E-Learning

April 4 Update

Some updates on grading:

Your grade in this class is calculated as a weighted average of 3 categories: homework (20%, video checks), tests (50%, free response and multiple choice assessments), and labs (30%, Khan Academy progress). As of today, I am adding a 4th category: assessments (online multiple choice assessments), which will be worth 30% of your overall grade. The other 3 categories are weighted in the same proportion as they were, but scaled to 70% of your grade.
During this time out of school, the district (actually the state) has a "do no harm" policy on grades. That means that the final grade that I post for you at the end of the stay at home order (which very likely could be the end of the semester) will not be lower than it was on March 13th. I will continue to put grades into the gradebook regardless of their impact on your grade, but if your letter grade at the end of the stay at home order is lower than it was on March 13, then it will revert to your March 13 letter grade. Entering all grades in this way will reflect the totality of the work that you do during the stay at home order, not just individual grades that are beneficial.
I will no longer allow submitting the multiple choice quizzes after I give out answers in the virtual class meeting. I will be sure to post the quiz at a time each day that gives you sufficient time to complete it before our daily 10:30 meeting each day, typically by noon the day before it is due.
The only grades that will be changing during this time will be the new assessment grades, and your Khan Academy course mastery progress. I updated those scores today with a target of 74%, but remember, the final target is going to be 80%.
If you would like to know what your grade was as of March 13, send me a message via email or Hangouts, and I will let you know.
Even if you do not need to complete work in order to maintain your grade or to prepare for the AP Test, I urge you to continue to practice and learn the course material. Keeping a learner's mentality now will make things a lot easier for you when you need it again!
I hope that you are staying healthy and sane during this time! I miss seeing you guys at school every day!

The best place to keep track of your work is in Google Classroom. I will do my best to put assignments on there for anything that you need to get done. The only exception to that is Khan Academy - I will count on you to keep up with the assignments on there and your course mastery goals.

"Office Hours"

I will make myself available during our regularly scheduled class time for assistance with anything you need.

A few things to keep in mind:

We will Google Hangouts Meet for the discussions - I will share the information to join each day via Google Classroom.
I will be recording the discussions for the benefit of students that are unable to participate. Please understand that any participation (particularly vocal) will be recorded and shared with the class - by participating, you are giving your consent to be recorded.
If you are asking for help with problems from Khan Academy or AP Classroom, I would recommend joining the Meet on a Chromebook, laptop, or PC - that way you can share your screen with me and make it easier for me to help with the problem. As far as I know, it is not possible to share what's on your phone screen in the Meet.
- If you have a computer without a microphone, you can call into the meet in order to use the microphone on your phone. Details are in the "Joining Info" for the Meeting.
Please mute your microphone during the discussion unless you are actively participating in the conversation.
Videos from each day will be posted on Google Classroom after each session

Multiple Choice Assessments

I will continue to give multiple choice assessments, but will transition to Google Forms instead of paper and pencil.

Grades will be scaled as before, but during this time, if your grade goes down, I will not count it (except for completion)
While I cannot prevent cheating, I urge you to try these on your own, and do your best to hold yourself to the timing as noted on the assessments. Since they cannot hurt your grade, I hope that I can count on you do complete these honorably.
I strongly recommend that that you write out work on paper to practice work flow.
I plan to do one of these almost every day, mostly to keep the older ideas fresh. I will use some of the time during Office Hours to go over these assessments.

Khan Academy

The new mastery target will be 80% - make sure that you continue working on this! Some tips:

before you take Unit tests, practice each of the topics and try to get them all up to 80 points
take your time on the Unit tests, make sure that you're not getting questions wrong that you should get right
after taking a Unit test, go back to any exercise that you missed on the test, and get that back to an 80%
don't spend large amounts of time to get a small number of points - for example, don't take a whole unit test to try to recover 40 or 60 points

For BC students, I will be assigning entire lessons (videos and exercises) for topics we have not done in class yet. Do your best to learn from the videos, but be prepared to use the Office Hours to ask any questions you have about the new material.

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