questions for them we definitely
encourage you to ask.
The way we will be asking doing QA
is through the QA box on webex. So take
a minute now
and look for where that is for you.
Depending on if you're on a mobile
device or on a laptop or desktop it may
be in a slightly different location
but it's just called "QA", not the chat
box- QA. 
And you may have to open that there's a
little arrow next to it- a little carrot
you may have to click that actual little
button.
Or if you're on a mobile device it's an
actual button you click that to open up
your QA.
When that's open you'll have the
opportunity to type your question
and also select a recipient for your
question. Please select
all panelists as the recipient,
regardless of who your question is for.
That will make sure that we can get
the question and we'll cue them up for
the speakers.
We're not going to be taking questions
until the end of the webinar but please
feel free to send your questions at any
time,
and we'll get them in the queue for the
speakers at the end.
If you need help or technical assistance
at all throughout the day or the webinar
use that Q and A box as well to all
panelists and we can help you
one-on-one. Okay
I'm just going to do a quick
introduction to the series
before we get started with our speakers.
We have three
webinars that we're doing in this series.
Today is the first we'll have one on the
fourth
and one on the 11th so one per week- same
time.
Those are going to be on, the next one's
going to be on measuring and evaluating
impact.
And the final one will be on collecting
and reporting data.
If you haven't- if you have not already
registered for those events,
you do need to register separately
for each of the three events.
So, why did we develop this series? This is actually a project of the
SNAP-Ed toolkit
and the SNAP-Ed Connection and was
inspired by the many questions
that have been posed on ASNNA open
calls as well as questions that we've
received at SNAP-Ed Connection,
and by the regional and national staff
at Food and Nutrition Service.
Obviously the pandemic has created a new
environment and SNAP-Ed partners have
had to adapt,
and sometimes change the way that they
plan, implement, and evaluate their
programming.
It's certainly been a challenging time,
and it's clear that it has
also presented a tremendous opportunity
for innovation,
and collaboration, and sharing. So what
will we explore
in today's session-we're going to be
focused on SNAP-Ed programming,
and adapting it to remote delivery. We
wanted to share with you some lessons
learned and best practices for
implementing
engaging programs
remotely. You will hear examples from
emerging and tested ideas for remote
delivery.
There we go.  So for today's session,
session 1,  we've brought together
3 SNAP-Ed implementing agencies who
are all doing good work
in this arena. We wanted to gather
together some experts who have a long
track record of delivering SNAP-Ed in
remote environments,
and also bring together experts who've
traditionally
involved more face-to-face hands-on
programming
to see how they have adapted their
programs to continue meeting the needs
of their communities.
So our first speakers today, I'm going to
load up their slide deck...
Are from...I'm going to give
presenter status to our first speaker...
Our first speakers today are from
University of Georgia SNAP-Ed program.
We'll hear from project coordinator
Edda Cotto-Rivera and research associate
Dr Sarah Stotz. Edda Cotto-Rivera has a
professional background
of 30 years of community health
education and chronic disease prevention
work with over 10 years working directly
with SNAP--Ed and EFNEP programming.
As the University of Georgia's SNAP-Ed
program coordinator, she works closely
with the program's principal
investigators to
develop, implement, and evaluate direct
education,
indirect education, and comprehensive
social marketing campaigns for their
priority audiences.
Dr Stotz is currently senior instructor
at the University of Colorado
Anschutz Medical Campus, Colorado School of Public Health.
She completed her post-doctoral
fellowship and PhD training at the
University of Georgia.
Her PhD research focused on the
development,
evaluation, and dissemination of the
nation's first
online asynchronous SNAP-Ed programs
entitled Food eTalk
and Food eTalk Better U, which we'll
hear more about today.
Okay Edda, you have the presenter status.
[ECR] Great, thank you Gina, for that
introduction.
We really appreciate this opportunity. I also bring greetings from Georgia
and from Dr. Dr. Jung Sun Lee our principal
investigator
unfortunately she's not with us today
she's in South Korea
attending a family emergency but we
definitely are very
grateful for this opportunity to share
our experiences
in adapting snap and programming for
remote delivery.
So we will share briefly
an overview of our program and review
the components of the e-learning
development.
And we expect that our findings
about challenges and new opportunities
are beneficial to your own programming.
For the last seven years the University
of Georgia SNAP-Ed program has been
delivering
our program into our priority audience
as one of four
implementing agencies in our state.
Our programs include evidence-based
and culturally appropriate curricula. And our impact
is possible because of the collective capacity
of the University of Georgia Cooperative
Extension
and the collaboration that we have
established with
multiple partners across the state.
Here is an overview of our programs. We implement
our direct education in eight counties using
our Food Talk curricula. We reach
the whole state with our social
marketing approaches
and we serve the early education
community with the Healthy Childcare Georgia, but we expand
our reach to all with our Food eTalk
programming in all 159 counties.
During the pandemic we have already discovered
the value of time. This chart
provides a timeline of our efforts to
develop, implement, and evaluate our e-learning
programs.
As Gina mentioned as an asynchronous
learning approach. Seven years and counting
the efforts for this time has paid off as
in 2019 when our Food eTalk program
was included in the SNAP-Ed Toolkit.
During the same year we completed the
translation of both
Food eTalk and Food eTalk Better U into
Spanish.
2020 marked the time when we had a good
plan
to do a wide dissemination of our
program,
but of course the pandemic added another
meaning to that plan.
Here is one of the flyers that we
have distributed widely
instead of related to
your stuck at home we can help with
Food eTalk
here is an example of that slide. Next
week we also will share our experience
with virtual learning.
But like Gina said today Dr. Sarah Stoltz
will
walk us through the process of
developing Food eTalk
as she was a PhD student working with Dr.
Lee
and also as a postdoctoral fellowship
fellow
in our program and with our team
developing
Food eTalk. Sarah?
[SS] Great! Thank you - can you hear me?
Thank you so much and I'll just
echo added sentiments thank you for
inviting us Gina, to present on
behalf of UGA SNAP-Ed.
So one thing I would like to point out this
particular slide that
these goals that we put for UGA SNAP-Ed
e-learning we've actually used the
same slide for many years.
These are not goals specific to the
pandemic they just happen to
fit. It's maybe more timely now
than ever before because of what we're
all experiencing. So our original plan was to develop an
e-learning program
for UGA SNAP-Ed was to serve the
audience who still has
decent access to the internet.
We know that a lot of our participants
have issues with transportation for
example, child care- so home-based learning
was going to perhaps work for them
better,
again this is all before the pandemic, 
we wanted to add a learning tool for
those who came to classes but maybe
wanted a bit of a review.
And then just supported by e-learning
theory, which you'll hear me discuss a
few times,
this idea of reaching individuals at the
point of decision making--
especially when smartphone was the way
they accessed the internet--
really lent itself to the the support of
e-learning in that
adults typically like to learn at the
moment that they need
the information rather than learning
something in a classroom, and perhaps
having to apply it later.
So the example we always give is at the
supermarket when an adult needs to make
a decision about
purchasing a healthy bread or cereal or
or what have you, the e-learning device on the
smartphone could allow them to learn
right there at the crucial point of
decision making.
And then of course we wanted to
expand our opportunities statewide.
There's far more participants who need
our services than we have staff so we
wanted to
have as much of a reach as we could.
This next slide--I know looks a little
busy--and the good news is that it is
available, it's in a published journal
for a couple years now,
and if anyone needs access to that
journal you can see the citation listed.
But what we really want to show you on
this slide --the goal of this is to
help any of you who haven't developed an
e-learning program-- kind of more easily get past some
of the bumps and the hurdles that we
dealt with when we started developing
this program.
So truly the the middle blue circle
symbolizes that this is an iterative
process, and that right from the
beginning in the perfect world,
you would have your curriculum
development team your instructional
design or e-learning team,
your evaluation experts, and technical
support
all at the table at the beginning of the
project to truly understand how best to
utilize your online learning environment. Something I will point out is that
Food e Talk was originally developed to be
asynchronous and self-driven. So unlike what we're
doing right now on this live time webinar, where we're in
synchronous learning mode,
Food eTalk was always meant to be
asynchronous, so anytime
anyplace learning. And we really needed
the tech support and the instructional
design support to help
us--myself as a dietitian and other
dietitians involved--
to develop this in a way that truly
utilize the online learning platform.
Next slide please.
Thank you,
So, we have two different online programs
actually and
both of them, the content is based on
in-person class
classroom curricula.  We have Food Talk
and Food Talk: Better U,
which we just add a little "e" to both of
them. We've got Food eTalk
and Food eTalk: Better U, but in adapting
to online delivery, we did a couple of
key things.
First and foremost we made it
so the order of the lessons
is more participant-driven than didactic
so if a participant wants to start with
lesson 4 because that's what he or
she is interested in,
they can start with lesson 4. That
is certainly
supported by e-learning and adult
learning theory: to
allow the adult learner to choose what
topic
interests him or her right then. The
lessons are also significantly shorter
than an in-person
class. You guys are all troopers for
being 90 minutes on this webinar with us,
but most of our learners and most busy
adults don't necessarily have time to be
on a
90-minute long webinar or class
on a daily basis,  So instead, we smushed
these down
and on average they take 8-12 minutes,
which we found might even be too long
for some of our learners.
So 2-3 minutes for the Food eTalk
Better U and those are averages.
Some people do take a little bit longer
depending on how quickly they read
or go through the lessons. We also have
augmented those videos so that we can
really enhance the multimedia approach.
We have cooking videos exercise videos
and we also have these just-in-time
videos
which again, as I mentioned earlier,
really try to
highlight this ability to this
ubiquitous, anytime, anyplace learning.
And these videos are very specific to
helping people make
crucial nutrition-related decisions at
the point that they're about to make.
For example, a purchase at the
supermarket.
Thank you Edda, so some of our engaging
features- and I know that was something
that Gina asked us to talk about-- was how do
we make this engaging for our learners?
Hopefully we did a good job of
that by first of all, developing for the
smartphone screen size so most of our
learners do
access internet on the smartphone versus
a laptop or a desktop.
I highly recommend, if that's the case for
you, that you develop it for smartphones
first
and then if someone does open the
program on a laptop or tablet it will
just it will size up. It's much easier to
size up than it is to smush something
down to a smartphone screen size.
Adult learning theory says that our
adult learners are typically visual
learners which a screen lends itself
very nicely to that.
Again the lessons are shorter, we try to
keep a very user-friendly interface, and
I'd like to point out that that's not
because
of necessarily just digital literacy
shortcomings of the audience. It's
actually not that at all.
Actually all learners, regardless of
education and comfort with tech,
prefer websites and online resources
that are user-friendly.
So you can think of yourself: if you open
up a website that's very clunky and you
can't figure out where to click,
you'll probably just go to a new website.
We have southern influence throughout. As
Edda mentioned, we are in Georgia
so we have highlighted recipes
that feature southern foods.
We have um southern foods in our some of
our games that I'll show you in a minute,
and we do have a voiceover throughout to
help with issues of limited literacy
to help engage learners who prefer to
hear versus read
and the southern-the voiceover-
does have a significant southern accent
which we tried to accommodate our
southern learners.
We have educational videos and then not
only with the voice work but also closed
captioning throughout the entire program
to accommodate the 508 compliance.
Some of our engaging format: we have
interactive games and lessons, and so you
can see in the upper
right screen those activities are
actually slide drag and drop activities.
There's multiple choice, again there's
a voiceover feature,
we have cooking videos, exercise videos,
just-in-time videos.
And what I want to point out here is
that some of the resources we needed to
develop these
interactive games and videos were
resources that were-
it was a little tricky to try to get
funded through the SNAP-Ed guidance.
And so we had to be really work
carefully with our
funding agency to be creative in how
to get these
really unique items such as an
e-learning designer,a web developer,
actors if we needed, them spaces to shoot
the video that had nice lighting, so that
would come across as nice videos.
And some of these were kind of new back
in 2014 when we started getting these resources.
One of the number 1 questions I get about Food eTalk is,
and I'm not watching the Q/A but
maybe the questions already come in is "is this an app?" and the answer is no.
Food eTalk is hosted and Food eTalk Better U
are hosted on
a web-based platform. We specifically
chose a web-based
platform for a couple reasons.
One, when we started in 2014
developing an app was extremely cost
prohibitive so that was one main reason.
Two, we knew that most of our
participants were utilizing the internet
through smartphones but not all of them.
And for some participants who had maybe an
older computer,
accessing an app was not really going to
be feasible for them versus accessing
a web-based program that again is
formatted to fit a smartphone screen
size.
And finally the updates were much easier
to make on a website unlike an app where
an app had the user has to download
updates to make sure he or she is
getting the most recent information.
We didn't need to do that with a web
based platform- it could be
updates in live time. Next slide, thank you.
On this particular slide- and I
believe this is my my last slide-  the timeline is not meant to scare
anybody off by any means.  Certainly
we're hoping by this presentation and by
making ourselves available
to support anyone who wants to develop
their own or or
collaborate with us in the future, to
help save you some of this timeline--some
of the bumps in the road that
we went through.
But again starting in late 2013,
all the way till 2019, is when we really
were evaluating and developing and
iteratively
designing these programs, we were
recognized in
2019 as the SNAP-Ed Toolkit "research
tested evidence-based" intervention for
Food eTalk, which we're very proud of
-you'll find that on SNAP-Ed Connect-
and just again pointing out that this
didn't happen overnight, so again we're happy to help and
support any other implementing agency that
wants to develop again,
an asynchronous, intentionally not live
time program.
[ECR] Thank you Sarah, for that iteration
of everything that has happened
in the past few years. This slide will
show you the participant experience
and I have seen a couple of questions
on the Q/A but it's
meant to show you that it's a it's a
lengthy process because we want to
comply with
the SNAP-Ed Guidance, making sure that
our resources are
available to eligible participants so if
a user will come to our website, and
they have free access to videos and
blogs and recipes.
But if they want to visit the e-learning
modules,
they have to follow and complete a few
steps. That includes creating a profile,
a password, and then they will be
filling some demographic information. We
will determine if they are eligible for
the services or to use our e-learning
based on their zip code the location and
if they receive any federally funded
program resources.
And then they
will have to access a survey
via Qualtrics and also a content form.
Once they go through that process, they
will
have the opportunity to engage with the
learning modules.
And then we will give them some
information about completion
and how to get some extenders as they
finish the experience.
To help us implement the program, we
have relied on our partners,
in our Cooperative Extension
relationship that we have at
a local level, we promote our program
through postcards, educational materials,
we also invite people to sign up for
e-learning,
newsletters, we follow on social media
our e-learning, and promote that as well.
And we also have a state coordinator-
a recruitment coordinator- that helps
other agencies
discover our resources in many ways.
We also promote our program through
e-learning
agencies. We work with safety net clinics
when they use the e-learning as part of
their nutrition education. There are some care management
organizations that are hoping to use the
e-learning
resources for their subscribers. And we
use the county health initiative
and the e-learning to connect the
community as well.
Back in 2020 January, we had a statewide
rollout
that involved all the county extension
agents in the state-
about 500 people- with the intention to
have a comprehensive initiative or plan
for this year.
After the pandemic we have been sharing
our information on websites
on all 159 county websites and we have
been providing
a e-learning monitoring tool for them as
well. This is a sample of the completion
certificate that a participant will
receive
and the email that the counties will
receive
alerting them that some people in their
communities are finishing their
e-learning tools
an example of our e-learning extenders
resources. Some of the challenges-we have have many across the years-
but we have decided to share just a few of them with you.
Determining eligibility is a challenge
because it's a lengthy process. Making sure that the content can be
adapted to the length of the e-learning
experience. The evaluation is also important: how to
make sure that the participant completes
the evaluation
on a timely manner, so we can report on
their experience. Money has always
been a player so money to be able to get the resources
for their development,
the implementation, and some of the
updates that we have
had to do during the time of this
program. Also by using hotspots but
also having a monthly plan
to be able to use those devices.
It's important for us because we then
can share
that with people in the community that
don't have those resources available to
them.
With the pandemic we have also
discovered new opportunities.
The e-learning can be used as a
stand-alone program model
in lieu of face-to-face programming. One
of our projects have used e-learning as
the content
for their Fulton Fresh mobile
fresh produce distribution. We have also
seen an increase in visitors to
our website
from people across the nation. We have
had the pleasure to talk to maybe some
of you that are here today
about your interest in using our
e-learning resources
and we have recently submitted a model
to our regional office
to our regional FNS office
to see if we can expand this program
across our boundaries.
And we are also waiting on an
opportunity to
do more rigorous impact evaluation of our
program
in collaboration with other implementing
agencies outside of Georgia as well.
This is a slide that is related to our
evaluation which we will share
in more detail next week when we have
our next webinar.
And we we hope to have you join us
then and we will then answer some of
your questions as well. These are references for our
presentation and our contact information.
 
 
 
[GG]Okay! I appreciate the WebEx is trying
to keep me on my toes!
Thank you Edda, you can mute yourself
now.
Sorry about that I'll just repeat what i
said basically it was thank you
to the team in Georgia for presenting
such wonderful information!
We have received many questions- I did
receive
some questions directly to me as the
host and
I am getting a lot of messages about
technical issues so if you have
questions for the presenters
about the content of their presentation
please send those questions to the recipient
"all panelists," that way we can make sure
that your question doesn't get lost in
the rubble. So thank you so much. A couple housekeeping
questions I will answer now because
we're getting a lot of them:
Yes, we will send out the PowerPoint
slides to everyone.
Yes, this is being recorded and we will
make it available for all of your
colleagues who didn't get on the line
today
to watch this as a recorded event. So I
apologize about that.
Let's move on to our next
presenter
I'm gonna load up the next set of
slides.
Okay and I'm going to give Anna
the presenter status
which I can do so no need for anyone
to do that for me, thank you!
 
Okay Anna, you should have the presenter
status now. I'll just introduce you
briefly we're going to be hearing from Anna
Farrier with Cooking with Kids.
She's the Executive Director of Cooking
with Kids Inc. which is a nationally
recognized non-profit organization
and SNAP-Ed Implementing Agency based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Cooking with Kids was founded in 1995. It
educates
and empowers children and families to
make healthy food choices
through hands-on learning fresh
affordable with fresh and affordable
food. She'll be sharing with us how their
program which has traditionally
delivered face-to-face direct education
has embraced some new and innovative
delivery methods so that they can keep
meeting the needs of their community and
meeting their needs of their mission.
Okay Anna, You should have the ability to
control the slide so I'll
pass it over to you.
[AF] Thank you Gina, I'm not seeing my
slides...
and Gina you're still muted.
[GG] Does anyone else see the Cooking with
Kids slides? I'm seeing the Cooking with Kids...
[AF] I can do a 20 minute monologue but
probably...
[GG] Anna could you um do you see on the top a little drop down menu where you can
choose different files? Now that I've made you the presenter, you may need to select that yourself.
um no okay do you see above
..my head if you jump over me
there's a little circle with a line
through it looks like a
circle cut in half
[AF] Yeah make you the presenter? [GG] and I'm going to put up
[AF] Oh- yeah i just see my slides [GG] Okay
I'm going to make you the presenter
again, and now you should be able to go through
your slides.
[AF] Okay hopefully I can go through them so thank you, Gina.
Thank you and hello from New Mexico SNAP-Ed everyone! I'm Anna Farrier the
director of Cooking with
Kids and I'm just so happy to be part of
this conversation.
And I use that as the operative word
because it does feel like well
we're all kind of learning this new
world together,
and the conversation and what we're
learning from each other is just
becoming so,
so important so as Gina mentioned,
Cooking with Kids as a non-profit
we've been doing this for for 25
years and
over 20 of it has been as part of the
SNAP-Ed network here in New Mexico and
then nationally as well.
Our programming is based in schools and
most of what we do is direct ed, and
that's what this
is focused on this presentation, but we
do do a fair amount of PSE work sort of
behind the scenes but we're not going to
talk so much about that today.
We work in 19 schools here in northern
New Mexico
with about 5,000 kids each year. And our
classes
are delivered as a series and
so any individual child over the course
of the school year has probably about 10
Cooking with Kids experiences and all
children that go to any particular
school that we work in participate
because
they're high free and reduced numbers.
On average it's about 88% so our target audience is elementary school
kids and their parents.
So for us, schools closed
abruptly in March. And
here we are we're doing
in-person programming, and quickly had to
start switching things up a bit. And
there are things though, that
don't change, like our mission is still
the same: we still
want to get kids excited about eating
healthy food! We still want to influence
eating behaviors and families
and the target audience is still the
same: we're still working with kids
in schools. The setting is sort of the
same? Instead of a
physical classroom it's now a virtual
classroom.
And our educators are the same. We know
how important the relationships are that
our kids have with their particular
educator at their particular school
so those things haven't changed.
And as we started
trialing some of this stuff last spring
we we realized if we were going to
continue to work with our target
audience in the same settings
that there were going to be some issues
right off right off the bat.
The first one being restriction and
privacy protections
around on protecting children in a
classroom setting. We can't just
march into the to the virtual classroom
so
we had to find our partners which in our
instance are the principals
and the teachers and so Cooking with
Kids
educators are invited into these private
school networks as part of
it's basically a special guest and
the other thing that was apparent right
away was
there were going to be equity issues
that needed to be addressed.
If kids were learning from home there
was going to be limited access to food
and equipment and those sorts of things
so we really had to factor those
in as we were developing our lessons.
I'll talk more about this stuff as we go
through.
Limited access to technology was more, this was more in reference to our own
staff
because again in March we realized
we were relying on everybody to use
their own equipment so
some people had an iphone and some
people had a laptop or a chromebook or
something like that. And
as we were trialing some of these new
approaches troubleshooting was just a
real problem because you didn't know
what device someone was using.
Furthermore it seems kind of an
imposition to ask
staff to use their own equipment so
what we ended up doing like Edda was
saying you know money's always an issue
so we were able to write a small grant
to a local
community foundation for a COVID relief
grant
to adapt you know an adaptation of
the work that we did.
And we're able to buy chromebooks for
all of our staff and
those just came in recently. The reason
we chose chromebooks is because
we're using the school districts that
we work in
they are using the google format the
google classroom format so we want to be
able to match that up.
And then, of course, another sort of
access issue
is folks varying levels of comfort with
technology. Not only
the participants but our own staff so
we're practicing a lot with each other
even with the kids and our families as
we're rolling these things out.
So this is a just an overview of how we
shifted our direct education
interventions.
And the first question that people ask
us is: cooking with kids, oh how the heck
are you going to do that?
You know because, normally we have
classrooms in schools we use our
our curriculum that's geared
specifically for that
and cooking is obviously an
issue.
So how do we how do we continue to keep
that experiential learning
at the heart of what we do? And that's
what we're
what we're trying to recreate in homes
with our kids so hands-on
cooking and tasting lessons in school
classrooms have now become digital and
we're doing synchronous learning
because for kids that engagement is so
important.
Kids can access YouTube stuff all over
the place, but they can't have a private
cooking
lesson or a tasting lesson with their
educator from their school.
Something to mention though, one of the
reasons that we're able to be
in the schools as part of the school day
is because
our lessons are aligned with academic
standards.
So many of you out there probably know how hard it is to to find
time during the school day so this
academic connection needs to continue in
the digital lessons that we've created
as well.
Like I mentioned we're not doing any
cooking per se
but we are trying to provide positive
experiences with healthy kids
with healthy foods for our kids. Another
piece of this
is besides the several thousand kids we
work with every year
we have about a thousand family members
that participate. They're active
participants, our volunteers
are an integral part of our programming
and we don't want to
leave them behind, so we've created
virtual family coaching nights which
I'll talk about in a sec.
Another piece of our normal programming
includes doing promotions and
Farmers' Market stands things like that
in school cafeterias.
So that's been morphed a little bit,
actually a lot
to doing taste tests that have been
distributed
during the school lunch distributions.
And this is actually this is proved to
be really difficult the food piece
getting food to kids
when they're not in school is really
hard and
I'll talk a little bit more about how
we've done that, but
that that's going to continue to be more
difficult I think than
figuring out the lessons. And once kids
are in school, if there's a hybrid model,
we have some options
for that, either through student
nutrition or through dropping things off
at the schools.
But when they're at home those equity
issues start to come into play so we
really
we're working on that and that's
something we're going to continue to
work on.
At the end of every class that we have
with the kids, printed recipes go home
those are now digital. The classroom
teacher distributes those.
And I'm going to go through these
different
approaches and just get into a little
bit of detail.
So what you're going to see in these
next several
slides are some examples of the google
slides that we've created that's how
we're creating our lessons
and some of the things we learned
right away was we are not going to be
able to
recreate what we do in the classroom
and to have that expectation is just
going to make everybody disappointed.
So the our curriculum, by the way our
curriculum is part of the SNAP-Ed
Toolkit - it's
research tested evidence-based and we're
using that
as, pulling content from that and
adapting it
for the virtual lessons. We're not trying
to create anything brand new, it's just
too hard
 to expect that our educators are
going to learn new content
along with this new delivery format, so
we're trying to keep everything
as simple as possible. We're creating
we're providing really clear frameworks
some scripting sort of like a lesson
plan but a digital lesson plan and
you'll see here in a sec.
Our classes are usually in the
classroom anywhere from one to two hours
long, depending on what it is that
we're doing.
That's not going to fly -an hour tops
with
these digital lessons.
And one of the things we found ourselves
doing down here
there's this little note that says: set
the tone, focus on what you can do,
not what you can't do. And here's sort of
some of the
we were hearing ourselves saying things
like this when we were with groups of
kids or families: "Oh, we miss you guys,
we're so sorry
we can't be there in person" oh, you know
that sort of thing and that's
just sad. So what we're trying to do is
come come across more like this: "Hey you
guys, this is so exciting. We're
happy to be with you this is so cool, so
high tech,
you know, our own private food network",
that sort of thing so you get kids
really excited and not feeling like
they're missing
anything this is a cool new experience
for them.
These are a couple slides examples of
the presenter view
for our educators. The slide on the left,
the fruit and vegetable scavenger hunt,
is what the kids see, 
and on the right are the speaker
notes,
which are kind of the lesson plans the
the directions for our educators to say:
"okay now flip to the next slide and now
put it on yourself" and
we want to try and support our
educators as much as possible and this
is one way to do it.
The another
logistical piece is the classroom
teacher
is the host and manages the children as
the participants. So
again, we're just sort of led in as a
special guest.
Something I'd like to draw your
attention to on the fruit and vegetable
scavenger hunt slide: there's a
little sentence that says,
telling the kids to do a little
scavenger hunt
find a fruit or vegetable that's on the
rainbow that sort of thing.
And what we know is there's going to be
a lot of kids that won't have fruits or
vegetables in their home.
So that again is an equity issue
and so what we're asking the kids to do
is
saying if you if you can't find this in
your house then here's another option.
Draw it instead. And we don't want to
use the language:
"If you don't have this thing in your
house" because that
implies a lack in the home. So what we
say instead is
"If you can't find it, do this" so we're
automatically giving
an option for participation.
Just some more things we're learning
about digital lessons.
I think it goes without saying that
online learning tends to address
auditory and visual learners, so what
we're trying to do is mix up the lessons
so that kids can
have more hands-on experiences.
We're including
like during a lesson that's being a
reading
kids get up, they move around there's
we're including videos demos that sort
of thing.
Something that we learned that's
actually kind of cool
is typically this little book that is
showing here is called My Five Senses,
it's something that we work with the
kindergarten kids with, get them excited
you know talking about using their
senses when they're
experiencing
food. Well, it's really hard when you're
trying to read a book,
you know, with a bunch of kids to be
holding up to the screen and like trying
to turn the pages and read to it
so what we're doing is digitizing all
the books.
And this one is
in the Spanish language and so what
PDFs allow you to do though is translate
it right there on the page so you can
see in that little
picture of that little the baby crawling
the text is in Spanish but then
the translation is below in English, so
the kids can see
visually the Spanish and English at the
same time, which is not typically
something you can do
in person, so that's a nice
adaptation that turns out to be pretty good.
For videos we're interested or
we're bringing in short little videos in
these one-hour lessons.
Virtual field trips are turning out to
be a fun thing, where we take kids to a farm.
We work with a lot of local farmers
and chefs so we'll
have them visit a chef in their kitchen,
or a farmer in their fields and,
so bringing the
kids to the chef or the farmer rather
than the other way around,
which we have those folks in our
classrooms a lot.
So that was just a quick overview
of the digital lessons and then and like
during an
in-person lesson we typically are
sending stuff home at the end of the
class, it's a home recipe. Well, those
are going to be digitized now, so the example
you see on the right -
this is Miss Kathy one of our educators.
She did this
photo recipe card that she sent home
to her families in the spring, and
they're colorful, they're fun, so that is
something that the classroom teacher
distributes to the kids and their
families. Again, we can't because of
privacy issues, we can't interact
directly with kids
in that way, so the that so we're going to
continue to do that
and as part of our digital lessons.
We aren't abandoning paper altogether
though. On the left
is an example of something that was sent
home,
I think just last week. We're still
collaborating with student nutrition
to do taste tests for kids. Instead of
that happening in the cafeteria, though,
it's happening as part of, you know, pick
up lunches.
So there's going to be a little sample
of, in this instance, it was cherries
and here's our little, you know, flyer
that
it's just like a little educational
flyer it talks about who grew the food
you know, eat a rainbow, that sort of
thing, the SNAP-Ed statements dropped in
on there. It's just a half-page front and back,
Spanish and English and
we get the food to the student nutrition
folks they
 were able to pack it up for us
and then send this flyer home
to the families.
So we, as I mentioned before, we have a
lot of
families that participate in our classes
with their kids and
they're, that's such an important part of
this work.
So how do we continue to connect with
them? Because family
volunteers aren't going to be coming to
our classes anymore during the day,
so we started doing these virtual family
cooking nights.
And we were able to trial several of
them in the spring,
and they were such a great success they
were so much fun.
This is something we have often done
live
in schools, but we're limited to the
number of people who can participate
just by sheer logistics
you can't have many more than like 50
people
cooking together it just gets out of
control.
So this way all families can participate
and it's just turned out to be
way better than we ever expected. And
it's kind of low tech, I mean we're not
doing anything too fancy here. Again, this
is synchronous
This is an example of the invitation
that was sent home by the principal to
the families of this particular
school. This is Chef Mariella,
the school that she works at is bilingual
so we have to address those language issues.
What we, again, we
want to keep this simple. We're not
inventing anything new.
These are - this is a recipe that most of
our staff can do in their sleep.
In this instance it was vegetable fried
rice.
The reason that one was chosen because
there's easy substitutions
families can use whatever veggies they
have at home, etc.
And, a couple of things that we learned though.
For us a three-person collaboration
worked best. Which means we had our staff member
who is on screen here
Mariella right there - you can see, it's
totally not high tech.
so, some other of our educators
there's Brie and Susie.
They were in their home, in their own
kitchen and so
that's our Cooking with Kids educator.
And then we also had a Cooking with Kids
person monitoring the chat,
so you can notice Rachel's right
here and she's answering in Spanish and
English because this is a bilingual
community
So we needed at least two Cooking with
Kids people persons
people and then the host from the school
was in charge of muting everybody and giving the instructions
and all that so that worked the best
and if you're working with smaller
groups I don't know that you'd
necessarily need all that, but for us
it was important to have those three
people, for sure. But something we
learned was the host, the school host,
so this would say like
a 45 minute, an hour, lesson the
people would come and go like a lot of
people didn't join until like a little
later,
and then they drop off, and then they
come back on, so if they miss the
instructions at the beginning,
like here's how you pin, here's how you
mute, those sorts of things,
it got a little disruptive so
like people would join in, they didn't
mute you know that
sort of thing, so we realized it's going
to be important for people to
for the host to every 15 minutes or
so say "Hey, if you're just joining in,
here's how you do this and this and this"
so that was a lesson learned.
And then here's some other,
I mean the best part, look at this! This
is so cute - the kids in their jammies.
The schools posted all this stuff on
their social media and
what we loved about this, though, was that
it was
allowing people to cook in their own
kitchens with their own
stuff and figuring out this
isn't hard we can do this at home by
ourselves. Because typically these families would
be in our classrooms, in our schools.
This way, it's a way for folks to realize,
Hey, this isn't so hard. I can do this....
and the kids are in the kitchen with
them and the kids are kind of the
experts because they've had this at
school before. We've decided that no
matter what
in the future we're going to continue to
do our family nights in this fashion.
And something I forgot to mention,
is the recipes were sent home ahead of
time so people were able to
stock up with whatever they needed.
 
And finally...
it is all about engagement. If this isn't
interesting and people,
and it's boring for kids, their families,
they're just going to tune out and not
watch it and the schools are not going
to find us a valuable partner, so
but we do know that teachers are looking
for help.
This is a really hard time, and if you
can supply quality
content to a school, they're going to
welcome you in.
You have to get through those hoops as
far as the privacy issues, but if you can
do that, this is you providing experiential
opportunities for kids when they're
home is going to be really important
for families and for kids, and keeping our staff engaged, too.
This, for us, the synchronous learning, is
really nice because you get instant
feedback.
And like I said, we're just we're
figuring this out we're going to keep
going. We're in
these two weeks right now starting
yesterday
we're trialing this with some summer
with one of the summer programs in one
of our districts.
So I'm sure in another week that we're
going to change something again
so but the nice thing about digital is
you can easily do that.
This is my contact info if you have
any questions please, feel free to reach
out and we have a lot of stuff on our
website too that's free for download
on lots of resources from over the years.
I'm gonna sign off. Thank you so much, Gina.
[GG]Thank you.
[AF] Oh Gina, you're muted again
[GG] Hey, there we go. Isn't technology fun?
See, I'm phrasing things as a positive.
Thank you very much.
And that was really fun to watch and
learn from.
We will have time for questions and
answers at the end, but we're going to go
right to our final presentation
because we don't want to waste any
more time.
Our next presenters, let me pull up
their slides,
are coming to us from Colorado.
You should all see their slides. I'm
going to
pass the presenter status to
Julie. Okay.
She should be getting that and I'll
do a quick introduction.
We're gonna be hearing from Julie
Atwood as well as Divyani
Pendleton, the program manager. Julie is
the program director. She's been working
with the Integrated
Nutrition Education Program since 2001.
She has spent the majority of her career
trying to provide youth and their
families with nutrition
and healthy lifestyle information.
And Div Pendleton has been working in the
nutrition field with minority
communities with an
emphasis on working with schools,
students, and their families since
starting her dietetic internship in
2011.
So, you will have the control of the
slides now Julie,
so take it away.
[JA] Hi. Can everyone hear me? Yes,
okay good. So first of all, I want to
apologize. It took me 40 minutes to get
into the meeting because I guess it's
been very popular
and I was very freaked out so
if I can't advance the slides, Div will
be able to.
Yeah, looks like it's working. Okay, so
just wanted to give you guys a little
bit of information about
Text2LiveHealthy here in Colorado.
We are part of the Rocky Mountain
Prevention Research Center
and work both with the Integrated
Nutrition Education Program
and the culture of wellness and
preschools so we're primarily
um
an elementary and Head Start early
childhood
nutrition education program. We're going
to be
talking about the objectives that were
outlined probably at the beginning of
this presentation.
We're going to give you a little
information about using texting as an
intervention with
low-income communities in the state
of Colorado and how it can be used
in your areas. We're going to be talking
about
how you can learn a little bit more
about the texting intervention
how we implemented it, how we evaluated
it, and then some of our strategies for
engaging with our SNAP-Ed audience.
There are a tremendous number of really
talented, wonderful people who have been
working with us
in Colorado on this
texting intervention. So we just wanted
to acknowledge and thank them,
it has been a huge team effort.
And just to give you a little bit of
background
about Text2LiveHealthy for any of
those who
aren't familiar with it. Like I said,
we are a
youth-based program,
working with elementary schools and low-income Head Start in early
childhood
centers, so we do classroom based
nutrition education
where it's actually the classroom
teacher themselves that teaches the
lessons.
Although we provide the curriculum,
the food, the resources, and then this
just really gives the students
an opportunity to do hands-on
lessons and recipes and things
in the classroom. And so this is probably
familiar to a lot of you, a lot of you do
similar things.
But what we also do is we have a true
commitment to making sure that
everything we're doing with the
youth is connecting to the home.
So not only do we do PSE work in the
schools,
there's a big outreach part of our
program to connect
with the families as well. So it's
something as simple as a family letter
with
recipes, nutrition tips, those kinds of
things that goes home with the kids
after each lesson. We send home
newsletters,
we set up in the schools and do table talks,
we're able to work with our schools and
our sites to offer one-time workshops
for the
families to attend,  45
minutes to an hour workshop on different
themes. So they can come in and also do
some hands-on
nutrition ed, cooking, physical activity
ideas,
things like that. And then we also
have a six week class series
where the families, the adults, are
invited to attend the six week class periods.
So you can see that Text2LiveHealthy
is one of these
strategies that we've implemented to
really connect with our families.
And it's turned out to be incredibly
effective,
especially for those families who are
not always able to come to
school to attend
a workshop, to attend a series.
This texting program has turned out to really be a way to connect with those families.
So a little bit of background about
texting.
Mobile Health or mHealth, is what
you'll hear it referred to
a lot of times. And it is being widely
used to reach low-income participants
throughout the country,
especially our Spanish-speaking families.
Many of them have shared with us that
this is really their preferred
way of connecting with us and receiving
information.
It does turn out that there are very few
programs using this that have
been rigorously designed,
tested, and are evidence-based, especially
around providing nutrition and
physical activity ideas to the families.
We also acknowledge that there is
currently a lack of research being done
in this area.
We are in the process of doing that,
we hope others are.
So there's going to be a lot more that
we learn, but
we we have found that it has
been very effective for our families.
So to begin with our goal
is we're really trying to find a way to
help influence behavior change for the
entire family.
So this is connecting to the adults, but
it's themes around working together as a
family.
We're working around increasing
consumption of fruits and vegetables,
increasing physical activity, decreasing
consumption of sugar sweetened beverages,
while also
consuming more water.
And the way we have it set up is that
whenever you opt into our program
everyone that is in the intervention is
going to get the exact same messages in
the exact same
order depending on when they start.
When they start,
they're going to get these themes,
and then every three to four weeks,
there are some evaluation questions that
come along with it that allow us to
really
follow what kind of an influence and
what kind of impact we're having.
We do offer the messages in English and
Spanish
and they select that when they first
join in.
It's two to three health messages
per week on the core topics, and then
many times there's a local message that
comes out as well,
so we can target it to the particular
school we're working with,
to the particular region of the state,
if we know that there's a health fair
going on at the school,
if we know that a farmers market is
opening, if we want to let
everybody know asparagus is in season -
here's a recipe
We can send along those local messages as well.
This next slide
is some of our sample text messages.
We're able to personalize them
with a name, which is really, helps
our families feel very connected.
We have focused
all of our messaging and our entire
intervention on
different theoretical models and
different domains,
whether it's self-efficacy skills,
knowledge-based, the messages tied back
directly to those theoretical models.
Many of our messages, you'll see, will
include links.
They'll maybe have a short video,
it can take you to a website with more
information. It can provide recipes,
connect you with a pdf that we've
created to go with these.
Currently have a reach of
over 3000 subscribers about 70 percent
are English speaking
and 30 percent are Spanish speaking.
In FY19 we had a retention rate of 82 percent.
We weren't sure what would happen, but
we quickly realized we were going to have
to develop a year two,
so we developed a second year. Weren't
sure how long people would continue at
that point.
Might be close to the end of the
second year, we realized people were not
going away, which we were very happy about.
So we're now entering our third year of
people participating.
We're starting up the third year of this
intervention,
so that part has been really exciting
to see.
 
We are tracking things like user
engagement. So we're looking at how many
subscribers we have,
are they clicking on the links,
those types of information.
We're receiving an average of 71
messages per month
from subscribers. Five to ten percent of
the subscribers are engaging with what
we call "branching logic".
It might be a little bit hard to see
here but some of our questions
provide the participants an option
to click a, b, or c.
And depending on
what they select, they're going to get a
tailored message
back in response to that message that
was
that question that was asked.
Let's see. And then
Div may have a little bit more she
wants to add to that, but
really what we wanted to do now is shift
to how this program has become
obvious, that it's such a beneficial way
to connect with our families.
During COVID, this was an immediate
opportunity for us to connect
with over three thousand of our families,
who could then connect some of the
messages
with their other families and friends.
I'm gonna let Div talk more specifically
now about how we've been using
Text2LiveHealthy during COVID.
[DP] Thank you, Julie. I am going to
advance the slides now. Okay, perfect.
So like Julie mentioned, we really
wanted to make sure that
our messages resonated with subscribers.
You know we worked with community
partners to
really determine what the needs are of
our community.
We heard from our current subscribers. We
heard from different partner
organizations, and we realized that this
crisis has caused numerous strains on
our families,
like access to food, water, physical activity.
So we wanted to make sure that our texts
still made sense for them, so we created texts that were
very specific
to help our families around the COVID-19 pandemic.
We sent out messages regarding access
to food, food resource management, food safety,
recipes using common canned foods that
families may already have on hand.
And we just want to let our subscribers
know that we're there for them.
We're here to support them. We
began this programmatic shift in March 23rd
and initially we thought, well we'll just
go through May and then
maybe this will be over and we are still
sending out those
COVID-19 specific messages.
And like Julie mentioned, it's going to
about 3000 subscribers.
 
So from March 23rd until now, we have
sent
actually over 50 local messages specific
to COVID-19.
Some of the themes of the messages,
include those supportive messages,
links to resources, food access for
adults
and for children, so partnering with
schools
and food banks, and food pantries, food
storage, grocery shopping.  So we created
a wide variety of messages that we sent
out. And when we say local messages what
we mean is that these were
crafted to provide targeted information
to different areas.
We're a statewide program across the
state of Colorado,
so we wanted to really make sure that
the messages were very community specific.
We also wanted to know how this pandemic
has affected our families healthy eating
and physical activity.  So we sent out two evaluation
questions via text as well.
Here are some sample local messages that were sent
during COVID-19. If we look at the
first one that's promoting
our school meal sites. So it says "Although schools are closed to keep families
safe, FREE breakfast and lunch grab-and-go
meals are available Monday through
Friday for anyone under 18 years at DPS sites."
And then there's a link for more
information. We've sent the second one is an example
of our physical activity text that we
sent out to families.
The third one is an example of branching
logic that Julie had talked about.
So we really wanted to tailor our
message
to what families want. So, here we say
"We're here to support you through this
challenging time! What type of resources
would you like to know more about? Please reply with:
a - for easy recipe video, b - for COVID-19
resources,
c - for physical activity, d - for wellness/
mind and body connection,
or e - for a virtual hug.  Maybe that's what
you just need at that time.
So we found that branching logic
is a great way for us to
engage with our families and really tailor
the information to what they need.
I'm going to go over our evaluation
results to those
healthy eating and physical activity
questions that we sent out.
The question we sent out to all
our subscribers is:
"How has the coronavirus affected your
family's healthy eating?"
Better, Same, or Worse? The two
circles that you see: the one on the left
is our responses from our English participants,
and the one on the right is our responses from our
Spanish-speaking participants.
Overall, we were actually fairly
surprised to see that the results were similar
by language. And the reason we were
surprised is when we have looked at our
other evaluation results, just to evaluate our the outcomes and
the impact of our programming we've
always seen a statistically significant
difference by language. So we ran the
analyses for this one too and there was
no difference.
We can see that about close to
50 percent are saying their health eating
is about the same,
but quite a few of them are saying that
it's worse.
I'm going to share some quotes that we got
along with the results of the evaluation.
So the next question that we sent out
was to figure out how the pandemic
has affected their physical activity. So
we said "How has the coronavirus
affected your family's physical activity
level?" Is it More,
Same, or Less? And again, we can see about 50 percent, or half, said
that it's affected them more, about a quarter
or to a third as saying less, and about
20 percent are saying that it's the same.
Here are some comments that we
received from our participants.
They just texted the comments into us, and this is
related to the healthy eating
question. One subscriber said
"Yes it has affected me, because eating
healthy costs
and one was left with nothing for rent
and food, the little we had."
Another participant said
"There is a shortage of canned foods and
I don't want to go out a lot and expose
myself and my daughter."
And so what we did is we used the
comments and these evaluation results to really
create the program, to make sure that we are meeting the
needs of our subscribers. We also received some
additional text from our subscribers.
 
and how our texting program may have helped them
through this pandemic.
One subscriber said, "Your texts
have been so good recently! Thank you for
all that you are doing!" Another person
said, "Thank you so
much for all your support. It definitely
makes a positive difference!
Be safe and God bless all of you." Another person said,  "This helps me a huge
amount. My family would not have gotten
through it without them."
And then the last one is,  "It's very good
ideas to put them into practice."
So we heard from our subscribers that
there is this huge
need for this sort of information,
and so we just wanted to respond to that need.
 
So thinking through recruitment
strategies, so pre-COVID
Julie mentioned we work with schools and
preschools statewide so
all of our recruitment pre-COVID was
in person.
This is through back to school nights, or
parent coffees,
we created posters and flyers with how
to "opt in".
On the right, you'll see an image of
that we would put on a flyer or a poster
and we did a lot of one-on-one
recruitment.
We found that parents struggled with
how to opt in to a texting program where the number
looks kind of weird, it's not really a
phone number.
So we we did a lot of that
in-person one-on-one recruitment.
However with COVID all of that went away,
but we realized that this program is
really valuable. We're hearing this from
our subscribers: how can we
share this with other parents who may
not be receiving these texts?
And so we try to think
creatively about how we could still
offer and recruit for our program.  So what we
did is we recruited by sharing flyers through our
connections with our schools and our
preschools.
And so the classroom teachers who are
the ones who
sent out our recruitment information to
families and to parents,
we created QR codes, so that's what you
see on the right,
where when you have a smartphone you
take a picture of the QR code and that
automatically sends,
opens up the browser where you can
type in your information to register with the program.
So we did this for ease of registration because we found
that sending a link to a flyer
may not be that easy, because how do you
get the flyer and then you type in the
url?
So we were thinking about
strategies on how to make it easier for
our families. So I want to leave
you with this quote that we received
from our subscribers and she said,
"Well it feels like a privilege. I think that maybe other people that
speak other languages don't have the same opportunity."
So what it really said to us is that there's a
great need
for programs like this or information
like this for other communities
outside of those who are speaking
English and Spanish.
What we have done on our end is we are
partnering with
several community organizations and
state agencies
to adapt our program for older adults,
for tribal communities in South Dakota
and in Colorado.
We're also working with other
SNAP-Ed implementing agencies
across the country to bring this program
to other SNAP-Ed communities.
I want to thank you all for letting us share
about our program and I believe there
will be time for
questions at the end. So Gina, I will turn
it back to you.
[GG] Thank you so much. I will grab the
presenter status.
Okay. We have had a lot of questions come in and
unfortunately I can tell you right now
we're not going to get a chance to
get to all of them.
I wish we could but, why is this
slide coming up? Here we go.
Before we get into the questions for
our speakers,
I want to just repeat, yes we are aware
there was a capacity issue.
We are so sorry for your friends and
colleagues who were not able to get in today.
We are going to work as hard as we can
to get this presentation
and the following ones online so
everyone can view and have access to this
great information as soon as possible.
We will also be emailing out copies of
slides.
And I know right now we're not going to be
able to get to all of our questions so
I'm going to, on the fly,
ask if all of the presenters and I'm
just going to accept this request on
their behalf.
We will consolidate the top questions
for each group that we don't get to today.
I will send them to the presenters so
they can have time to respond and we
will post that as a document
as a follow-up to this presentation,
because there are so many great meaty
questions
and I just know we're not going to be
able to get to all of them today,
so I'm sorry about that.
And I want to mention that for the
the next two sessions we're going to be doing "q and a"
a little bit differently.
We're going to allow everyone to start
submitting their questions in advance. That will give us time.
The next two topics are
evaluation and measuring program impact,
and data collection and reporting. Those are two topics that
always have a lot of really nuanced,
complex questions. So we want to give
our speakers time to
create great answers for you and give
everyone a chance to
send in their really thoughtful questions.
So if you can see that link right now, we're using
a program called slido. It's a website.
You go there, you can submit your question.
Also you'll be able to see the questions
that have already been submitted, so if you
support that question, if you have the
same question, you can just upvote it.
You don't have to ask it again. You
can see the types of questions that
we're getting. And that's live
now, so you can go on to that url right
now and start submitting your questions for
the next
two topics which are measuring and
evaluating program
impact, and data collection and reporting.
So, that's open now.  Feel free to start
submitting your questions on those two
topics now and we will try to create
our presentation to tailor if
there's a significant need in one
direction we can
we can swing in that direction. So please,
I know you can't click on the link in
the slide but someone's going to post
that into the "QA" box.
You can either click on that link or you
can just copy and paste it, save it for later.
I will put the link to this on our SNAP-Ed Connection webinars page as well.
So yes, it is going to be shared via the "chat" or
the "QA". One of my colleagues is going to put that in there so you can copy and paste.
Okay, so I am going to get ready to start
asking some questions. If the presenters
could unmute themselves to speak and
then mute themselves again, this could
get a little fuzzy with some feedback.
I'm aware that that's going to happen.
I apologize in advance. I'm going to try
to mute myself too.
Okay so let's get to a couple of the
first questions for the Food eTalk
group from Georgia.
Do the food eTalk lessons count as direct
education
or indirect? Under SNAP-Ed with the 20 minute standard, in order to be counted as Direct Ed
delivery, how does eTalk count the
interaction in EARS since the average
session length is 8 to 12 minutes?
Feel free to hang on to your response to
the data reporting webinar, but if you just
address that question, that would be great. [ECR]...Yeah,
Joanna?
You're muted.
[JA]] Hi Gina. I'm going to take this question.
I didn't present today but my name is
Joanna Aiken. I'm the evaluation
coordinator for the UGA SNAP-Ed program.
This is a great question, and actually
taken as a whole, the entire Food eTalk
intervention
each lesson in the series, so each
module,
takes an average of eight to twelve
minutes in that original Food eTalk six
lesson series.
So taken as a whole we do meet that
20-minute threshold for
direct education and as you also saw
we really meet the requirement for the
content being interactive,
interactive multimedia, so we do count
it as direct education.
We're very sure, I think it's item
four on EARS, we're very careful about
calculating the actual number of modules
completed in total by our participants.
And I can also, if it's okay Gina, I
can also answer another question I saw
in the chat
about the number of people who cycle
through the e-learning programs.
We, last year had about 670
people create online learning profiles
through our website
and this year you know there's been such
a demand for
e-learning, we've seen over 1500 people
creating profiles for e-learning on our
website. Thank you.
[GG] Thank you. Another question for your team.
Was there any training on computer
literacy with participants?
[ECR] There is none because the participants just visit the website on their own.
Through the recruitment coordinator, she
has some opportunities to work
locally with agencies and participants
and there's some technical
assistance with them. And when she
discovers some
things that need to be updated on the
website then she brings that feedback to
our office as well.
[GG] Thank you. One more question for your team.
Have there been concerns or issues with
the sign-in process that might be
prohibitive for eligible participants?
As I can imagine that this added step
may discourage people from using or
accessing the lessons.
[ECR] Well definitely we are trying to find
some ways to make this an easier
process and make sure that we are in
compliance with the SNAP-Ed
 Guidance so we have been talking to
our state office and with our regional
offices
to make sure that we can definitely look
for ways to make this process less
cumbersome on the participant
and to make sure that they can access
the resources as well.
[GG] Okay last question for your group is:
Which software or design
platform did you use?
[ECR] Sarah, would you want to take that one?
[SS] Yeah I can answer that question.
So it's actually using Articulate
Storyline which anyone can access
and actually it's pretty easy to
use. It's just like a
powerpoint however we hired a
professional e-learning design group
called Yukon Learning...yukon
like the potato and I'm happy to
provide their information they're based
I think in Virginia.
But so professional designers used
Articulate Storyline to make our
interface
I think as beautiful as it is, so
thank you for asking me.
[GG] Thank you. We do have a lot more
questions for your program. We're going
to get those to you
in writing and give you an opportunity
to create responses that we can share
with our attendees today.
The next batch of questions we have
is for Cooking with Kids so Anna
a big question we got was talk to us
about
any special permissions you needed or
any issues you faced regarding the
digitizing of your
books that you share. Was that an issue for you?
[AF] The way we are thinking, oh and I
think you're still on. There you go better.
Since these aren't being these are
not being shared
anywhere except in these private
classroom settings.
They're created on google slides
where
we can create restrictions around them.
They're just part of our
digital tool box. We're
considering it not unlike reading a book
to a child in person. These aren't being
shared anywhere and they're private they're not
even being shared with our
educators, I mean our teachers and
students it's just something we use, so
we're not seeing the copyright issue as
a problem.
[GG] Thank you. Next question is are you
planning to send
food like ingredients to participants
for cooking demos?
If so, how do you plan to manage funds
since SNAP-Ed funds only allow for
sample sizes?
[AF] You're right so the stuff that we're
sending home in school lunches
is part of the school lunch
distribution. Those are little samples
and we're actually using money from
another grant that we have with our
Department of Agriculture that promotes
local food.
Then for the classes that we're
doing the digital classes
we, truth be told, we haven't figured that
piece out yet.
We don't know that we can get food to
every single participating kid
and if even one or two kids are left out
then we don't want to do it. So we're
trying to figure out other experiential
ways for them to
have some sort of fun food
experience that doesn't include them all
having the same food.
For the family nights where we just
submitted a grant
to a grocery chain to see if they'll sponsor
cooking kits for families who don't have
access to food, and then we would have
the families pick up the food either at the
school, if the kids are in hybrid, or at the
school lunch sites if they're not.
[GG] Okay. Thank you
This a follow-up question related - 
Were you able to fund the groceries
families would need to participate? If
not, did the families have the resource
to purchase those items?  If you want to
speak more about that great, but I think
you kind of covered that.
I'll just go to the next question.
Was virtual family night direct
education?
Did you get demographics and record
participants?
[AF] Yes it was direct education
and the reason and we know that the
demographics match this
the family since it was in one of the
communities in which we work, the school
we worked at.
We know that those families, they're SNAP
eligible. Like I said, 88 percent
of our families that our schools are
eligible, are free and reduced.
How do, what was this last part of it?
How do we record participants?
[GG] Yes, how do you get demographics
and record participants?
[AF] Well what I just mentioned about the
demographics. And then for the
participants
their names are all lined up right
there.
That is part of the you know thing you
know so we will work with this
when this becomes more systematized
we'll work with the school to get
like proper lists. Right now truthfully
we just did screenshots.
[GG] Okay. Thank you.
I'm gonna I'm screening through my
questions here.
So I believe again we have more
questions for you but
I think that's all the time we have
today so I'm gonna just do a few more
questions. I know we're coming up on our
our time allotment here. But for the
group in Colorado, did your subscribers
increase more than usual during COVID-19? And what texting service do you use for
this program?
[JA] Div, do you want to answer that? [DP] Sure. Since our recruitment efforts had
changed
from pre-COVID to post-COVID, I wouldn't
say our subscriber
numbers increased. We were actually
really worried about
our retention rate going down which we
didn't find.
And the platform that we use is mobile
messaging or mobile commons.
[GG] Thank you. One more question for your group.
I'm gonna pick the most exciting and one
that's
 
You've been researching and planning
these programs for years. How can we
adopt
virtual teaching effectively in a
shorter time span? How are the SNAP-Ed
educators
in counties involved with Text2LiveHealthy?
Is it mostly just recruiting
participants to sign up?
[DP] We've we have a fairly big
team who has been instrumental in
designing,
developing this program and I think
Julie mentioned them in the
acknowledgment slide,
so it's a it's a team effort. The way we
partnered with other agencies is that
the agency would recruit participants
and when we would work with them to
adapt messages and just
kind of use our expertise that we have
created over the years
in adapting the content, the
platform, the logistics
in sending out those messages. I'm not
sure
that was exactly your question
but I hope that helped.
[GG] Have you found that having the QR
codes has helped
in your recruitment? [DP] Yeah, I
think it has helped. I think we're
still thinking about ways to
get the QR code to our families
because before that we didn't really
have other ways of recruitment
unless we send out a link.
The teachers will then have to send out
to the family, so I think it does.
It has helped. I think next school
year and through the summer we'll really
be thinking about how do we
share those QR codes with the families
and what avenues do we have with our
school partnerships as well as community
organizations
that we can promote our program.
[GG] Okay, thank you. We are out of time, so
again we will endeavor to get to all of
your questions
and get those questions to our
presenters so they can provide answers
and we'll post that on our
SNAP-Ed Connection website. I want to give a big thank you to all
of our panelists today,
Edda Cotto-Rivera and Sarah Stotz
presenting from the University of
Georgia.
To Anna Farrier with Cooking with Kids.
And to Julie Atwood and Div Pendleton at
Text2LiveHealthy in Colorado.
So much good information today.
Thank you to all of our attendees who attended
today
and please send our sincere apologies to
your colleagues who were not able to get
in. We hope that you can join us at the same
time next week. We will
do some troubleshooting on our end to
make sure that everyone can get in
August 4th 1pm eastern time and we'll be
taking a closer look at evaluation
and measuring program impact.
So, wherever you are I hope you're well
and safe
and we look forward to seeing you next
week. Thank you so much.
