Administrators' Digest

March 2018 (Vol. 9, No.3)

Salinas Adult School Celebrates 100 Years of Service to the Community

Changing Lives, Building Community

Salinas, California, March 7, 2018: The Salinas Adult School is celebrating its 100th year of providing quality education to the adults in Salinas. The celebration will take place on Thursday, April 12th from 6:00 to 8:00 at the Salinas Education Center, 20 Sherwood Place in Salinas, CA.

The centennial celebration will include presentations of music, dancing and artwork from students, a display of the history of the school, testimonies of current and former students, and addresses from community leaders.

For 100 years the Salinas Adult School has supported the community by playing a prominent role in promoting education for adults in the Salinas area. In 1918, the Salinas Adult Evening School was born. During the first year, 186 students were served in classes such as typing, bookkeeping and physical education. During World War II classes were conducted around the clock in welding and machine shop. Agricultural classes of the early 40’s helped to increase farm production in the Salinas Valley. The Salinas Adult School became a leader in California with a mobile bus program entitled “English on Wheels." The growth of the program was evident by the enrollment of 15,000 students in 28 different locations throughout the Salinas area in 1979-1980. In April of 1989, the district broke ground for a permanent adult school facility on Sherwood Place that continues to serve the adults in our community.

“My high school diploma is everything to me,” said Winson Herrera, a 2017 Salinas Adult School graduate. “At the adult school I was able to work at my own pace and set my own schedule. After I graduated from the Adult School, I completed a Certified Nursing Assistant Program. I am now looking forward to starting at Hartnell College in the Licensed Vocational Nursing program this spring. The Salinas Adult School opened the door for me to get the job that I want to have. ”

The 100th anniversary event coincides with Adult Education Week, which is held annually to spotlight the contribution of California adult education. It is free and open to the public.

The Salinas Adult School serves over 3,000 students annually through its main campus at the Salinas Education Center and in satellite locations throughout Salinas. The mission of the Salinas Adult School is to provide 21st-century skills and support to our adult students as they transition into new phases of their lives in education, workforce, and parenting. It provides classes for high school diploma, high school equivalency preparation, English as a Second Language, college and career preparation, parenting and Spanish for Professionals. The Salinas Adult School is accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges and is a member of the Salinas Valley Adult Education Consortium. For more information about the Salinas Adult School visit https://www.salinasuhsd.org/sas

U.S. Department of Education Open Licensing Rule Now in Effect

Starting in FY 2018, education resources created with Department of Education discretionary competitive grants ($4.2 billion in FY 2016) must be openly licensed and shared with the public. This announcement comes after years of work by Department of Education staff, multiple civil society organizations, and individual open education leaders.

This new Department of Education open licensing rule follows the example set by the Department of Labor agency-wide CC BY open licensing policy, the Department of State’s open licensing playbook for federal agencies, and multiple other open education licensing policies from around the world. While the rule does not specify the use of a CC license by name, it provides guidance on what attributes the open license needs to contain.

The text of the final rule was published in the Federal Register and in the Government Publishing Office Code of Federal Regulations. .

Some of the summarized key points include:

Grantees must openly license to the public any grant deliverable that is created wholly or in part with Department competitive grant funds.
Grantees must grant to the public a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, and irrevocable license to access, reproduce, prepare derivative works, publicly perform, publicly display, and distribute the copyrightable work provided that attribution is given to the copyright holder.
A grantee that is awarded competitive grant funds must have a plan to disseminate the openly licensed copyrightable works created with grant funds.

Grantees may select any open licenses that comply with the requirements of this section, including, at the grantee’s discretion, a license that limits use to noncommercial purposes.

Source: Creative Commons https://creativecommons.org/2017/06/06/us-doe-open-licensing/

Steps Students Can Apply to Fact-check Information

These days, statements of all stripes are bombarding us via broadcast and social media. The trick is classifying them correctly before we swallow them ourselves, much less before we hit “Like,” “Share” or “Retweet.” And that’s the goal of an educational initiative that will be adopted by 10 universities across the country this coming spring.

Thinking like fact-checkers

This new approach seeks to get students thinking like, and doing the work of, fact-checkers.

“We have approached media literacy and news literacy in the past sort of like rhetoricians,” says Mike Caulfield, director of blended and networked learning at Washington State University in Vancouver.

Four moves and a habit

Caulfield has distilled this approach into what he calls “Four moves and a habit,” in a free online textbook that he’s published. It’s aimed at college students, but frankly it’s relevant to everyone.

The moves are:

Check for previous work: Look around to see if someone else has already fact-checked the claim or provided a synthesis of research. [Some places to look: Wikipedia , Snopes , Politifact and NPR’s own Fact Check website.
Go upstream to the source: Most web content is not original. Get to the original source to understand the trustworthiness of the information. Is it a reputable scientific journal? Is there an original news media account from a well-known outlet? If that’s not immediately apparent, then move to step 3.
Read laterally: Once you get to the source of a claim, read what other people say about the source (publication, author, etc.). The truth is in the network.
Circle back: If you get lost, or hit dead ends or find yourself going down a rabbit hole, back up and start over.

Caulfield is also the director of the Digital Polarization Initiative of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities‘s American Democracy Project . Starting this spring, the initiative will bring at least 10 universities together to promote web literacy.

Source: Mindshift