There are two primary systems in place to help keep you on track while you progress through this course:
This page will go into detail about the Daily Announcements. Go to the Getting Class Help page for more information about how to use and interact with the Question Parking Lot (QPL).
The primary reason for the Daily Announcements posts is to keep you grounded in the course.
In our new age of public health, it is not uncommon for students (or teachers) to be out of class for a prolonged period of time due to illness and/or or quarantine measures. Since our class will keep moving forward regardless of individual health concerns, it is important that we have a designated "home base" and a designated form of daily communication that we can use for both in-class and off-campus situations.
Our "home base" will be this class website.
Our primary form of communication will be our Daily Class Announcements.
The Daily Announcements are posted via a basic Google Doc. This doc is publicly available. You can access it from any device (computer, laptop, Chromebook, tablet, phone, etc.) that has internet access.
An embedded link to the Daily Class Announcements (DCA) document is located on the home page of this website for easy access. However, I recommend that you set up a bookmark on your browser toolbar for the DCA for easier daily access to the document.
The DCA should be posted by 8:30 a.m. on every school day. It will be a detailed summary of class announcements, assignment overviews, answers to student questions, and a detailed overview of the agenda for each school day.
Since we will rely heavily on the Daily Class Announcements for delivering most of our class communication, here are MY expectations for YOU:
READ the announcements every day. If you are in class, you will do this as part of your warm-up activity each school day. If you are out of class, read the announcements before you attempt to complete any of your required work.
Make sure you carefully read and completely follow all directions posted in each day's announcements.
If you have any questions about anything in the DCA, be sure to ask questions in class or post to the QPL if you are outside of class.
I have use digital Daily Class Announcements with my classes for more than 20 years. Across all those years, two things have been pretty consistent:
Students who end the semester with an A in the class, tend to faithfully read the daily announcements - every day - without fail.
Students who end the semester with a failing grade, rarely read the daily announcements.
So does reading the announcements guarantee you an A in the class? Hardly. However, if you want to give yourself the best chance to earn an A, faithfully read the daily announcements each and every school day.
If you do, you will always know exactly what you need to complete for your assignments and projects.
So here's your next challenge (do this RIGHT NOW):
Go back to the home page of this class website and find the embedded Daily Class Announcements document.
Hover over the document.
In the upper-right-hand corner of the embed frame, click on the grey box to pop-out the announcements into its own browser tab.
Add a bookmark to the tool bar of your browser so you can easily get back to this stand-alone announcements page. It will be much easier to navigate the announcements this way rather than trying to read the embedded document on the website.
Carefully read and completely follow all posted directions in the most recent announcement post. If you have any questions as you work your way through the Daily Announcement Post, post them to the Question Parking Lot.