Letter to Students, Parents and Guardians
Students, parents and guardians,
While students are out of school due to the COVID-19 virus my webpage is the place students should come to for their assignments in my class. Each school day I will have a new webpage dated with that day’s date. On that webpage will be links to resources and assignments that maybe in a variety of learning platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Its Learning, EdPuzzle as well as links to news articles from a variety of publishers. The most recent school day’s webpage will be the third link from the top (just under the link to the home page and this letter) in the navigation bar on the left and side of my website. Once a new day’s webpage has been published you will still be able to find old day’s webpages grouped together by month further down in the navigation bar on the left.
My website is https://sites.google.com/site/rakosnikschool. Many students already have this page bookmarked on their school laptops. You can also navigate to my page by going to the middle school’s webpage (https://pcms.putnam.k12.ga.us/pcms), hovering over “Faculty and Staff” in the navigation bar towards the top of the webpage and then clicking on “PCMS Faculty and Staff.” If you click on my name, William Rakosnik, on that page it will take you directly to my website.
Mrs. Reaves, Mrs. Peeler and Ms. Steele said that assignments for their classes will be in either Microsoft Teams or Its Learning. So you can go directly there for students’ Math, Science and English/Language Arts assignments.
As we have all year in class, students should start at the top of the webpage and work their way down to the bottom. There will be links on that page that take students to other websites. Once a student is done with a link, he or she should return to the webpage for that day until the student has reached the bottom of the page.
Sometimes students may need to use multiple windows at once. If a student needs or wants to have two windows side by side on their screen, the keyboard shortcut for quickly doing so is to hold down the windows key and press one of the side arrows. This is a link https://lifehacker.com/move-windows-around-quickly-using-your-keyboard-in-wind-5828453 to a video tutorial of how to do this. Legitimate reasons for a student needing or wanting to have two windows side by side on the screen include answering questions from an online article or following along with the transcript of a video.
The formal name of my class is Critical Thinking with Current Events. It is the Social Studies class for 6th graders in Putnam County Middle School. Instead of learning about history that happened a long time ago, we have been learning about what is happening now. We will continue to learn about whatever is happening in the news during this time and there may also be updates about news topics we previously covered.
I suspect that the COVID-19 virus will continue to be the biggest story while we are out of school and we will certainly spend some time learning about it. However, during this time I don’t just want to overwhelm students with information about the COVID-19 virus. So since we are going to be relying on technology a lot for communication and distance learning I thought it would be appropriate for us to take a look at how technology has been in the news recently, how it is changing the world and is it making our lives better.
If you need to individually contact me, the best way to do so is to email me at william_rakosnik@putnam.k12.ga.us. You can find my email address on the faculty and staff page that I directed you to earlier in this letter. After students have logged into their Microsoft account, Outlook is the Microsoft email program. If you begin to type my name, eventually the rest of my email address should auto-complete.
Thank you,
Mr. Rakosnik