher's last name um and it may be the class period if you're a high or middle school teacher because they might have multiple mates for different classes and when you say continue you'll see it in just a second it's going to load it it's telling me that i'm joining the stalker a google me right here if you join through uh your google classroom through that link that i showed you in the slides that's at the banner at the top of the google classroom we would just have the last part about that banner link would be just however those letters
033are it's usually not um it's not like an english word it'll just be like random strings of letters but that would appear right here as well um and then you would just go ahead and click right now the same way you would for any um any google made you always come through this screen no matter how we get there any questions about nicknames or links i think that's a very complicated part of this puzzle i'm gonna go ahead and stop sharing my screen as well all right if there is enough questions we do have a question um about uh kindergarten and participating in a google meet i would just um we understand that younger children might need to be supported through this um we also would ask that families respect the privacy of other families
034as well because you are being you are almost like a visitor into someone's home when we are in a google meet together so um you know yes we understand that you will be supporting your children at times but also respect their um confidentiality and privacy um another question came from asha they were wondering about a google meet for tomorrow morning from wildwood please look in your email principal nick just sent something out today just making sure that everybody had one of the options for how to get to wayfinding and i know that teachers are sending out emails today as well um and then christine lindstrom asked will children be on their google meet with their class while also logged into another program or will they mostly be just on google meet um you can do
035this in many different ways uh jay shree i mean you probably know of a million ways that people can combine these products uh sure thank you alison so i think uh you will be using two different tabs at the same time um and uh just as ella was presenting we will be we can listen to the voice of the teacher while we are working on seesaw or while we are working on google classroom and yes just like christine said we would be logging on to different programs at the same time but we would be uh we can listen to the voice and still follow the directions of what a teacher is asking a student to do so okay yeah i i just i wanna just think back on that really quickly and just say that
036it's really gonna depend on your classroom teacher and what they're doing in that class period and it might change from day to day what they're doing and how they're using google me but pretty much across the board everyone will be starting the day in google me every day so wherever you go from there will depend on what you're working on that day and what your kids are doing in their classes but that this is a the starting place is google classroom and google me that's where they should be every day they should start their day with google classroom open and google me open or google or seesaw if they're in pre-k for two all right i feel free to keep posting questions about google me as we go but i i do want to give
037alison a chance to walk us through some of the really helpful sort of some strategies to support your children i think this is actually a really logical transition like sort of how do you get your kids set up for success every day in remote learning so allison i'm gonna turn it over to you but if questions come up about me as we go please feel free to post them in the chat and we will get back to them great thank you so much ella um i i'm going to try to share my screen we'll see how that works um i am going to see if i can do this sharing screen um let's see share tell me if you see it that's not it is it this one yeah yes okay i don't see you
038so this is always the wonder of what i'm doing right now so i'm relying on my team allison you had it but now it's on to something else it's on a farm yeah do you see it now no google form a google form yeah okay uh okay i'm gonna try that one more time then because i think i messed it up let's try that one more time share screen application window share any luck yes okay so i'm gonna i'm gonna click view presentation what do you see now yes we did it oh boy see i've never done a a powerpoint in or a google slide presentation with stream yards so this is a learning opportunity for me thank you for your patience so this is going to speak more about some of the social aspects
039of of the remote learning environment and so i'm going to start off by encouraging all families to please um remember that this is a school day we are going to try to build in routines and try to create a pattern and a routine in our experience to help us you know have breakfast brush our team put on some clothes and so that we are preparing our bodies for learning i think that this is an important first step to trying to create that um shift there will be attendance taken um grades will be given um so i just want people to realize that this is school even though um it feels like we're still at home all the time but this is school as well you heard some discussion about the hardware and the software that
040you'll be using i just wanted to emphasize that the hardware tools that you'll be using with the internet that you can have access to if you have it at your home or you'll need to get a hotspot from the district chromebooks also we are trying to make sure everybody has those but you also kind of want to have those traditional tools pencils and paper to help support each other while we're trying to do our activities then on top of this hardware you have software we've been speaking a lot about the seesaw google classroom and google me older children might be able to use calendar and email efficiently and these are really solid programs to help us manage our day you know something that might be a good habit to get into is to have your
041gmail read in the morning while looking at your calendar before that first google me that might be a habit that middle schoolers and high schoolers get into just to prepare themselves for the day and these other programs are things that teachers will be using consistently every day i'm going to stop there for a moment and see if there are any questions i don't hear anything i'm not seeing anything in the comments so i will keep going and focusing if you have questions please post them we'll make sure alison um i wanted to make sure that everybody knows that the district has been purchasing software tools to help with support learning um you these are on the screen dream box lexia our dream box is a math program lexia is a reading based program along with
042some others these are all getting um purchased and in connected to our system so that children have options beyond just what the teacher is providing them so here's what our process of learning remotely looks like you will start your day checking in with your calendar in your gmail you will have a whole school google meet up this is how we will help children center what's going to be the important first beginning steps of the day then during the day they'll have reported lessons live lessons and independent work that they will be cycling through to be able to get access to the different learning opportunities then they at the end of the day will have an end of the day whole group meeting so that they can check out with their teachers students receive ell intervention
043or special education support that support will be coming during the middle part of the day they either will be getting that support during their language arts or math system time of day or they might have a separate session that's scheduled at uh independent choice time or at one of the what i need or when blocks that are in the schedule what are your expectations for your students and this is something that we are always developing whether in school in the school building or remote learning we really want to encourage our students to build a an honest interaction with all the adults in their life because so much of what they're doing is going to rely on them being able to tell us where they're going on the internet and also what they're understanding remember we
044don't want to have children using screens in private areas that is monitored you also want to pay attention to the number of tabs that are open sometimes somebody will have 20 tabs open and that can be very inefficient really you want to have a small number of tabs in order to participate in google me google classroom and maybe one other program and remember the number one goal is enjoying learning if we focus on having fun while learning regardless of the setting then we can all achieve what is necessary in this remote learning time that's the end of the presentation any questions i don't see any questions in the comments just left i'll give you a minute to come in if they have any more i'm not totally sure how middle school is doing that but
045there are some slightly nomenclatures or what we're calling those things depending on um what are uh what grade level you're at just be aware that they're completely different um but that will be communicated to your students all right still one question so um if you think of any more questions later on you can always email us at our email addresses and we will be ready to help you there uh and i think in a moment in another 10 more minutes we would be starting our seesaw presentation uh if um no more questions are there all right i see i give you two questions that have just come in so thank you we'll get those answered real quick and then i i wanna at least let jay street and molly go to get our next president
046who comes burden um but i so one question is if the chromebooks allow for web surfing outside of the arts work of software so the answer is yes do allow some some web access i'm not sure if there's additional restrictions on elementary school students i'm not my elementary school colleagues on the bottom at the end of that um but all all chromebooks and actually all school computers even the desktops are laws around child safety on the internet so there are a lot of sites that are blocked for our students um so they are not able to accomplish like the full internet while they're on there um they will have access to things that are not just the software tools that work that allison mentioned there will be some other things they'll be allowed to get
047to including library databases that are really great resources so um if you have a concern about the site that your child has navigated their way on please let us know so we can get that site blocked but hopefully most things should be blocked already that we'd be particularly concerned about um other thing where is the information for first grade so i think what that is probably referencing the information for getting into your file so again i would just suggest you check your email there should be email from either your school and or your classroom teacher with that information for tomorrow um so if you want to do that for some reason please reach out to your uh someone at the school so we can make sure you get that information right away and i wanted
048to piggybank on that um since uh it's the first grade uh i think you should be looking out for the uh meat link or the meat code and um the rest of the information about seesaw accounts will be coming in soon from your class teachers all right i i'm not seeing any other questions come in um i do just want to remind folks that you are welcome to reach out to us at any time we are getting a lot of meals at the moment so it might take us a little while to get back to you but we promise we will be returning them as quickly as we possibly can and making sure you get that information that your students need to have a great first period tomorrow we are all so excited to welcome
049them back or welcome for the first time if they're new to the district school um but we are we're just really excited to have them back i know we had a an all district-wide meeting this morning and left that meeting feeling so excited about seeing kids like welcoming them tomorrow so please reach out if you have any questions in the meantime um and it was wonderful thanks for joining us