Grace period WARNING. Some of you are already getting in the habit of treating the Grace period as if it were the "real" due date for your assignments. Please don't do that - if you treat the Grace period as the deadline, then you do not have any Grace period left! The Grace period is there for real emergencies, totally random things that happen which prevent you from finishing your work on the day that it is due. So, if the weekly assignment list says that an assignment is due on Thursday, that means it really IS DUE ON THURSDAY, and you need to finish that assignment on Thursday. Or even better, finish the assignments several days before they are due, so you are not having to stress about the deadline at all.
Ning FAQs and Tips. I want to call your attention to the list of Ning FAQs and Tips which you will find in the left-hand column of the Ning's main page. You will find information there about managing your Ning blog and also about your profile page. If there is something you want to find out which is not answered there already, please let me know and I'll add to the list of tips! You will also find some Technology Tips about your Ning Profile page, like how to add a YouTube video to your page.
3 classes = 1 Ning. As you have noticed, all three of the online courses I teach are combined into one Ning. There are a couple reasons why I did that. One reason is very practical: I am paying out of my pocket to have the Ning be ad-free, so I preferred to pay just once, instead of three times. But the more important reason is that I wanted to be able to let people interact among all three classes. You will ALL be doing Storybooks this semester - and you might have some good ideas to share with each other as you go about creating your Storybook webpages, too! Meanwhile, for the blog commenting assignment, you will just be commenting on the blogs of other people in the same class you are enrolled in - that blog commenting assignment will be ready for you on Friday, after everybody finishes up their Thursday "Storybook Favorites" blog post assignment.
January 22: The "1984" Macintosh commercial. Today, January 22, is a fun technology anniversary! On this day in 1984 -- 25 years ago! -- the Macintosh personal computer made its debut in a television advertisement during Superbowl XVIII. There is an entire Wikipedia article dedicated to this advertisement which marked a real changing point in the history of personal computing, as well as being a landmark in advertising, too. You can watch the advertisement at YouTube - and if you haven't ever seen it, it's definitely worth taking a look, and I don't just say that because I am a Mac user...! It's a great example of storytelling, told with images, all in just 60 seconds.
