General Tips

The following are some general tips for a successful virtual experience for your student.

• Students are strongly encouraged to attend live virtual help sessions. Many students are not attending these incredibly valuable sessions. I would strongly encourage families to make these a priority.

• Speaking of virtual help sessions, our teachers would really like for students to turn their cameras on (if possible) when they are asking questions. This really helps our teachers when they are trying to get to know their virtual students.

• It would be great if students would also introduce themselves when asking questions in virtual help sessions. This does not have to be overly formal. A quick, “Hello, my name is __________ and I have a question about number 7 on the study guide” will do. Again, this really helps our teachers when they are trying to build meaningful relationships with their virtual students.

• When asking questions, students should be as specific as possible. In many cases, students might simply say, “I need help” or “I don’t understand.” Instead of this, please encourage your student to say something like, “I don’t understand why I missed number 4 on the quiz” or “I looked at the answer key and I keep getting a different answer for number 2.”

• We have all had a bad experience with technology at some point and this is likely amplified during virtual learning in the middle of a global pandemic. Please know that our teachers are not trained to troubleshoot technology issues. With this in mind, please visit the help resources in this site. If you cannot solve your issue, contact our ITS, Tracey Abercrombie: tabercrombie@forsyth.k12.ga.us

• If you are experiencing technical difficulties, it would be a great idea to take a screenshot of your screen so that you can show your teacher that there was a glitch. Our teachers can then share this with our tech people to see if there might be a workable solution.

• Before jumping straight to a quiz or assessment, students should work their way through the entire lesson(s) first. In the face to face setting, a teacher presents lessons and practice to students before expecting them to take a quiz / assessment. In the virtual setting, students can jump straight to the quiz / assessment. This is not really a recipe for success. In general, middle school students are not known to be patient and methodical, so please make sure that they are diligently working through a lesson fully before assessing.

• As aforementioned, middle school students are not generally patient and methodical. Please encourage your student to carefully and strategically read through the directions of an assignment. Let them know it is okay to read them twice!

• The ability for students to work their way through a struggle is something that teachers continually work on with face to face students. Encourage students to work through struggles first before asking the teacher for help. This could take the form of rereading the directions, checking their work against an answer key, or asking other students for help first before sending a message to the teacher in itslearning. Some virtual teachers have opened up discussion boards where students can post questions for the class and other students can answer. Classroom teachers will oftentimes use the phrase, “Ask three before you ask me.” This means that the student should ask three classmates first before asking the teacher.

• Every single North Middle teacher that teaches a virtual course also teaches face to face courses. Because of this, communication cannot be instantaneous as teachers have an obligation to their face to face students during class time.

• Teachers availability / office hours change each week based on our rotating schedule for face to face students. If you need to connect with a virtual teacher, please make sure you know the best times that they can be reached each week.

**This list of tips was created by Todd McClelland, Principal NFMS