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.

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

In all likelihood, with our ongoing pandemics (COVID and Monkeypox), this will be another challenging year. While unlikely, it is still possible that we could once again do some form of distance learning at some point this year. However, it's more likely that individuals who test positive will have to quarantine out of school for days at a time (including teachers).

Since our "On-campus Level" could change at any time, we need to have a designated "home base" that we can always use whether you (or your teacher) are on campus or at home. We also need a standard form of daily communication between teacher and student (and parent) that we can use every school day in every possible learning situation.

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 and can be accessed 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 8:00 a.m. on every school day. It will be a detailed summary of class announcements, answers to common class questions, assignment overviews (with links to work), 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. It is your first assignment to complete each day. Read the announcements before you do anything else for our class that day. The last item on each day's announcements will be the warm-up activity for that school day.

• Carefully read and completely follow all directions posted in each day's announcements.

I have done daily class announcements with my classes for more than 2 decades and here's what has been fairly consistent across all my classes and grade levels throughout the years: 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 from the website.

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.