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Northville Summer School 2020 Parent Webinar

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(Background music) (Background music) Hello everyone and welcome to the Northville Summer School meeting for the year 2020. We are very excited to have you here tonight. The purpose of today's meeting is really to give you information about both the onsite and online summer school programs at Northville. We  really encourage you to read through the frequently asked questions on the summer school page and we are excited to talk a little bit more about our continued partnership with Michigan virtual. So again thank you for coming tonight and we hope that we are clarifying any questions that you may have. I'm not going to turn over to Thomas Soria from Michigan Virtual. Thank you Sandra. My name is Thomas Soria. I am the Director School Partnerships at Michigan Virtual and Michigan Virtual has been just a great partner to work with at Northville as we've worked together for maybe gosh, nine years and we've we are nonprofit organization for the state of Michigan. What we do is provide online courses for students and professional development for teachers and today we're going to talk about online summer school options for for your students. Michigan Virtual is partnered with a variety of people and we also have a variety of of accreditations from Cognia, which is the formerly Advanced Ed organization, Quality Matters who reviewers are online courses and offered courses are taught by Michigan certified teachers and if you have traveling athletes that are contending for an NCAA scholarship, our courses are approved by them as well. This year summer school will be starting on June 8th that's the start of our courses and those courses extend through August 14th. This is a snapshot of the dates in which registration and well registration will be starting soon but when the classes start and the last day that you can enroll as well as a drop date no later than June 28th. We encourage our students as soon as they get the opportunity to start to start on June 8th and we do have a special note for this year and Northville is going to allow students to be to have the opportunity to take their final exams at home and not on site as we have in the past. Michigan virtual also has a Research Institute in which we provide a variety of different guides to help parents and students as well as school administrators navigate online learning. If you're looking for some support documents as a parent and a student so that you successful online, please visit MBLRI dot o-r-g slash guides for these free documents. Now I would like to turn it over to my colleague Debbie Lynch. Thank you Thomas. I am Debbie Lynch, the Mentor Outreach coordinator here at Michigan Virtual and I have enjoyed working with Northville the last few Summers I'd like to just talk a little bit the advantages of taking an online summer school course as you know a lot of students will take it for the enrichment purposes from take it for a grade replacement some take it for credit advancement to fulfill prerequisites for an advanced placement class. For College and Career ready and a lot of kids take it to so they can free up time during the regular class during the summer so it frees up time to take a different class throughout the regular school year. Our Michigan Virtual teachers as Thomas said they are Michigan certified highly-qualified and they will respond to your student emails within 24 hours and 72 hours they have to grade assignments. Their way quicker than that but that is the maximum time that they have to do that. If you students not getting reaching are there online teacher than have contactor Northville Mentor but our teachers are really really good especially in the summer at getting back with students very quickly and getting back to their students much quicker than 72 hours. They also provide students a pacing guide which I highly suggest I said you print this because this will show the students what they need to complete during week 1 week 2 and so on it'll keep the students on pace so they can finish the course on time. Successful online Students. A successful online student needs to be able to work independently, obviously have daily access to a computer and internet, needs to be self-motivated, have an email account, are grade level reader and we do have SpeakIt! and Grammarly to help if that it's an issue and of course have support from their family and their school. We have a new Strategies For Online Success course. It replaces the old course if somebody is familiar with that and this strategies for online success course Thomas if you could hit the clicker thank you we have three units that you were the students can go through and look at the three modules and this will help students understand what online learning is. So the first modules about online learning the second one is about skills for online learning and the third one is is just getting into some sort of strategies so just to let the students know what what is online what does it look like how much time do I have to spend so it's very self-paced they can get it done in an hour or two at the very most. It is just a great tool to use before the students sign up for an online class. Parents: Parents of course are a huge role in the success of their students you have Rockstar mentors in Northville I'm going to say they are seriously the best mentors I worked with and what would they also I need your support and they need your help at home especially because it's going to be even more remote this year than than before so you being encouraging looking at that pacing guide of the students asked me how they're doing looking at their class You also have your own log into our student learning portal so you're able to go and check your students grades too but any encouragement you can give your soon the summer will be very beneficial. And this is where you and your students will login. It's called her student learning portal we call it the SLP. This is our student information system and you will log in with your email and password. You should receive an email from Michigan virtual when your students signed up. if you don't receive any mail it might mean that your student has already taken a class of Michigan virtual. The kids will get an email every time but the parents only will get an email the first time the student logged in or the student takes an online course. So you didn't get any mail you can easily click on the forgot your login and our password length that is right below the big orange sign in box. Once you do that you type in the email you gave Northville, Michigan virtual immediately sends you your password and if your student forgets their password maybe before or during the class they can do the same thing so there's no need to contact Northville if they forgot their password. You can do it right here on this page. And once the students login here, this is where they will then they can send messages to their instructor in the student learning portal and they can also click on a link to get into their actual class from Student Learning Portal. So everything starts here for the students and the past and the parents Okay I'd like to turn it over to Daniel, summer school principal. Thank you Debbie. Daniel Spitzley as Debbie mentioned that coordinator of the online portion of the Northville summer school program. I want to provide some insight as to what you guys to expect from the online mentor and I'm specifically what guess we expect from the mentor from Northville Debbie alluded to earlier you have the online class teacher and then as part of our NPS program you also have that additional layer of of a mentor as a resource to be there to help as well. So as you can see from the slide their job, part of their role is to help keep on pace, advocate for student success recognize that they are not that online instructor as Debbie eluded to earlier we have mentors that have been doing this for quite a while now and they're very good at what they do so they'll be able to kind of really steer and guide make sure that your student is on pace and that they are following some tips and some ideas but they're not gonna be the one to reach out to necassarily for content or specific things to that class. There's an online teacher for those for those reasons. They are not the tutor you guys had access to courses across many different subject areas. Some of them are of our mentors are experts in those areas but some of our mentors don't speak Spanish and Mandarin and different languages you might have the opportunity the take the summer, so they are there again as a resource but not that online or that instuctor they cannot solve computer technical problems if those do, a few slides later I'll show you where you can go to can you get the support needed for that and I share information from the Michigan virtual teacher to the parents and students. So Michigan virtual reach out to them and then they will disseminate the information as need be. Specifically to our Northville mentors what you can expect is communication on a weekly basis to begin with and more often as we progress, if progress is not be made. Key sidenote here is to make sure whatever email you put in during that registration is something that you you look at what frequency. Please open email in there that is something that isn't viewed because he'll be a lot of important, very relevant information that comes there. It could be alerting your kid to falling behind or not on pace or changes that have happened. Make sure that both the student and the parent emailed one of the two different emails and took the other emails that there will be eyes on throughout the course of the summer. Our Mentor schedule be posted on the Northville summer school website. Our mentors are available via Zoom during his office hours. So as we get closer to the summer session starting up will post those hours to see online and also provide specific updates regarding our testing information and there will be availability to with assignments instruction that you can see again through our summer school website. If you need help for anything here is kind of a hierarchy. Start with the online that content that the Michigan Virtual teacher of that specific course. If they aren't able to help you solve that problem or give you the information needed, then you would step to that Michigan Northville mentor. They'll do what they can and then it happens to be more of a technical issue that neither one of the teacher or the mentor can solve, then you can contact Michigan Virtual Customer Care. Their contact information is right here. You can either reach them by phone, email, website. You see the hours of operation the website there. Again with more technical where you've exhausted your others options, if you got still don't have an answer to your question this will be a good place to go. With that being said, I am going to pass it off to Kari Couchman, one of our online mentors. Thank you Mr. Spitzley. Couple of things just from the mentor perspective with this. We've been doing this for a long time and we found some things that definitely make this process much easier and some things that make the process much more difficult. First one is to start early. Although, you had that June 8th start date for the class, the school year is not done until that next week, you can still get started at first week The first week's assignments are really just to login, make sure that you can communicate with your online instructor so you can start that first week stay right on track with it. The second one is to set a schedule and stick with it. You have a pacing guide for your course. If you can stick with that pacing guide you're able to work through the course easily. You don't have the stress of needing to work 15 hours a day for the last week because you put everything off. So using at pacing guide as a really good way to work your way through the course with not too much stress. Third one is to put yourself in a physical location that will help you focus because you do have lots of other things perhaps going on inside your house, you want to find one spot that works for you. So you want to make sure that you are location is going to help you focus. Probably not best to have all of your siblings around. So you want to find a place that works. Your goint to want to monitor your grades and assignments. There are really easy tools within Michigan virtual system where you can see what your current grade is, you can see what upcoming assignments are available, you can see how many points remain. There is a really easy way to be able to monitor that so it's important that you keep track of that. It's important to communicate with your instructor. Even though your instructor is online, you don't sit down and talk to them like you would in a normal classroom, that communication is really important because those online instructors are wonderful when you need help with something. So contact them if you're struggling to understand something. The online instructors also have office hours. You can call them, you can email them, you can text with them and communicate often as they offer a really great resources for you. Next point here is to ask questions as necessary. If you are struggling, it's important to ask questions early. If you wait for a little while before you ask those questions, it ends up becoming very frustrating. So if you start to struggle with something reach out to your mentor, reach out to your online teacher. We are here to help. But we can only help you if we know that you're struggling. So if you are having problems ask us questions early and often and we will do our best to help you. Last one is just anytime you're using technology, make sure you're backing up all of your materials and your assignments. When you create assignments, create them in a Word document, create them in a Google Doc so you still have them before they're submitted to Michigan virtual. That just saves you in case there's suddenly a storm and you lose your technology or whatever it issue may be, So make sure that you backup all those materials and assignments. It's really frustrating to work hard on something and have it disappear. So back up all your work. Final exams for those of you who have taken online courses with us in the past. Final exams this year are going to look different. We still have our final exam week. It's last week of the course. You'll still be able to sign up for a specific time. If you would take your exam earlier in the summer because you've been working really hard and you want to take the entire month of August off because your worked hard in June and July, you can still do that. You just contact your Mentor. The big difference this year is that you are not taking your final exam with us in a computer lab. We're doing everything virtually this year so we will communicate with you early and often about how to sign up for those times, what we expect of that final exam experience for you. We'll be able to provide passwords and all that information. It will just be done a little bit differently than it has been in the past. One of the things to note with that bottom bullet point, not all classes have a final exam. The English classes end with final papers that you're writing and so you don't have exams there you just have final papers. Some of the computer and Technology courses end with final project so you don't have an exam. So again, your mentors will talk with you you go to the course about which class has a final exams, but we will still send out that Google form so we have the basic information of when people are planning to take exams. But we can always be flexible, especially the Summer with the time that you need. Last but not least would like to discuss our our previous on-site courses that we have facilitated in other summers. This year they will be facilitated via Zoom. They all be completely virtual. We are running the same courses as before. So we just wanted to let you know they are available, they will be included in registration if parents would like to take the students would like to take the onsite courses. However they will be completely facilitated via Zoom or flipped classroom So last but not at least, we would like to thank you for coming tonight. Again we would like to urge you to read through the frequently asked questions and certainly reach out if you have any further questions. And on behalf of myself Sandra Brock, Director of Instruction and the entire summer school team. We would like to thank you for coming.