Welcome Video

Welcome to your virtual classroom. My name is misses Lassiter, and I'm going to be your instructor. Before you get started, let's review a few policies you need to be aware of. One is the grace period. This is the first four weeks for MD VS or three weeks for SJVS, and this is when you want to decide are you in the right course, and are you going to be able to do your best? If not, we can withdraw you during that time it will not affect your grade or your GPA. You want to work consistently and try your best, make sure this is going to be a good fit. If you are not working in the course, you might be withdrawn by your instructor or on the last day of your grace period if you're behind in the course, you'll be withdrawn. That way it doesn't affect your grades if it's not going to work out. Be sure to communicate with me if you have any concerns or questions so that I know what we need to do to work with you to make sure that you're going to be able to be successful. Now to be successful, you need to follow your pace chart, I have a link on the announcement page with a paste chart that follows the county school calendar for you. If you complete and submit these assignments weekly you should do wonderful. Now, some of you might take longer than others. I know some people say, well, you get to work at your own pace. Yes, but not working at all doesn't mean you're working at your own pace. It just means some of you might go through the lesson in ten minutes each day. Others might take two or three hours in each day. But you get to work on what you need to to build on your strengths and weaknesses. So the pacing guide is a suggested due date, like something might say turn this in on Wednesday, you can turn it in on Thursday, that's fine. But you want to each week make sure you're staying up with what you need to for that week. If you need to take off, let me know. You know, if you're going to be on vacation or if you're in the hospital or something, just shoot me a text or email and let me know, so I won't be worried about you. All right? Submit original work. You're doing your own work, so we can see what you have learned. I don't want to know what your friend learned or what the Internet knows. I want to know what have you mastered, and also that helps me to help you. If I don't know what your weaknesses are, I can't help you. You can use a note on your quizzes and tests. Don't just copy from the Internet. We do use turn it in dot com and it will red flag anything copied, but you may use your notes because we're not trying to test to see if you memorize the material. It's more to see if you understand it. There are what we call discussion based assessments or DBAs. And that's when I'm going to be able to really find out what you might need. Help with and what you've already mastered. When you log into your course, be sure to check for virtual school messages, read any course emails and announcements. If you're having any technical difficulties, here's the phone number you want. I highly suggest you write this down and keep it somewhere handy, so in case you have trouble locking into the course, you can find it. 8 6 6 three two two 8 three two four. I can help you with any course questions where math questions, or even the parenting skill questions. I got those down pretty well, but if it's a technical difficulty or computer issue, call this number and they'll be glad to help you. Now parents and guardians, you can open an account to help monitor your student progress. Click on this link. It should open up where you can register. Now you will need your students, log in, information. So just get it from them now, say, hey, what's your login information? And if they don't know, call this St. John's virtual office, 5 four 7 8 zero 8 one sorry about that, my dog barking. 5 four 7 8 zero 8 one, and they can get you the information. This way you can set up an account to monitor your child's progress to help them in going through the course and being successful, and to let me know if you see any concerns that you might have. Now it's time to access your course. You want to go to this link VSA dot NET to log in, you enter your username and your password. If you can't remember it, just click on that forgot username and password, and it will get you the information. When you log in, be sure to check for any messages you'll see the little envelope at the top if there is a number on it that means you have messages to read. You can change your password under student records in student profile, if you want. Make it a password that you're going to easily remember. Now you should see a list of your courses if you're taking more than one. You can enter the course. Now, if one is Mark contact in structure that means you need to get a hold of me, there's some problem or some issue, or something that we need to talk about before you move on in the class. Otherwise you can just enter the course and get working. As soon as you enter the course, take a look at the announcement page to see if there is anything new or anything you need to know. You'll also note on here there are links to lots of goodies, for instance, for new students. There is a link to a presentation that shows you how to navigate through the course how to submit assignments or check your grade. So you can always go check that any time you need it. It's got links to get a hold of me. It's also got the office hours for when you can log into the virtual office to get assistance, or to log into the virtual office to do your discussion based assessments. We do those online where you log in. It will give you the instructions what to do once you log in, and as you go through slides of questions and review for the modules you need to know, and then shows you how to contact me to call you so that we can discuss anything that you need to know and get your test passwords for you. The announcement page will also have a link to helpful resources like for math courses there are some math help pages with lots of good stuff, including tutoring videos, formula sheets, study guides, all sorts of things that can really make the class a lot easier for you to do. Now, any of you in an EOC course, there will be information as it gets closer to the testing dates. After reading through the announcement bar, you can go to anywhere you need in the course by checking the toolbar at the top. You'll notice the far left icon is takes you right to your lessons, the icon next to it is where you can go to assignments when you're ready to turn them in. Now don't go straight to the assignment, go to the lesson first, go through your lesson, and then submit assignment. The three bars going across like the hamburger bar, that's your main menu. If you click on that or even just put your mouse over it, it will open up all kinds of different tabs that you can check such as your grade book, your pace chart. Well, actually, I want you to use the paste chart on the announcement page. But you can go to just about everything in this main menu bar. Next to that the envelope, that is your email messages in the course. So you might have email messages in your virtual school account, and then you may have some different ones here in the course, if you're taking more than one class, this could especially happen a lot. You'll notice on the announcement page, I have made a pacing chart for you that has the date for this semester already filled in, so you can just click that out and use it as a guideline. It tells you some daily assignments, but it's just a guideline so you can change it around a little. For instance, if it says, turn something in on Tuesday and Thursday of this week. Well, you can turn them in on Monday and Friday, or some people do all their work on the weekend. That's fine, as long as you are staying up each week, and then there's also a pacing chart in the course information of the course. So some of you may want to follow that because some of the courses you can actually go through a bit quicker than the actual county semester. You may want to print these out and have them so that it's easy to refer to and that you always know right where you should be. You can work ahead if you want. Like if you find the course real easy and you're understanding it well or you know you're going to go on vacations, you want to get a little bit ahead beforehand. You are perfectly welcome to do that. You don't really want to fall behind because school year flies by really fast and once you get behind very hard to get out of a hole. So make sure you're trying to keep up with that. Let me know if you need help and I can help you out. You want to follow the county's academic calendar, even if you start late, they expect you to finish, so we'll adjust the pacing guide to fit you if you're starting late in the year. You do have to complete a minimum number of assignments each week, and sometimes I'll have their students say, oh, I thought I got to work any pace. That is true each day you can work any pace. Some of you may finish a lesson in ten minutes, and others may take two hours, but you still have to do your lesson each day. Doing nothing at all is not any pace. That's not quite what they mean. They mean you can take the time to go through the lesson as quickly or slowly as you need to each day to make sure your comprehending the material. If something happens like, say you're in the hospital or you have a car accident or a family emergency, just let me know, and I'll work with you. We'll get you through, but just let me know because otherwise I'll be wondering what happened and I'll be worried about you. You want to click on your lessons button to access all the lessons or you can click on the main menu and lessons is the very first one listed. And it will have you go through modules. Now modules are like a chapter in a book, and it will have all the same type of information in the same module. The same course content. At the end of the lesson it will tell you if there is an assignment to turn in or not, sometimes it will tell you the instructions for the assignment, and sometimes it would just say go to the assessment area, because maybe it's multiple choice. You can turn in your assignment, take a quiz or complete a test all from this assessment tab. When you're going to submit an assignment that you have a file to attach, you can attach it by clicking on the browse button, and then find where you have your file. Now, a lot of times that can be an issue because maybe your Internet connection is not good enough to wait while the file uploads, maybe your file name is not compatible with this program, maybe your file type is not compatible with my computer, so sometimes that happens, so my suggestion is just copy and paste your work directly into the student comment box. That way you don't even have to attach a file. Just put your work straight in there, or you can just type your work in there to begin with. You don't have to do it in a separate file. If you type your work in here and click save for later, then even if you open it up on a different computer, all your work will still be there. You don't have to worry about finding it. So that's wonderful. Now, some things you can't copy in there, like some courses have a chart you're going to fill out or a graph you're going to make. In that case, the best thing to do is save it as a PDF file, and then attach. You can also do a dock or an RTF. Now one thing I can not open are the pages, files, or ODT, so if you're working in a program with pages, just re save it as a PDF, and that way it should be no problem. Once you get to the end of a module, you'll take a discussion based assessment, also called a DBA. A couple of courses, they only have it every four modules, but most of them will be every module, and this is a time for us to find out what you've already mastered in what you'd still need to work on, and it's also your time to ask questions if there's something you're not real comfortable with before you take a module test. You're required to pass a discussion based assessment. And you must do that with at least 60% in order to get credit for the course that you have to do it before I give you the password for your test. Because I want to make sure you're ready so you're going to do your best. So you don't have to be afraid of doing the test or the DBA. It's our time to talk about what you've learned and what you need to know, and if there's anything you need to work on. And if it turns out that, you know, we don't feel you're quite ready. Well, then we'll just practice a little bit more and work on it and then try it again. When you go to take a test your quiz. Very important that you click and wait for the test to load. It might take a little while, especially with the math courses that have some of these weird symbols that you don't normally see on the keyboard. Might take just a little bit to load all the images and symbols. So be patient, then once it loads, you'll go through and answer each question. Before you can turn it in, you have to click check this box to indicate you're ready. It won't let you accidentally submit it. Now also, once you open your test, you can't open another website like you can't navigate to another website, look up the answers, come back. First of all, we don't want that. I don't want to know what the website answer is. I want to know your answer, what do you think? Second of all, it'll cause the test to lock up. And then you have to call me to get it unlocked. So just make sure that you stay in your test, make sure you have plenty of time. If you're taking the course during a lab at school, you might want to wait and take the tests at home. Because you don't want to be in the middle of it, and there's a fire drill. Or the bell rings, and you had three more questions to go. Now you don't have time to finish. Because once you open a test, it won't let you reopen it. If something does happen, you know, my cat likes to jump up on my keyboard. That happens. Or if you are taking a test and up your battery went out and you didn't have it plugged in, just let me know, and I can get it opened for you. Now, if that starts happening every single test we need to have a talk, that it will happen once in a while, happens to everybody, and just let me know. Once I grade your work, you can check your grade in the grade book tab. This is also where you can make corrections and resubmit and assignment, if you need to. Most assignments let you do them at least three times, some of them are unlimited. Now a test you can only do once, but you're going to have that discussion based assessment with me before you take the test so we can make sure you do well. In your grade book, you're going to see a couple of different things. Your current grade for each segment is separate and it's shown in green for passing or read if you're not passing. The total current grade will call the average greater bow segment one and two if there are two segments. Now, if you just started in segment two, and you already completed segment one, that total average is not going to look quite right. But the more you get done of segment two, the closer it will look to your actual grade. The percentage of the segment completed is in the circle. So notice this person segment too, you see 59% in the circle, that's not their grade. That's 59% of the segment is done. Sometimes things go wrong, and just like I said, I gave you that number for tech support. If you're in the course, you can also click on the tech support, and it will open up and allow you to submit a help ticket or to chant with someone or to call them. So have the phone number outside of your computer so in case you can't log in, but if you're logged in and you have a problem, just click on this technical support, and it will come up with all sorts of different options that you can do to get some help. Now that you're ready to get started in the course, let me know a little bit about you. What kind of things do you like to do? What are your hobbies or interests? You can send by text or by email and let me know and then jump right into your courses. Be sure to go to the first lesson before going to the assignment. Also explore everything on the announcement page, get familiar with it, find your pacing chart, and get to work.