Thursday, September 10

Today is Thursday of WEEK 3 of the class. If you have not turned in your Week 2 Storybook assignment yet, you may still do that for partial credit until noon today. For those of you in Myth-Folklore or World Lit, Thursday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due on Wednesday.

Storybook Stack. I'm still working my way through the large stack of Storybook assignments that people have turned in. If you turned in an assignment before 11PM on Sunday, you should have comments back from me now. If you turned something in later than 11PM on Sunday or on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, it is probably still in the stack, waiting for me to get to it (contents of the stack). A couple of people wrote to ask why they had not gotten comments back yet: that is because the stack is first-come, first-served. About 40 or 50 people usually turn in their assignments on the day that it is due, which creates a kind of digital traffic jam for me in terms of reading and replying. I always get through the stack by the end of the week, but if you turn in the assignment on the due date or after the due date, you will end up having to wait a bit longer for comments back from me.

Week 3 Read and Respond assignment. The Week 3 blog commenting assignment is not available yet; it will be available starting on Friday, September 11. The blog commenting assignment is the only assignment you cannot complete early, because people will still be adding posts to their blog today, Thursday. At midnight tonight, the list of blog assignments will become available and you will have Friday-Saturday-Sunday to complete the blog commenting assignment.

Week 3 Internet assignment: Images for your webpages. Congratulations to everybody who published their first webpages last week! For the Week 3 Internet assignment, you will be adding images to your pages. Again, as with last week's assignment, please try to do this early in the week if it is your first time creating and publishing webpages. I am available during the week to help you if you run into any snags as you add images to your pages and publish them; I am much slower to answer email on the weekend - so start on the assignment now if you can, and I'll be able to reply to any questions you have much more quickly.

Technology Tip: Picnik.com for images. Now that you will be using images on your webpages, you might want to try this Technology Tip for Picnik.com, a FREE online service you can use for editing your images - cropping them, resizing them, etc. When you work with images online, it's very useful to be able to get them just the size you want. If you learn how to crop and resize images, you can easily make a coverpage for your Storybook like this wonderful coverpage with four images, one for each story in the Storybook: Clash of the Heroes.

Sierra did something similar at her "About Me" webpage, with some musicians' images arranged horizontally (same height, different widths):

And here's another Storybook coverpage - Medieval Heroes - with four images in a row. As you can see, the key is to resize the images so that they are the same height, which allows you to use them in a nice layout of your own design!