How to Navigate the Classroom

If you have participated in our program in the past, we have a totally new eLearning environment so we will cover some of the important points to guarantee that you have an enjoyable, thoughtful, and enriching experience in our online classroom. If this is your first time navigating an online learning environment, we are confident that you will quickly and easily learn how to navigate our online classroom. While you may login and navigate our online classroom with a cell phone, we strongly discourage doing so. The reading, writing, and research should be done on a laptop or desktop computer.

Login

To login to the classroom, you will need a username and password. Most user names are in the following format (JohnSmith). Once a username has been issued, it cannot be changed. When you are first enrolled into the classroom, you will receive a computer generated password. However, you may change your password to something that is easy to remember. You may request a password reset at any time. Instructions for resetting your password will be sent to the email address that you used to enroll in the class. Like your password, you may change your email address at any time. You login on our website: www.accessandequity.org by selecting the ‘Login’ menu and entering your username and password. After logging in, the ‘Login’ menu will change to ‘Account.’ The ‘Blog’ menu will provide a dropdown menu for the ‘Mychal Wynn Blog.’ The Mychal Wynn Blog is where we post newsletters and other important information that is only accessible to students enrolled in our programs.

Selecting Your Class

After logging in, you may select ‘Course Outline’ from the side menu or from the ‘Account’ dropdown menu. Selecting ‘Course Outline’ will show the class in which you are enrolled.

Classroom Screen

After clicking onto your classroom, you will see the classroom screen, which displays the following information:

Your Progress (the percentage of the course that has been completed)
Your Overall Grade (based on your quiz scores)
Modules that are currently available to you
Completed Units (indicated with a green check)
Grades from each quiz that you have submitted

Modules

The entire classroom is built around Modules and Units. Each module contains the name of the month in which it is available to be completed. Modules open on the first of the month in which they are assigned throughout the academic year. Once a module is open, it remains open for the balance of the academic year. Courses open on September 1 and close on June 1.

Units

Units are the lessons in each module, which are delivered in a variety of formats. Some lessons involve completing surveys while others require watching videos. Most lessons are accompanied by a quiz, like the quiz associated with this lesson. After a unit (lesson) has been completed, a green check will show up on your progress bar. Some units only require taking a quiz, others require writing a narrative, and others require completing forms.

Overview

All Modules contain an Overview. Each Overview is broken into 3 parts:

An overview of the lesson
The objective of the lesson
Guiding questions about the lesson

Since the information provided in the overview is important to successfully engaging in the lesson, most overviews are accompanied by a quiz, whose purpose is to ensure that you read the overview! Quizzes associated with each overview are straightforward. They are not designed to trick you, so you should not experience any anxiety. Our goal is for you to score a perfect 100% on each overview quiz. To assist you in reaching this 100% goal, each question is taken from the overview and the correct answer is ‘exactly’ what has been stated in the overview. So you may ask, if the quizzes are so easy and if I am suppose to score a ‘100’ on each quiz, why do I need to take a quiz? Because we need to ensure that you read and understand the overview so that you can successfully complete the lesson.

Videos

Many units have videos. Most videos are accessed via our Google Drive and should not present a problem. However, you experience problems viewing supplemental videos, typically accessed via YouTube, depending on the WiFi Network being used to access the Internet. Schools have restrictions for viewing videos on YouTube.

Lessons

Lessons typically require you to do something, such as view a video, read an article, engage in a discussion, or engage in research.

Narratives

Throughout our program, you will have many opportunities to provide narrative responses. These narratives will typically reflect your point of view in response to specific questions. Narrative writing is a critically important skill for you to develop as you will eventually required to write college admission and scholarship essays. Narrative writing is more than the recounting of facts, but involves telling a story from your point of view.

Narratives require you to write something and typically are linked to a secure Google Document. At this time, we would like for you to open another tab in your browser and log into your Google Account. If you do not have a Google account, click here to establish one or to log into an existing Google account.

Each time that you log into our classroom, you should also log into your Google Account so that you may access the narrative document that you will create and maintain throughout your enrollment in our program. Throughout your enrollment in our program, you will maintain a single narrative document, to which you will refer each time that you are directed to write a narrative. Pages have been set up within the document for you to write your narrative response and will be clearly referenced in each unit that requires a narrative response.Since only one narrative document will be used for all of the narratives that you write throughout the year, at the end of the year, you (and your parents) will be able to review all of your work. Hopefully, you will see growth in your writing as you explore each component of your college bound plan. Your Google Document is private and is only accessible by people to whom you grant privileges (e.g., course instructor, mentor, parents, etc.). Whenever composing a narrative response, do not delete the question or prompt, so that your parents, the classroom instructor, or your cohort facilitator will clearly understand the context of your narrative response.

Quizzes

For students participating in a cohort, many of the quizzes are designed to be group quizzes. Since the quizzes pertain to the lesson, you may be required to discuss what you learned in the lesson with other students and answer the quiz questions as a group. When we conduct College Planning Boot Camps, we require that all students agree on all answers so that the quiz grade is a group grade. If any student submits a quiz without engaging in a group discussion, then the lowest grade becomes the group grade! This is consistent with many college programs where students are encouraged to collaborate, after which a group’s final grade is the lowest grade of of any group member. This means that the group succeeds or fails as a group. Whether or not your cohort utilizes this method is up to your cohort facilitator. Most quiz answers are contained within the unit.

Conversations and Collaboration

Our program is designed with conversation and collaboration in mind. The lessons and quizzes are designed to engage students in conversations about what they are learning and collaboration around how they will process or apply what they have learned. Why are conversations and collaboration so important? The answer is simply, “This is a college planning program.” Preparing for college requires that students develop the type of skills expected by colleges. Our program is designed to assist students in developing 5 important skills expected by colleges:

Verbal communication
Written communication
The ability to collaborate with others
The ability to follow instructions
The ability to be self-directed

Students who participate in our program will gain experiences in each of these areas, and ideally, will greatly strengthen their skills in each area.

Preparation

Proper preparation is one of the keys to success in our program.

You should always have a notebook and pen to take notes.
You should know how to access your Google Account, including email and Google Docs.
You should have your username and password available for easy reference (typically in your cell phone).
You should have headphones or earbuds to listen to videos.
Questions regarding course content should be directed to cpc@collegeplanningcohort.com.
Technical support should be directed to techsupport@collegeplanningcohort.com.

You Must ‘Own the Process’

Our program and the accompanying modules, units, lessons, and quizzes provide opportunities to learn. How you apply yourself and engage in your small group conversations will determine how much and how deeply you learn. How much you learn will be a function of how deeply you engage in the lessons and the activities. In essence, you must ‘Own the Process.’

After viewing the video of this rising high school sophomore commenting on what he learned through his engagement in the type of activities in which you will be engaged, take the quiz associated with this unit.

Lesson: How to Navigate the Classroom