There are two primary systems in place to help keep you on track while you progress through this course:

• The Daily Announcements
• The Question Parking Lot

This page will go into detail about the Daily Announcements. Go to the Getting Help page for more information about how to use and interact with the Question Parking Lot.

Keeping Grounded in the Course

The primary reason for the Daily Announcements posts is to keep you grounded in the course.

We are entering a challenging school year that could see our "schooling" take many different forms before the school year is over. The GUHSD has instituted a flexible, modified quarter-system, curricular plan that has five possible learning environments. The GUHSD refers to these as "On-campus Levels":

• Level 1: 100% online distance learning.
• Level 2 (Hybrid Model): 25% on campus, remainder of instruction delivered through distance learning.
• Level 3 (Hybrid Model): 50% on campus, remainder of instruction delivered through distance learning.
• Level 4 (Hybrid Model): 100% on campus ( 4 day per week), remainder of instruction delivered through distance learning.
• Level 5: Return to 100% traditional school.

(see the GUHSD Reopening Schedule document for more information)

Since our On-campus Level could change at any time (due to current community health conditions), we need to have a designated "home base" that we can always come back to no matter what "On-campus Level" we are on. We also need a standard form of daily communication between teacher and student that we can use on any On-campus Level.

Our "home base" will be this class website. Our primary form of communication will be our Daily Class Announcements.

How it Works

The Daily Announcements are posted via a basic Google Doc. This doc is publicly available. You can access it from any computer/mobile device that has internet access.

An embedded link to the Daily Announcement document is located on the home page of this website for easy access. It is located next to the Question Parking Lot spreadsheet. However, you should access the document directly and set up a bookmark on your browser toolbar (for even easier daily access) to the document.

The Daily Class Announcements should be posted by 7:30 a.m. on every school day. It will be a detailed summary of class announcements, assignment overviews, answers to student questions (posed via the Question Parking Lot), and a detailed overview of the agenda for each school day.

Student Responsibilities

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. It is your first assignment to complete each day. Read the announcements before you do anything else for class that day.
• Carefully read and completely follow all directions posted in each day's announcements.
• If we are having an online live session that school day, READ all the announcements and take care of any warm-up activities BEFORE class starts.

We have so little time allocated to actual live instruction, we need to maximize every moment of our live class sessions.

Final Comments . . .

I have done daily class announcements with my classes for about 15 years and here's what has been fairly consistent across all my classes and grade levels: the students who get an A in the class, faithfully read the daily announcements. The students who fail the class, almost never read the daily announcements.

So does reading the announcements guarantee you an A in the class? Hardly. But if you want to give yourself the best chance to earn an A in this class, faithfully read the daily announcements each and every school day.

So here's your challenge (do this RIGHT NOW):

1. Go back to the home page of this class website and find the link to the Daily Class Announcements document.
2. Click on the link in the upper-right-hand corner of the document to pop-out the announcements into its own browser tab.
3. 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 in their own page rather than trying to read the embedded document.

Carefully read and completely follow all posted directions in the most recent announcement post. If you have any questions/comments as you go, post them to the Question Parking Lot.