Note to Mr Herman's Students and Parent/Guardians 4/1/20

To All Students and Parents

Wappingers students will start “continuity of learning” on Friday 4/3.  The biggest thing to know is that everything that will be happening is new to everybody, and we will be experimenting with different learning platforms.  I would like to think that since we have been using Google Classroom for the entire year as a method of communicating assignments, tests, due dates, submissions, and such other important class related things, that we should be able to continue in our classes without much difficulty.  I will continue using Google Classroom as a means of communicating and giving out information, and I am not worried about the learning curve associated with Google Classroom itself. Every single student in my classes has a Google Classroom connection. If the availability of internet or device access at home is an issue, please email me as soon as possible.

To Parents

There is an option that I see as a teacher in each Google Classroom that allows me to invite Student Guardians to the classroom. As always, you have had the chance to be included.  A number of parents and guardians already have chosen to do this and receive summaries of their students’ class activities. This is obviously a different time, and if you are now interested in “staying tuned” to your students’ activities, PLEASE EMAIL THAT YOU WOULD LIKE TO BE INCLUDED.

My email is thaddeus.herman@wcsdny.org

Something that I run into as a "Teacher" in Google Classroom is that I don't see what you the "Student" or "Guardian" might see. Here was a helpful video meant for what Guardians can expect from Google Classroom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-XPMUeobvY

Student Grades

At this point, there are a lot of questions centered about grades, and how it works from here.  This is a significant part of the students evaluation by others outside of class (parents and prospective colleges) and there is always a district policy that we teachers work under in determining our grading scheme.  As of this writing, there is a lot of discussion at the district level about how grading will work in this new environment.

I will continue grading online assignments as I always have. And since most in-class assignments are usually graded for completion, I will continue to do that as well.  The nature of testing is still a big question. I will be creating testing tools through Google Forms, but I am not sure how these evaluations will play out in a grading scheme. More to come on that issue.

Individual Classes

I teach three very different classes, so I will just include a quick summary of my intentions for each in the following few paragraphs.  More details will come up in the Google Classroom stream itself.

Astronomy-

There is a freedom in this class that will work well here.  Though there is a general direction of material that we follow through, there is also the long list of new things that crop up through what we have already been doing all year with Student Research Reviews.  I often take the topics that you find in Astronomy in doing your SRR and turn them into mini-lessons. We will continue to do that.

We also were just in the process of starting our 3rd Quarter Project - Good Astronomy Video search.  By Friday, I will have this project fully modified and ready for you. We have watched a lot of short videos over the course of the year, and this project may become our main backbone for interesting new source material for our exploration. Keep the SRR’s coming.  I will adjust the due date in Classroom.

Physics-

My main goal is to expect that the Regents exam is still happening in June and that I would like you to be ready for it.  Obviously, we are currently living in a world of constantly changing directives, and my goal may have to change with the times, but my main goal stands for now.

The general nature of our class is only a little lecture and a lot of practice of topics and problems.  We have used Self Graded Google Forms to track points of difficulty during each topic. Exactly how I present the new material is something that will evolve over the coming weeks, but I think the Self Grading Google Forms will be the place of familiarity.  I want to concentrate on new topics, but we also still are in the middle of Retro tests. Expect to see continued review along the topics of PVA graphs, SAWITEASWU, Projectiles, and FBD/Friction problems.

Principles of Engineering-

This is a tough one...We were on the edge of our big unit (6-8 weeks)  on Control Systems. We were going to learn about computing coding and building “robotic” devices like Sparky (who you were introduced to right near the end).   

One thing about PLTW courses is the amount of online resources they have.  We all have access to MyPLTW Course material. Since I am an old “horse” at teaching POE, I tend to go in my own direction regarding the material, and frequently ignore the MyPLTW platform.  This will change in that we will be exploring the remaining topics not covered and utilizing the MyPLTW material with assessments on Google Classroom.